{"id":65420,"date":"2014-12-18T09:00:53","date_gmt":"2014-12-18T14:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=65420"},"modified":"2014-12-17T12:50:33","modified_gmt":"2014-12-17T17:50:33","slug":"why-i-called-it-the-family-and-what-that-has-to-do-with-cosby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2014\/12\/18\/why-i-called-it-the-family-and-what-that-has-to-do-with-cosby\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Called it “The Family” and What That Has To Do with Cosby"},"content":{"rendered":"

First, a note\u00a0on language<\/strong><\/p>\n

In\u00a0American English books<\/a>\u00a0from 1910 to 1950, about 25% of the uses of \u201cfamily\u201d were preceded by \u201cthe.\u201d Starting about 1950, however, \u201cthe family\u201d started falling out of fashion, finally dropping below 16% of \u201cfamily\u201d uses in the mid-2000s. This trend\u00a0coincides with the modern rise of\u00a0family diversity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In her classic 1993 essay, \u201cGood Riddance to \u2018The Family\u2019<\/a>,\u201d Judith Stacey wrote,<\/p>\n

\n

no positivist definition of the family, however revisionist, is viable. \u2026 the family is not an institution, but an ideological, symbolic construct that has a history and a politics.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The essay was in\u00a0Journal of Marriage and\u00a0the<\/strong>\u00a0Family<\/em>, published by the\u00a0National Council\u00a0on Family Relations. In 2001, in a change that as far as\u00a0I can tell<\/a>\u00a0was never announced,\u00a0JMF<\/em>\u00a0changed its name\u00a0to\u00a0Journal of Marriage and\u00a0the<\/del>\u00a0Family<\/em>, which\u00a0some\u00a0leaders\u00a0of NCFR believed\u00a0would make it\u00a0more inclusive.\u00a0It was the realization of Stacey\u2019s argument.<\/p>\n

I decided on the title very early\u00a0in the writing of my book:\u00a0The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change<\/em><\/a>. I agreed with Stacey that the family is not an institution. Instead, I think it\u2019s an institutional\u00a0arena<\/em>: the social space\u00a0where family interactions take place. I wanted to replace the\u00a0narrowing, tradition-bound\u00a0term, with an expansive, open-ended concept that was big enough to capture both the\u00a0legal definition and the diversity of personal definitions.\u00a0I think we can study and teach\u00a0the family<\/em>\u00a0without worrying that we\u2019re imposing a singular\u00a0definition of what that means.<\/p>\n

It takes the\u00a0unique\u00a0genius that\u00a0great\u00a0designers have to capture a concept\u00a0like this in a simple, eye-catching image. Here is how\u00a0the artists at Kiss Me I\u2019m Polish did it:<\/p>\n

\"cover-amazon\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What goes in the frame? What looks like a harmless ice-breaker project \u2014 draw your family! \u2014 is also a conceptual challenge. Is it a smiling, generic nuclear family? A family oligarchy? Or a fictional TV family providing cover for an abusive, larger-than-life father figure who lectures us about morality while concealing his own serial rape behind a\u00a0bland picture frame?<\/p>\n

Whose function?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Like any family sociologist, I have great respect for Andrew Cherlin. I have taught from his textbook, as well as\u00a0The Marriage Go-Round<\/em>,\u00a0and I have learned a lot from his research, which I cite often. But there is one thing in\u00a0Public and Private Families\u00a0<\/em>that always rubbed me the wrong way when I was teaching: the idea that families are defined by positive \u201cfunctions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the text box he uses in Chapter 1 (of an older edition, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s changed), to explain his concept:<\/p>\n

\"cherlinpubpriv\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I have grown more sympathetic to the need for simplifying tools in a textbook, but I still find this too one-sided.\u00a0Cherlin\u2019s\u00a0public family has the \u201cmain functions\u201d of child-rearing and care work; the private family has \u201cmain functions\u201d of providing love, intimacy, and emotional support. Where is the abuse and exploitation function?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why one of the\u00a0goals that motivated me to finish the book was to see\u00a0the following passage in print before lots of students. It\u2019s now in Chapter 12: Family Violence and Abuse:<\/p>\n

\n

We should not think that there is a correct way that families are \u201csupposed\u201d to work. Yes, families are part of the system of care that enhances the lived experience and survival of most people. But we should not leap from that observation to the idea that when family members abuse each other, it means that their families are not working. \u2026 To this way of thinking, the \u201cnormal\u201d functions of the family are positive, and harmful acts or outcomes are deviations from that normal mode.<\/p>\n

The family is an institutional arena, and the relationships between people within that arena include all kinds of interactions, good and bad. \u2026 And while one family member may view the family as not working\u2014a child suffering abuse at the hands of a trusted caretaker, for example\u2014from the point of view of the abuser, the family may in fact be working quite well, regarding the family as a safe place to carry out abuse without getting caught or punished. Similarly, some kinds of abuse\u2014such as the harsh physical punishment of children or the sexual abuse of wives\u2014may be expected outcomes of a family system in which adults have much more power than children and men (usually) have more power than women. In such cases, what looks like abuse to the victims (or the law) may seem to the abuser like a person just doing his or her job of running the family.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Huxtable family secrets<\/strong><\/p>\n

Which brings us to Bill Cosby. After I realized how easy it was to drop photos into my digital copy of the book cover, I made a series of them to share on social media \u2014 and planning to use them in an introductory lecture \u2014 to\u00a0promote this framing device for the book.\u00a0On September 20th of this year I made this figure and posted it in\u00a0a tweet<\/a>\u00a0commemorating the 30th anniversary of\u00a0The Cosby Show<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"huxtables-myfamilyphoto\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ah, September.\u00a0When I was just another na\u00efve member of the clueless-American community, using a popular TV family to promote my book, blissfully unaware of the fast-approaching marketing train wreck beautifully illustrated by this graph of internet search traffic for the term \u201cCosby rape\u201d:<\/p>\n

\"cosbyrapetraffic\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I was never into\u00a0The Cosby Show<\/em>, which ran from my senior year in high school through college graduation (not my prime sitcom years). I love lots of families, but I don\u2019t love \u201cthe family\u201d any more than I love \u201csociety.\u201d Like all families, the Huxtables would have had secrets if they were real. But now we know that even in their fictional existence they did have a real secret. Like some real families, the Huxtables were a device for the family head\u2019s\u00a0abuse of power and sexuality.<\/p>\n

So I don\u2019t regret putting them in the picture frame. Not everything in there is good. And when it\u2019s bad, it\u2019s still the family.<\/p>\n

Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of\u00a0<\/span>The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and writes the blog\u00a0<\/span>Family Inequality<\/a>. You can follow him on\u00a0<\/span>Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0<\/span>Facebook<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First, a note\u00a0on language In\u00a0American English books\u00a0from 1910 to 1950, about 25% of the uses of \u201cfamily\u201d were preceded by \u201cthe.\u201d Starting about 1950, however, \u201cthe family\u201d started falling out of fashion, finally dropping below 16% of \u201cfamily\u201d uses in the mid-2000s. This trend\u00a0coincides with the modern rise of\u00a0family diversity. In her classic 1993 essay, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":65421,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[209,349,223,2056,23384,329,55,2088,2090,2100,272,129,343,8118,868,133,76],"class_list":["post-65420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academia","tag-ageaging","tag-childrenyouth","tag-crimelaw","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-emotion","tag-gender","tag-gender-marriagefamily","tag-gender-violence","tag-gender-work","tag-marriagefamily","tag-media","tag-tvmovies","tag-organizationsinstitutions","tag-power","tag-violence","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/12\/1a5.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65420"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65422,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65420\/revisions\/65422"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}