re: : [PEN-L:13717] Re: Mark Jones: Theses on the worldconjuncture

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> "M A Jones" <mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 11/29/99 08:33PM >>>
Yoshie wrote:
>The nuclear family was a blip in world history, and it was never even a
>universal phenomenon.

Is this so? Peter Laslett was one of the first to show (in "The world we have
lost") that for example traditional stereotypes of English family life 
consisting
of large extended families and inter-generational households, was largely a 
myth,
and apart from the very rich, most people in all social strate tended to live in
nuclear family settings, as far back as evidence from parish records and the 
like
show, ie, to the time of the Black Death anyway; and if one reads Chaucer for
example, that image of family life is anecdotally confirmed. There is a lot of
evidence that people lived in what we would regard as nuclear families in 
medieval
China, Persia and elsewhere. It may not have been universal but it was surely 
more
than a blip and was probably predominant (but I'm not trying to skirt round the
obvious facts that modes of production were organised in ways which required 
clan,
tribal or extended family/gentile complex systems of interaction,. 
subordination,
collective work, support etc).

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Charles: This could be true. Afterall, Engels places the origin of the nuclear 
or
monogamous family as coincident with the origin of private property. However, 
class
society has existed for about 7,000 years and the human species has existed for
100,000 to 1 million. So, is 7/100 or 7/1000 a "blip"?

((((((((((((((


CB



The silk industry in medieval China and Persia was very much dominated, owned 
and
controlled by women, incidentally, at all stages of production. Emancipation 
from
gender can be a perversely gender-determinate thing, and perhaps that is
inevitable as long as the crude facts of biology still exist as the inevitable
substrate of all our performativity, ludic or otherwise. This is why I don't
believe in the 'emancipation from gender' as a meaningful goal in some
transcendental sense. Gender is biological.

((((((((((((((

Charles: But only in the same sense that "class is biological", that is both 
the mode
of production and the mode of reproduction are complex social metabolisms. But 
gender
is not a simple reflex of biology. Human biology has remained relatively 
constant
throughout the history of the human species, yet gender and division of labor 
have had
a lot of different forms.


CB