Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender (review)

In her excellent book  Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender, Ellen Feder tells a “new tale” of race and gender in the United States. Moving beyond the truism that race and gender intersect, Feder “thinks together” these categories without conflating their different modes of production. To do so, she gives unique attention to a third figure—the family. According to Feder, although race and gender are experienced in inseparable ways, they are produced distinctly through the family. Mechanisms of gender act within the family, and mechanisms of race act upon it. To develop this position, provocative in its very simplicity, Feder “tells stories” using Michel Foucault’s method of storytelling—genealogy. From the postwar construction of the Levittown suburb to the diagnosis and treatment of gender identity disorder (GID) to debates over the federal government’s “Violence Initiative”—Feder’s stories illustrate the family’s central role in the construction of race and gender.

Family Bonds should find and fascinate a broad academic audience; Feder’s prose is clear and engaging, her arguments deft and accessible. Nevertheless, those readers familiar with Foucault, feminist theory, or critical race theory will find Family Bonds most exciting. In each field of inquiry, Feder makes bold contributions. For scholars of Foucault, Family Bonds is an original extension of his genealogical project and an uncommon application of his account of power to questions of race. Feder’s stories illuminate and advance Foucault’s own. For scholars working in feminist theory and critical race theory, Feder’s interest in the family is as uncommon and fruitful as her Foucauldian method. Once the central object of Second Wave analyses, feminist theory has since shifted its attention away from the family. Returning and reshifting her focus, Feder traces and contests the family’s marginalization.

The book begins with an introduction that grounds its Foucauldian method and familial focus. Here, Feder makes clear her special debt to Hortense Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (Spillers 1987). In this important essay, Spillers traces the history of restricting the categories “woman” and “family” to white women and white families. Feder affirms Spillers’s critique of Second Wave feminists like Nancy Chodorow, who fail to think race and gender “together” effectively. More uniquely, Feder observes and accepts a claim, shared across Spillers’s and Chodorow’s texts, that gendering processes are located within the family and racializing processes without. According to Feder, the challenge of “thinking together” race and gender is deepened by their distinct production. Foucault’s method of genealogy and account of power meet this challenge because disciplinary power and regulatory (or biopolitical) power specify, respectively, the mechanisms of gender and race. That is, disciplinary power operates within the family and biopower operates upon the family.

The three core chapters of Family Bonds tell stories that illustrate the family’s important role in the production of gender and race. The first core chapter, “The Family in the Tower: The Triumph of Levittown and the Production of a New Whiteness,” tells the story of the development of Levittown, New York, a model suburb constructed after World War II. In the postwar period, a combination of political and economic policies and actions encouraged European Americans to leave urban ethnic enclaves and move to the suburbs. The same policies—zoning ordinances, financing rules, etc.—also encouraged the exclusion of African Americans. As Feder’s genealogy carefully shows, Levittown developed through and alongside a new concept of whiteness. There, ethnic differences between neighbors became less important than racial differences between suburb and city. Levittown was a homogeneous community, where white families lived in identical houses on identical streets.

A brilliant reading of Bentham’s panopticon and Foucault’s “panopticism” shapes Feder’s subsequent account of the production of gender, in Levittown and beyond. Bentham’s panopticon is a design of a prison where prisoners are observed from a central tower by an inspector that they themselves cannot see; completely visible...