ABSTRACT
This chapter compares two moments of transition, both effected by the law as it criminalizes certain practices of family life. In Michel Foucault's analysis of the development of the art of government since the sixteenth century, he notes a shift in the significance of the family. Laws passed in 1845 and 1850 dramatically transformed gender relationships, reconstituting the family as a single, private unit outside the scope of the law and under the sovereign control of the husband. The public sphere was constituted by agreement among equals while the private sphere, outside the law and different in kind, was the realm of emotions, desires, needs and cultural traditions in which inequalities were understood as the result of naturalized differences and capacities, such as those based on gender. The feminist criminalization of gender violence tends to see men as inherently violent and women as not violent, thus essentializing gender identities.
