No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Modern Tales of Anxiety
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
As we approach the end of the twentieth century, humanity is facing a crisis in definition and ways of thinking across the boundaries of identity, politics, and culture. This paper briefly addresses unusual forums and forms for expressing the anxiety surrounding change and the ability to analyze it, forms linked to the media and its intensive focus on particular “human interest” stories, but also to the uncertainty that a lack of precedent for thinking creates. One of the questions that most interests me is how the malaise of society and the malaise of political change is expressed through the debates around maternity, birth, and the custody of children, how socio-political problems are made intelligible through dramatization of individual struggle involving family relations. What is compelling is the way in which certain stories followed by the media gravitate around facts that speak of what we do not know. Recent advances in reproductive technologies have put into question the belief (whether implicit or explicit) that biology, as a teleological process, can hold cultural chaos in abeyance. The doors have been opened wide as the definition and status of mother, father, and child have all been deeply questioned. Yet at the very moment when the so-called nuclear family is endangered, it is the extraordinarily powerful metaphor of the family that rings insistently in social and political discourse. There is a sense that the threat to the family signals a disintegration of order, leaving the contemporary sense of self bereft of a discourse that can represent universal order.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 1995 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
Notes
1. Address of the President of the Czech Republic, on the occasion of the Liberty Medal Ceremony, Philadelphia, July 4,1994.
2. Mary Warnock, A Question of Life. The Warnock Report on Human Fertilisation and Embryology, Oxford, 1985.
3. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I, Paris, 1976, p. 188.
4. See T. Ingold, Evolution and Social Life, Cambridge, 1986, and Marilyn Strathern, Reproducing the Future. Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies, New York, 1992, p. 19. "What is to count as natural has acquired rather specific meanings."
5. See Baudoin, Jean Louis, and Catherine Labrusse-Riou, Produire l'homme: de quel droit?, Paris, 1987.
6. "The discussion over human beginnings proceeds without reference to social factors at all: when a person begins is taken as a biological fact of development. By contrast, the legal debate over who shall be socially acknowledged as parent makes constant reference to biological parenting: legislation is after the fact." Strathern, pp. 25 and 148.
7. See "Changing the Facts of Life: The Case of Baby M," Sub Stance 64 (Spring), 31-48.
8. Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième sexe: les faits et les mythes, Paris, 1949; Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, London, 1979; Adrienne Rich, Of Women Born, New York, 1976.
9. The problems encountererd at the United Nations Population and Develop ment Conference indicated how difficult such translation can be. For example, for some countries a "single-parent household" is inconceivable because women may not bring up children alone. The Boston Globe, September 9,1994.
10. The New Yorker, May 21 and 28,1990.
11. "An Open Adoption," p. 74.
12. Ibid., pp. 76-79.
13. Ibid, p. 79.
14. Under the title, "Annals of Law," the New Yorker (March 22, 1993, pp. 56-73) published an article entitled "The War for Baby Clausen" by Lucinda Franks.
15. Ibid. 69
16. Ibid., 71.
17. Aeschylus, The Eumenides. Oresteia. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. Chicago, 1953, 1. 605.
18. "The mother is no parent of that which is called/her child, but only nurse of the new-planted seed/that grows. The parent is he who mounts. A stranger/she preserves a stranger's seed, if no god interfere." Oresteia, 1.658-662."
19. Oresteia, 1.279, p. 145.
20. Moses and Monotheism, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. In collaboration with Anna Freud assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, London, 1937-39, vol. XXIII.
21. The conflict that came to light in this case legally was that, on the one hand, biological parents should have custody of children unless they are proved unfit, and, on the other, that the "custodial environment should not be changed unless it was in the child's best interest."Franks, p. 72.
22. Editorial, New York Times, January 8, 1993.
23. Prepared remarks by the Vice President, Commonwealth Club of California, Office of the Press Secretary, San Francisco, CA, May 19, 1992. He went on to suggest that "marriage is a moral issue that requires cultural consensus, and the use of social sanctions." Vice President's Speech, p. 6.
24. Lance Morrow, "Folklore in a Box," Time, September 21, 1992, 78. In this view, the ability to reach a vast and diversified audience results in programming that is both universalizing and plural, a potential counteraction to fanaticism—a form of "symbolic democracy."
25. See "Opérateurs du changement: De Miss Polly Baker à Murphy Brown, Oeu vres et Critiques XIX, 1 (1994), pp. 69-78; "Personal Criticism: Dialogue of Differ ences," in Feminism Beside Itself, Bloomington, forthcoming Spring 1995.
26. Gloria Steinem, Revolution From Within, Boston, 1992, 17.
27. See Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments. Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West, Berkley, 1990.