KINSHIP REIMAGINED:FAMILY IN DORIS LESSINGS FICTION. Selçuk Sentürk

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Marxist Feminism

Radical Feminism

Psychoanalytical Feminism

Gay Men, Lesbians and the Family

Political Lesbianism

Queer Kinship and Families of Choice

The New Right and After: The ‘Pretended’ or Alternative Families

Overview of Existing Criticism: Lessing and the Family

Chapter Summaries

       Chapter One Communism and the Family

       The Revolutionary Possibilities of the Commune/Communism

       ‘Latent Slavery’: ‘Natural’ Division of Labour in the Family

       Dependant Men: The End of Male Supremacy

       The Limitations of Communism and Marxist Theory: Gender Blindness

       Domesticity and Women: Invisible Labour and the Alienated Proletariat

       ‘Pretended’ or Alternative Family: New Right and New Labour

       Lesbians and Homosexuals: Invisible Groups in the Revolution

       Women in the Revolution

       Delusions and Sweet Dreams

       Conclusion

       Chapter Two Feminism and the Family

       Lessing and Feminism

       The New Right and Feminism

       Women and the Family

       Work as a Hobby Rather than a Career

       Romantic Notions of Love and Marriage

       Sexual Relationship

       Reproduction

       The Myth of the Perfect and Happy Mother

       Illusions of the Happy and Stable Family

       Public Patriarchy

       Kate and Maureen: Feminist Sisterhood of the 1970s

       Maternal Ambivalence: A Feminist Struggle

       Other Forms of Oppression

       Conclusion

       Chapter Three Sufism and the Family

       Lessing and Idries Shah

       Lessing and Jenny Diski

       The Sufi Family

       Sufi Parenthood

       Habit (Un)Learning

       Schooling

       Lessing’s Sufism and Feminism: Su-feminism

       The Sufi Liberation: The Walls

       Conclusion

       Chapter Four Postcolonial Ecofeminism and the Family

       Lessing, Postcolonialism and the Environment

       Gendered and Exploited Spaces: Family and the Environment

       The True Self and the Social Self

       The Environment: From ‘Singing’ to ‘Dying’

       Feminist Exploration (Eco-centric) vs Masculinist Exploitation (Ego-centric)

       Environment and Women

       Non-Normative Families in Mara and Dann

       Incest as a Trope

       The Farms

       The Family: From Dystopia to Utopia

       Conclusion

       Conclusion

       Bibliography

       Index

Introduction: Lessing and the Family

      Family has been a central concern in the work of Doris Lessing since she published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950). This book explores the treatment of family in selected fiction by Lessing. It looks at how Lessing’s relationship to political and mystical philosophies shapes her representation of the family and considers the ways in which she problematises the family and celebrates alternative families. In her fiction, the family is represented as an ideological construct rather than a biological relationship, and through her work she reveals this ideology by illustrating that the family shapes and is shaped by the interests of the wider society in which it is found. Lessing’s fiction challenges the promotion of traditional family values, presenting them as concepts that ‘discipline’, in a Foucauldian sense, individuals into gendered roles and hierarchal relations.¹ Performance of gender roles, specifically men as breadwinner and women as homemakers, heterosexual marriage, raising children as obedient individuals are some of the traditional family values. These values are equated with social stability, shaping the ways in which wider society is organised. However, Lessing’s fictional family challenges this stability, celebrating individual demands and choices.

      Debrah Raschke, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, and Sandra Singer argue that ‘Lessing’s fiction and non-fiction demand a reformulation of some of our most taken-for-granted assumptions about the contemporary world and how we relate to that world’.² In this work, family is shown to be one of the taken-for-granted institutions that Lessing seeks to reformulate in her fiction. Overall, this book suggests that Lessing celebrates varied forms of family. In this way, Lessing’s fiction challenges the limitations and a single meaning of ‘the family’.³ In a broader sense, she is preoccupied with family in her СКАЧАТЬ