Familienduell

Taking the thorough changes in the political regulation of family in Germany as a starting point, this article considers these developments as (discursive) struggles between different social actors over the meaning, the form and the social tasks of family. Family therefore is not considered as a ‘pre-societal’ given but rather a socio-political and power-laden construct, which takes a central role in governing privatized social reproduction and reproductive work. To capture these aspects four critical debates on family are discussed: First, feminist approaches which focus on the separation of the private and the public, second, queer-theoretical approaches which discuss family as a heteronormative concept; third, Foucault’s writings which enables to capture family as an aspect of biopolitics; fourth, Gramscian theory of hegemony which allows analyzing family as a contested notion and a field of struggle.