Controlling for Kin: Ghosts in the Postmodern Family
Abstract
Family formation and functioning are changing in complex and myriad ways. These changes have not escaped the notice of lawmakers and legal commentators. The commentary increasingly calls for redefinition of families, particularly the parent-child relationship, away from biological connection and toward social connection, while the law continues to privilege biological connection and models even non-biologically-ordered families on the nuclear family. Situating this debate and these tensions in the changing construction and foundational roles of family, this Article claims that biological connection remains important as political, moral and existential matters and suggests that legal regulation account for these biological connections, which are persistent and imminent, if often ephemeral, and continue to pull individuals and entire families who look to these ghost relations for identity and connection.
This Article aims to anchor the postmodern family law movement in the physical, social, and economic conditions of those who have experienced involuntary disruption of kinship, relations that serve as sites of hard-won individual and group identity and authority. The current trajectory toward simply recasting nuclear families along social rather than biological connections disregards the pervasive structural and identitarian roles of biological relationships and suggests a more expansive notion of family. The Article presents this country’s experience with adoption law and practice as both an exemplary and a cautionary tale of the importance of biological and social connections and the futility at present of discarding either.