Reproducing the State (review)

Kinship practices are the mechanisms by which all states reproduce themselves, including modern democracies. Although liberals' social contract seemingly substitutes consent for birth as its criterion for membership, it simultaneously reestablishes family as the basis of political society. Decreasing the role of kinship in political reproduction requires an end to marriage laws and the creation of new citizenship requirements. In Reproducing the State, Jacqueline Stevens supports this original and controversial argument with analyses of philosophical concepts, legal cases, scientific taxonomies, and personal narratives. Her method of analysis is similarly eclectic, combining deconstruction, genealogy, and phenomenology. The result is a fascinating—and chilling—story of the power relations (ethic, familial, national, and racial) that perpetuate existing inequalities.

Stevens begins by questioning the distinction between "primitive" societies and "modern" states, arguing that both are organized around "invocations of birth and ancestry" (51). Divisions between disciplines (anthropology and political science), spheres (private and public), and affiliations (nation and state) simultaneously replicate and obscure the relationship between political societies and family forms. As Stevens puts it, "In brief, political societies constitute the intergenerational family form that provides the pre-political seeming semantics of nation. The familial nation reinforces the membership rules of political society, and, at certain junctures, yields taxonomies of race" (9, italics in original). In Chapter Two, Stevens discusses marriage practices that define political societies from ancient Athens to the contemporary United States. She also identifies tensions along the "metonymic chains" that unify the body politic as a national family within a political territory. Which are more powerful, she asks, ancestral forms of being or geographic places of birth? Is the United States, a so-called nation of immigrants, better described as "a state with members who have ethic ties elsewhere?" Or, have legal institutions created "an ancestral 'us'" (148-49)?

For Stevens, important differences exist between the political practices that constitute nations and the physical features that define races. In Chapter Three, she analyzes how national families manifest themselves through a political semiotics of personal and proper names. Names signify the legal bases of political membership from birth to death certificates, and extend the scope of the nation from places to peoples to products and practices. For example, "Schmidt" is presumably of German ancestry, Seagrams is a "Canadian whisky," and baseball is an American sport (170n77, 43, 168). Although ancestry may seem primordial, the markings of race on the body have deeper, stronger roots, both political and phenomenological. Chapter Four presents race in its many senses—performative, phenotypical, scientific, taxonomic, xenophobic—as "the culmination of political society, family, and nation" (173). Race is the product of a dialectic between "the internal rules of political society" and "the familial form of nations," and the physical marker that "makes nationality clear" (208).

Family forms, more specifically, sex/gender systems, which provide the basis for all of the above categories, are the explicit subject of Chapter Five. Stevens argues that marriage and kinship regulations are designed to control reproductive practices. The relationships they define between men and women are only byproducts. These state controls are often overlaid with religious rhetoric, the subject of Chapter Six. However, religious teachings also question the inequalities reproduced by "the materialist, propertarian logic of political society's family form" (237). By privileging "out-of-body" experiences, religion can ironically expose the absurdity of all fetishes, including the nation-state.

Although Stevens shares postmodern suspicions of psychoanalytic theories, she refuses to ignore the universal features of political membership. In her final chapter she asks the most basic of questions: "why birth?" "Pregnancy envy," the "phantasmic woman"—these stories assuage all-too-human, and more specifically, masculine anxieties about mortality (268-70). Attempts to construct alternative, more optimistic, birth narratives, such as Arendt's "natality" and Hegel's "dialectics of spirit," themselves often fail adequately to protect the political autonomy of individuals. Stevens concludes that the alienation associated with individuation cannot be overcome, only accepted, thereby freeing politics for other purposes.

As even this brief overview suggests, Stevens's argument pulls in many directions, all...