ABSTRACT
The ‘family’ has become the controversial focus of many important issues, cast at centre stage in contemporary collective fin-de-siècle angst as we reach a new millennium. All the major political parties denigrate what they see as contemporary trends towards ‘selfish individualism’ and offer in their place a return to ‘family values’. The question is why has the family become the focus, in political circles, media proclamations and common sense parlance alike, for concerns about social morality, and economic decline? And not only why but how has this state of affairs come about? As Foucault might have asked, what are the conditions of possibility for this situation to arise? What are the unacknowledged power relations here? Whose interests are being served and whose dissimulated? What forms of knowledge are being produced and promulgated to enable this situation? These are the issues with which we are concerned in this collection, which maps out what Judith Stacey refers to in Chapter 10 as the ‘family values terrain’.
