Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture - Hardcover

Oliver, Kelly

4.67

6 ratings by Goodreads

9780415913652: Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415913659 ISBN 13: 9780415913652

Publisher: Routledge, 1997

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Family Values shows how the various contradictions at the heart of Western conceptions of maternity and paternity problematize our relationships with ourselves and with others. Using philosophical texts, psychoanalytic theory, studies in biology and popular culture, Kelly Oliver challenges our traditional concepts of maternity which are associated with nature, and our conceptions of paternity which are embedded in culture.

Oliver's intervention calls into question the traditional image of the oppositional relationship between nature and culture, maternal and paternal. Family Values also undercuts recent returns to the rhetoric of a "battle between the sexes" by analyzing the conceptual basis of these descriptions in biological research and the presuppositions of such suggestions in philosophy and psychoanalysis. By developing a reconception of maternity and paternity, Family Values offers hope for peace in the battle of the sexes.

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About the Author:

Kelly Oliver s Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Womanizing Nieztsche: Philosophy's Relation to the Feminine (Routledge, 1995) and Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-bind, and editor of Ethics Politics and Difference in Kristeva's Writings (Routledge, 1994).

Review:

"The area she covers is broad and crosses disciplinary boundaries: phenomenology and psycho- analysis. Yet, she is aware of the difficulty of such an under- taking. Noting the well-critiqued problems within each sphere of discourse, she argues that her project and its promise necessitates a methodology that intersects both." Thea Harrington, Sophia vol 37, 1998

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