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Keynote Myra Marx Ferree: Contested Modernity in Family Gender Regimes

Wednesday, November 23, 2022, 18:30 - 20:00
Virtual lecture open to the university public. Join via the link below.

The storms of the present moment in Europe as well as the US make it impossible to ignore contestations over both gender and national identity as features of modern politics. However, nationalisms and their threats to democracy and peace, and the right wing mobilizations against gender and sexual diversity are not always recognized as being related. The former is commonly understood as a conventionally political defense of democracy as an institution, the latter as a “culture war” based in identities rather than institutions. I argue here that the connections between democracy and demography are best understood through considerations of the contested changes in family as a crucial institution of politics, not a separate sphere. 
Demographic transitions are fundamental parts of the social changes we associate now with modernity, and the modern family that is the contemporary normative standard is framed misleadingly as “traditional” or even “Biblical.” Modernity for the family came as a contested development along with democracy and industrialism, was contested among capitalists, unions, suffragists and religious reformers. The modern family is not eternally the standard, however. The changes that are prompting some to defend this modern family in apocalyptic terms are real transformations in how families have been organized in the past fifty years. The modern family, which relies on a breadwinner and elevates national (or class) identity in the form of brotherhood, is becoming old-fashioned. The changes that make breadwinner-brotherhood based families unmodern are materially technological, geographic, and political, but are contested in terms of values, beliefs and identities. The present demographic transition is far from complete, but it suggests wider, highly contested changes in politics, including the rise of nationalism as a response to the challenges of connecting family and nation as forms of social membership, and the declining practical significance for the nation-state as a political form. 

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Wednesday, Nov 23, 2022 2:00 pm | 6 hours | (UTC+01:00) Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna
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