Foucault’s Familial Scenes:: Kangaroos, Crystals, Continence and Oracles

Abstract

Foucault did not write about the family as such, and certainly not as the sociology of the family has come to write about it, viz. as a discrete domain of predominantly functionalist sociological thought and empirical endeavour. To read his work through the lens of the family is therefore to set oneself upon a task that must be approached with some caution. Indeed, as this chapter aims to show through selected moments in Foucault’s books and lectures, his interest was always in the modes by which ‘the family’ has served as a site for the exercise of the power/knowledge relations that have surrounded it. Indeed, if ‘the family’ is an arrangement of figures and concerns, it is co-emergent, in a very real sense, with our understandings of it.