ABSTRACT
This chapter explores that the disease addressed in some versions of self-help practice is primarily epistemic, and can be understood fruitfully as a set of situated responses to the strong deployment of the hegemonic ideal of family. The ideal has this content: the family is white, nuclear, and co-resident, and in it, heterosexual, biological parents raise their children. This content of the notion of family is what Naomi Zack attacks as what is assumed to be the dominant family form taken to be the morally good form of the family in cultural imagination. The model of the dysfunctional family set forth in AA and Al-Anon literature, the problems of a family revolve around the existence of an addict within the family system. Like gender, the notion of family has been criticized by several contemporary feminisms as a descriptive and normative term. Two very general strains of critique have emerged from different standpoints.
