Abstract
Deleuze and Guattari have often received attention for their criticisms of bourgeois families in Anti-Oedipus, but their speculations about non-heteronormative kinship practices have rarely been addressed in Deleuze studies and are yet to be taken up in the study of kinship and the family more generally. This paper is then the first to offer their work on the family to a general academic audience as a useful tool in polarised debates about contemporary family practices. It begins with a close reading of the relationship between desire, capitalism and the private nuclear family in Anti-Oedipus before extending the political use-value of this with the concept of the ‘majoritarian’ taken from A Thousand Plateaus. The second half of the paper brings Deleuze and Guattari into engagement with the larger critical field of kinship studies as an entry point into topical debates about the ‘normative’ family and its alternatives.
Highlights
We begin by surveying Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus, focusing on the limits of ‘familial symbols’ as the lenses through which
ISSN 1837-8692 we understand desire and repression. This leads to a broader discussion of the ‘domestic’ household in the context of bourgeois political economy, in which we argue against a ‘micro-‐’ understanding of the family in relation to ‘macro-‐’ social structures, looking instead at the slippages between different spheres of social production, reproduction and consumption in which no single institution is the ‘prime mover’, so to speak
We examine the critical shift towards intimacies in the work of Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, and suggest that celebrations of counter-‐hegemonic collectives often slip into moral polarisations between conservative and progressive cultural practices. We argue that these dichotomies lend themselves to the highly charged ‘culture wars’ that continue to confuse, and in some cases stifle, public discussions of diverse family forms
Summary
We begin by surveying Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus, focusing on the limits of ‘familial symbols’ as the lenses through which.
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