sinthomo's reviews
15 reviews

The Emotional Incest Syndrome: What to Do When a Parent's Love Rules Your Life by Patricia Love

To Love, emotional incest is not an inevitable consequence of the family structure but that structure thrown out of balance. This balance just so happens to be two successfully married parents who instill a healthy respect for hierarchy and authority in least two children—the hegemonic form in Love's society. Without the ability to imagine alternatives, Dr. Love prescribes appropriate libidinal flows to the treat the symptoms of enmeshment. The genuinely valuable parts of this book (your mileage will certainly vary) are bounded by this commitment to family ties.

In general, abuse and trauma literature needs to be mined for insights that can be re-situated in a family abolition politic.

Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care by M.E. O'Brien

Despite calling for international communization, this book could not have more squarely aimed at a USamerican and largely white audience. It defines the target of family abolition as conformity to a singular white/bourgeois/nuclear/private ideal. It casts other kinship formations as counterhegemonic or aspirational or not "really" family. It falls back on the most conventional sentimental appeals to family love. In the hopes of making its message less threatening, it refuses to engage with the majority of familial domination that actually exists or has ever existed. The reader is left with few tools to counter the intense moralization of family ties that will inevitably rise to meet any reform, any revolution, and most individual resistance. 

My family is not on the margins of or a refuge from The Family. It is the very site of struggle. If I am a traitor to my culture, so be it.

Minimizing Marriage: Morality, Marriage, and the Law by Elizabeth Brake

Weaksauce

Los mejores narradores jóvenes en español by Valerie Miles
Did not finish book. Stopped at 12%.

paused

The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies by Marcel Mauss

Should have read the Hau press edition whoops

Reflections on Gender and Science by Evelyn Fox Keller

As Keller herself is well aware, this book is only a first step. While she names many assumptions and metaphorical relations that are (still even now) taken for granted, what strikes me is not just what was scrutinized but what wasn't. In tracing steps through the history of paradigms of scientific knowledge, Keller makes the spectacular oversight of the role of European expansion in creating the self conception of the modern scientist. This dynamic not only overtakes gender in metaphorical resonances, but also explains why masculinity in later times takes on the character that it does. If you know of any works that put Keller's arguments to use within the well trodden ground of criticizing imperialist ways of doing knowledge, hmu.

Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study by Orlando Patterson

I have two major points of contention with this book, for which I'll borrow a summary from this review:
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.2307/1899753

Patterson's definition of slavery depends on precepts that are by no means
confirmed by what one knows of slavery in the Americas at large. If slaves
were in fact "generally dishonored," how does he explain the degrees of rank
found among all groups of slaves--that is, the scale of "reputation" and
authority accorded, or at least acknowledged, by slave and master alike?
Second, if slaves were by definition "natally alienated," they would have had
no chance of establishing the vigorous and effective family life that has been
demonstrated by Barry Higman for the Caribbean and Herbert Gutman for the
United States.

My criticism is in a sense opposite to Craton's—I do not contest that the condition of slavery is defined by powerlessness, alienation, and lack of honor. Rather, the issue is these qualities can be found in all other relations of domination, and that slavery differs in the intensity, at least symbolically, of these qualities, for which it then becomes the referent, the arch domination.

However, I could not have even arrived at this conclusion without Patterson's meticulous and lucid analysis, drawn from 66 (!) slave holding societies across the world and throughout history. In the process of characterizing slavery, he tests the conceptual boundaries of property, kinship, dependency, authority, power, and honor. I expect I'll be coming back this in years to come.

The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make by J. Lorand Matory

a conscious and measured confrontation of the problem of epistemology in the form of a much needed recontextualization of canonical theory and historical narrative

The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination by Jessica Benjamin

Benjamin sees no need to distinguish erotic domination fantasy—where total psychic murder collapses the tension and provokes abandonment or actual murder—and lived experience of domination, where the extent of self effacement is the strength of the bind, and murder is the response to self assertion. This focus on a singular and inadequate model of domination severely limits the applicability of many of her arguments. While "personal power relationships" are acknowledged, they are of little interest. the universe depicted is contained to domestic dyads and occasionally triads whose dramas are little disturbed by outside forces, despite the objection made to public/private dualism and isolated conceptions of the self.

I felt like i was sifting through symbolic archetypes and Robert Stoller citations for the real meat, most of which had to do with intersubjectivity. The identification of rationality with domination is convincing, but the identification with inherent masculinism slides into the overdetermination of dichotomous gender that is evident throughout. For example:

The ideal of the autonomous individual could only be created by abstracting from the relationship of dependency between men and women. The relationships which people require to nurture them are considered private, and not truly relationships with outside others. Thus the other is reduced to an appendage of the subject—the mere condition of his being—not a being in her own right.

This is a relationship of servitude, and presenting the autonomous ideal as one women are nar categorically excluded from erases the same capability of women to invisibilize labor they are dependent on. 

A reorganization of key insights is in order.

The Unique and Its Property by Wolfi Landstreicher, Apio Ludd, Max Stirner

 If something didn't count as sacred for people, indeed the floodgates would open to willfulness, to boundless subjectivity!