ABSTRACT
In this chapter I have explained Foucault’s theory of power-knowledge and maintained that the social relations that are lived in the four families are relations of power. Resistance, in combination with Foucault’s ideas about power-knowledge, is also important for analyzing parent and child conflict in daily domesticity. Feminist poststructuralism adds a gender dimension to the power-knowledge-resistance blend, as do Butler’s theories of gender as performativity and the concept of the heterosexual matrix. Along with patriarchy, masculinities and hegemonic masculinity add strength to an analysis of the workings of families, particularly those operating on the basis of the heterosexual matrix. Colonial/postcolonial theory is drawn on to understand the way in which children can be positioned as “Other” or opposite to adults, as primitive or naive, and as objects to be civilized and socialized. In later chapters I use combinations of these theories in an attempt to display the complexity of family lives and the ways that parent and child conflict was played out in the four families.
