LITMIR.BIZ

      Introduction

      The last thirty years of the twentieth century witnessed an upheaval in family relations and in ideas about the family. We also saw profound mutations in people’s lives – I am thinking first of all of the lives of the millions of individuals of both sexes, of all ages and conditions, who make up the traditionally Christian, capitalist and democratic societies of the Western world, and who will be our principal reference here. These mutations have reshaped the practices, mental outlooks and institutions that define what are known as kinship relations between both individuals and the groups engendered by these relations: nuclear families, what are mistakenly called ‘extended’ families, kindred, and so forth.

      Several facts testify to this transformation, including the sharp decline in marriages and the even sharper rise in the number of separations and divorces, resulting in the appearance and multiplication of single-parent families, ‘recomposed’ families, etc. But if the conjugal tie is proving increasingly fragile, the parents’ desire to continue to shoulder their child-raising responsibilities, even after separation and divorce, is nevertheless a social fact that is constantly and strongly asserted. It is an aspect and one of the effects of the tendency to value childhood and children that emerged in Western Europe in the nineteenth century and became fully fledged by the mid twentieth. In short, among the metamorphoses of the conjugal family, if the marriage axis has weakened, the axis of filiation is still solidly in place.1

      But filiation itself is likely tomorrow to be no longer what it was yesterday, and defining it has already been made more complex by recent discoveries in biology and the development of new reproductive technologies. Whereas it used to seem a matter of common sense to say that, while paternity may always be open to doubt, there can be no doubt about who the mother is – she is the woman who carried the child in her womb and brought it into the world – nowadays this may no longer be the case. Today, it is possible to transfer an egg fertilized in the body of one woman into the uterus of another woman, where it will continue to develop until the child is born. Whereas formerly, in our societies, the woman who gave birth to a child was perceived as being both the child’s genetrix and its mother, as it becomes possible artificially to separate these three naturally indivisible stages – fertilization, gestation and parturition – the question arises of what, for the child born under these conditions, are the various women who, one after another, contributed to its birth? Generally speaking, because of the importance our culture places on the biological aspect of kinship relations and the genealogical representation of these ties, the question usually comes down to asking: which of these women is the ‘real’ mother?2

      For if all these transformations – which sometimes lead in opposite directions – have deeply altered the world of kinship, they have not yet shaken an axiom that, in Europe, has for centuries been the basis of its definition and representation, namely: that kinship is fundamentally a world of both biological and genealogical ties between same-sex or opposite-sex individuals of the same generation or of different generations following in time.

      Nevertheless,

Скачать книгу