generally, the phenom is attributed to the ambiguity of the status of women, mothering, family and, in general, parenting. the split between family and work, institutionalized during the rise of capitalism, is and has been under assault for quite some time, but the ideological infrastructure remains. every fucking single day we stuggle with it--it runs to the very core of our identities --even when we struggle to reject the notion that our identities are somehow involved in our status as members of families and, more importantly, what counts as being a "good" family member. [whatever 'family' might mean (and i define it rather broadly)]
you don't have to be a parent to be involved in the "war over the family" because you end up taking a side as a practical matter. for example, we enact the split between family/private and work/public right here on this list in so far as discussions of the personal, the private, the familial is rigorously relegated to the frivilous or, at best, an indulgence allowed a grandpa or a doting daddy [we girls who have kids have learned to avoid talking about them and we tend not to mention partners, parents, etc and so on].
in that context, consider what happens as men and women who are parents try to negotiate a world in which gender identies associated with family butt up against the requirements of the workplace. the ambivalence, the anxiety about "who I should be" and "what makes me successful?" lead to this tremendous anxiety and a deep concern over the fate of children in daycare.
consider this in the context of a society in which the notion that "the family is the foundation of society" operates as a hegemonic discourse encompassing a kind of schizophrenia with regard to a highly privatized conception of the family [individual families are entirely responsible for the outcomes of their practices] and yet a public discourse that castigates those who "fail" as doing a disservice to society.
a situation in which it seems that you have no control, right? well, historically, one way we have dealt with this in the US is to zero in on these stories by way explaining why things go wrong, why society doesn't work. these events are the repository for all sorts of felt onfusions, ambivalences, ambiguities --they enable a kind of psychic drama. we are fond of the idea that things don't work because some people are corrupt. the institutions are fundamentally sound, it's just bad people and bad habits. USers don't have a vocabularly for thinking about how our social isntitutions are rotten to the core and need to be radically reconfigured. instead we blame it on corruption, the wrong doings of a dangerous few, the psychological instablity of this group or that.
this is a quick gloss on the analyses of similar phenom [child kidnappings, rape as the act of dark stranger] but see esp. arlie hochschild's work as well as stephanie coontz.
don't forget doug that zizek is a sociologist by training and he's clearly been influeneced by good old fashioned criminology a la that conservative wanker durkheim.
zizek it appear to me makes the mistake of engaging in what is ultimately a methodological individualism [weber] in so far as he seems to want to see society as akin to the working of the psyche writ large. huge problems there --see christopher lasch and adorno on why this approach is a problem.
as i've written to ken and ange before, zizek's theory cannot account for social change because he undertheorizes [doesn't address at all actually] relationship between the psyche and society and the mediations involved therein.
kelley
At 02:16 PM 11/18/1999 -0500, you wrote:
>Katha Pollitt wrote:
>
>>Gee doug -- do you need Zizek for that?
>
>No, but he helps.
>
>Actually I was using "Zizekian" as a shorthand for taking collective
>fantasy seriously as a political category. That applies to the day
>care scandals and to the body-part thieving stories that Maureen
>mentioned - I don't think the kinds of political analyses our more
>hardheaded members subscribe to are up to the task. I'd even say that
>about a lot of the discourse around "globalization" - which posits a
>pure Ur-space that's been invaded by "outside" forces. Chalking these
>things up to mass hysteria is the beginning of an explanation, not
>the end of one.
>
>Doug
>
>
>