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Conclusion
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201 Conclusion The many and varied activities of the educated man’s daughter in the nineteenth century were clearly not simply or even mainly directed towards breaking the laws. They were, on the contrary, endeavours of an experimental kind to discover what are the unwritten laws; that is the private laws that should regulate certain instincts, passions, mental and physical desires....[S]uch laws...have to be discovered afresh by successive generations, largely by their own efforts of reason and imagination. —Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, 1938 “Can the family be redeemed?” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick poses this question in an illuminating discussion of “queer tutelage ” published in the early 1990s. It is this question I have also sought to address by feminist historicist means in the wake of queer theory. Suggesting that knowledge of more expansive practices in the past, comparable to the ones I have analyzed here, might provide precedent for projecting “into the future a vision of ‘family’ elastic enough to do justice to the depth and sometimes durability” of intimate “bonds,” Sedgwick holds out an alluring prospect: that “the family of the present can show this heterosexist structure always already awash with homosexual energies and potentials, whose making-visible might then require only an adjustment of the interrogatory optic, the bringing to the family structure of the pressure of our different claims, our different needs.”1 The cultural work that Sedgwick herself performs in her essay,however,doesn’t so much “redeem” the family as question its future as a site of resistance to, rather than a key apparatus of, the normative . Having entertained the possibility of refocusing the past so as to bring a different version of it into view, she rejects that move as insufficient to the contemporary situation: “The word, the name, the signifier ‘family’ is already installed unbudgeably at the center of a cultural value system—so much so that a rearrangement or reassignment of its signifieds need have no effect whatever” (Tendencies 72, emphases in original).2 202 FAMILY LIKENESS Nearly two decades after these words were written, they are that much harder to argue with. Pervasively, indeed oppressively, deployed in U.S. culture against those of us who do not do our best to approximate the norm, the discourse of “family values” may have its most pernicious impact on those who actively seek the recognition and legitimation that the state withholds, those who desire access to the institutions of marriage or family. Their continued exclusion maintains, even as it troubles, the boundaries between who’s in and who’s out, who does or does not qualify for access to the full social, economic, and civil privileges that being married and adhering to the hegemonic family form can convey. As I have argued throughout this book, nineteenth-century conceptions of “the family” were also premised on exclusions—based in concepts of blood and biology,shaped by racialized and class limits that forged distinctions,institutionalized by civil law and religious precept. Yet like comparable contests in our own time, the continuous resistance to emergent forms also helped to keep alternative practices, extralegal arrangements, and other models for intimate relation in play. Whereas Sedgwick concludes that redeploying “family,” even in new contexts with new players, “can only add to the numinous prestige of a term whose origins, histories, and uses may have little in common with our own recognizable needs,” I must conclude otherwise: that in the effort to make institutional forms responsive to our heterogeneous needs, an effort for which there is a good deal of historical precedent, we have an opportunity to reshape the forms themselves (Tendencies 72). To be sure,that task is fraught with risks of its own. In a moving and incisive essay entitled “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” Judith Butler emphasizes the danger entailed by the quest for legitimacy that she identifies in the movement for gay marriage. If, “on the one hand, living without norms of recognition results in significant suffering and forms of disenfranchisement ,” including economic and social disabilities,then advocacy for inclusion potentially produces further exclusions with no less painful material effects: The demand to be recognized...can lead to new and invidious forms of social hierarchy, to a precipitous foreclosure of the sexual field, and to new ways of supporting and extending state power, if it does not institute a critical challenge to the very norms of recognition supplied and required by state legitimation.... What would it mean to exclude from the field of potential...