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145 7 In the years after the Revolution’s rewriting of Mexican family law, the judges of the nation’s Supreme Court found themselves faced with deciding what constituted “the home” in divorce cases brought for abandonment of the marital home. In 1926, author and “emancipated woman” Antonieta Rivas Mercado sought to divorce her husband Albert Blair for abandonment. She initially won her case, but lost on appeal.1 She then brought an amparo petition for review to the Supreme Court.2 In 1930, the Court found against her. In doing so, it loftily dismissed the relevance of the home as material space: “The word ‘abandonment ,’ in relation to the words ‘marital home,’ cannot refer only to the materiality of the house, of the dwelling which is inhabited, but, by a figure of language, the container is taken for the contained, that is to say, the dwelling which is inhabited for the spouse and children who inhabit it.”3 “Abandonment ” meant neglect of one’s marital obligations, such that someone still living in the marital home could have abandoned their spouse, though an absent spouse might not. Since Blair had continued to support his family, even though he neglected his “merely personal [obligations] towards his wife,” his absence did not constitute grounds for divorce.4 This insistence on the insignificance of space can be read as an assertion of legal closure, of the power of legal rationality to house its own subjects and locate the relations between them in a conceptual landscape of its own making. Legal closure has been challenged by critics who insist that law is social and political—not set apart, objective and autonomous, its authority unshakeable (Blomley 1994, 11). Critical scholars therefore reject conventional legal histories depicting law as either the heir of privileged normative values of the past or the result of progressive evolution, because they “subjugate the flux of historical contingency to the imperious logic of the Law” (ibid., 17). In Mexico, the authors of the new family laws introduced by the Revolution made very different claims Domesticating the Law ANN VARLEY Chap-07 4/7/07 10:57 AM Page 145 about the historical status of their work, to the effect that it represented a radical break with past traditions, since the “transcendental political reforms” of the Revolution required the transformation of all other social institutions.5 This chapter suggests that such claims should be received with the same caution as legal histories emphasizing continuity or evolution. In particular, scholars should be wary of the claim that the 1917 Law of Family Relations would introduce “modern ideas about equality”6 into the family by abolishing the subjection of married women to their husband’s authority, such that: “Husband and wife shall enjoy equal authority and respect in the home [El marido y la mujer tendrán en el hogar autoridad y consideraciones iguales].”7 When the 1917 law was incorporated into the new civil code of 1928, the reforms were explicitly described as a response to “the feminist movement.”8 I argue, however, that the legislation and its subsequent interpretation by the Supreme Court perpetuated a structuring of marital obligations according to the belief that a man should protect his wife and a woman obey her husband, translated into a duty for husbands to provide a home and for wives to run it.9 In addition to rejecting the “historicity of social life,” assertions of legal closure also reject its “spatiality” (Blomley and Bakan 1992, 669). As critical scholars have noted: “[T]he legal mentality is curiously acontextual, such that legal relations and obligations are frequently thought of . . . as existing in a purely conceptual space, with little recognition of their spatial heterogeneity or the local material contexts within which law is understood and contested” (ibid., 663–664). This chapter shows that Mexican family law has had difficulty in coming to terms with the home as the material context for marriage, leading some litigants in divorce cases to ridicule the lawyers’ conclusions about the marital home. The discrepancy between everyday and legal logic arose because legislators had failed to take into account social and spatial heterogeneity in married couples’ living arrangements.10 Critical and feminist approaches to theorizing law both draw on deconstruction , but Sara Ahmed (1998, 34) argues that deconstruction “is not sufficient for a feminist politics of the law.” Drucilla Cornell (1992) combines deconstructive strategies with a reading of gender as system to show how, despite the continual restoration of the gender...

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