Critical Family Law

The family is a powerful instrument of governmentality in the Foucaultian sense. It disciplines interpersonal, sexual, and intergenerational relationships, and in so doing it structures definite relations of power between genders and construes social identities which affect not only individuals and groups but also national communities. Of course, the law plays a critical role within this framework, substantially contributing to the construction of the family as a governmental dispositif. It operates primarily as such in the law of the family as an intellectual enterprise, namely in the way lawyers create family law as an autonomous body of law, ambiguously situated in an area that is neither entirely private nor entirely public. Therefore, family law is exceptional but also peripheral to the heart of the law, conceived as the object of legal science.