Please make plans to join us this Thursday, April 12th, 12-1:15 p.m. in Swift 201 (Second Floor), for our first workshop meeting of the quarter, which is cosponsored with the Religion and the Human Sciences Workshop.
Presenter: Diane Picio, Ph.D. Student, Religion, Literature, and Visual Culture
Title: “Representing the Family” (dissertation proposal)
Author’s Comments: Dear RAME and RHS Colleagues, I present to you what is currently a bona fide draft of what I genuinely hope will turn into a much more organized dissertation proposal. The topic of my dissertation as will become obvious is the American Family. I say this term, the “American Family,” because it is less awkward than the United States Family and has a certain historical and cultural weight to it. However, as gestured at, the scope of the project is the family in the US.
The general question with which I am beginning this project can be put in one of the following two ways: “what is cultural work of the family?” or “how does family function as a cultural structure?” I am keen to state this problem as well as what is currently a working claim that family is a metonymy for America as a whole. Meaning that the large-scale issues facing the United States are taken up by and played out in the family. My eagerness to include both the working thesis as well as the question or problem is so that we are able to discuss whether this project is it is currently proposed is answering those questions or seems to be more addressing another line of investigation.
Unsurprising to those who know me, I intend to pursue my questions and thesis through an examination of films. As part of the argument that will support my claim, I intend to choose a few films to examine how the family is visually represented in cinema. What I hope to accomplish by using films is not only to show how the family works as a metonymy for America but to determine if the films complicate what has been presented in the historiography and theoretical work on the American Family.
The time period I have chosen to examine is the post-WWII, focusing mainly in the 50s and extending up through 1975. Of course, these dates have to be flexible as events, thoughts, movements, etc., are never neatly constrained to a calendar year or decade. I am concerned with limiting myself to a time period rather than a theoretical/conceptual framework, however, because of the changes happening in cinema beginning in 1975 and the fecundity of this time period—with the rise of the stable domestic ideal, followed by the activism of the 60s, the reaction to the activism by conservatives, and coining of the term “family values”—this temporal limitation does not seem as though it will shortchange the project. However, I would be curious to hear thoughts to the contrary.
In addition to the above, the following are also two questions or areas of concern I am thinking through while constructing this project: Is this project about miscegenation or does miscegenation have a place within the project? Am I thinking of the “family” as a structure/norm or as a phenomenon that needs explaining? I look forward to the conversation and feedback.
There will be a formal response and lunch will be served.
The paper can be accessed and downloaded via the “Papers” tab (password protected) on the RAME Workshop website.
Please contact Joel (joelabrown@uchicago.edu) if you have any questions or trouble accessing the paper.