call for proposals: CASCA 2014: Unsettling Marriage

CASCA Proposal "Unsettling Marriage: Kinship, Households and the
Privatization of Intimacy"

Panel organizers

Michael Connors Jackman (York University) mcj@yorku.ca
Robin Whitaker (Memorial University of Newfoundland) robinw@mun.ca

Call for proposals

Feminists, gay activists, socialists and anarchists used to challenge the
institutional dominance of marriage-centred households. Although some –
notably queers and anarchists – continue to trouble marriage, the dominant
question now revolves around who gets in. Likewise, marriage, through
kinship theory, once occupied a central place in the anthropological
imagination, with major studies from Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss and other
"founding figures" – although as feminist anthropologists pointed out,
these models precluded important lines of analysis. While recent
scholarship on kinship has shed light on the ways that relatedness gets
reconceptualized in the wake of the new biotechnologies and politics of
family life, much is yet unexplored about the entanglement of biopolitics,
neoliberalism, and capitalism. This session considers how marriage,
cohabitation, and consumption come to be configured and aligned within a
range of cultural contexts, as well as how such new and troubling
realities present possibilities for rethinking the public sphere. We
intend it
as a kind of workshop: the first stage in a conversation on marriage between
participants, with the intention of ultimately revising and exchanging the
papers presented in preparation for a roundtable to take place at the CASCA
conference in 2015. Thus, we encourage submissions from those at various
stages of their research projects.

Possible topics could include:

*How and why marriage, children, and homeownership become markers of success,
full adulthood, and citizenship in a neoliberalizing world.
* How anthropology might reinvigorate the marriage question and new
politics of
and against marriage to unsettle the anthropology of kinship and households.
*Critical analyses of marriage, common-law partnerships, and cohabitation.
*The entanglement of race, ethnicity, and class in the formation of distinct
and
divided suburban neighbourhoods.
*Studies of suburbanization and the role of neoliberal restructuring in
constituting the domestic sphere.
*Issues of reproduction, contraception, and abortion as they relate to the
structuring and reconfiguration of gender, sexuality, race, and the state.
*The privatization of forms of public intimacy and the involvement of the
state
in private relationships.
*New reproductive technologies, family planning, and childfree households.
*Normativizing and/or alternative relationship models and domestic
arrangements.

*Please e-mail your paper title and abstract (of no more than 150 words) to
Robin and Michael no later than 7 February 2014.*