Fathers in Flux

Abstract

Fathers in Flux Rey Chow (bio) and Markos Hadjioannou (bio) In his magisterial study The Metamorphoses of Kinship, the anthropologist Maurice Godelier offers a memorably vivid image for thinking about the way sexual and gender roles are routinely activated and lived across cultures. The way human beings perform their intimate relations, Godelier suggests, often resembles the way a ventriloquist's dummy "speaks"—that is to say, by channeling voices and behaviors whose sources are hidden from view, even as we believe that we are acting uniquely in accordance with our own identities, desires, and choices (314). In developing this idea, Godelier proposes a twofold metamorphosis that appears within kinship structures. On the one hand, he explains: Social realities that have nothing to do with kinship or sexuality—such as (shared or private) ownership of the land, succession to political and/ or religious offices, the existence of a dominant class or caste—make their way into kinship relations, install themselves and co-opt those relations into their service, into the service of their own reproduction. (313) This is to say, economic, political, religious, and hierarchy practices tend to metamorphose into attributes of the particular kinship relationships within which individuals are born, individuals who then entertain such practices in relation to their fathers, mothers, siblings, and so on. Put differently, familial ties are cultivated and lived in accordance with a larger social structure that hosts them but that typically remains out of sight. Importantly, though, kinship relations are further characterized by the particular biological attributes of the kinship members. Godelier stresses, for instance, that in certain social contexts, it is the son and not the daughter who will inherit the land, or the older sister and not [End Page 23] the younger sister who will take on the role of particular religious functions. It is precisely here that Godelier identifies the manifestation of a second metamorphosis, according to which "all of the attributes of kinship relations are ultimately redistributed among individuals according to their sex and their age, and are transformed into attributes of their person in accordance with their sex. Sex becomes gender" (313). Hidden within the personal attributes of the family members, in other words, are various social realities, which, though originally distinct from kinship, have become attached to, and are further reproduced as, family relations. These social realities are now enmeshed with roles defined by sexed bodies, through which these social realities start to prescribe— and reproduce—a socially specified set of differences between the sexes. Fatherhood, motherhood, siblinghood, and so on become gendered manifestations of the social relations that structure familial configurations, which in turn sustain and perpetuate these social relations. In sum, Godelier writes, "Kinship is the site where the individual's appropriation of society and society's of the individual is prepared and begins. It is first of all within kinship relations that each sexed body begins, at birth, to operate as a ventriloquist's dummy for its society" (314; emphasis added). This image of the ventriloquist's dummy is important not only because it conceptualizes sexuality and kinship explicitly in terms of performativity (it is an operation) but also because it underscores such performativity as inescapably collective and impersonal. Embedded in the dummy's moves and utterances are entire networks of social dependences, transactions, and negotiations. Furthermore, while the ventriloquist's dummy speaks in accordance with the societal forces that shape it, there is no essential or intrinsic link between these social forces and the sexed body as such: as Godelier demonstrates through his own ethnographic research into the Baruya, among other tribes, the connection is social, cultural, historical, and conventional, not natural. It is with an interest in this contingent connection that we turn, in this essay, to the changing features of the longstanding, global-popular figure of the father. If, as a kind of ventriloquist's dummy, the father has played a major role at the intersection of economies of (hetero)sexuality, biological reproduction, domestic organization, and cultivation of the young, what are some of the scenarios in which this role appears in late capitalist society around the world? Put differently, what kinds [End Page 24] of performances or operations does the father...