New Social Orders: Reconceptualising Family and Community in Utopian Fiction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21153/pecl2005vol15no2art1246Keywords:
family, community, society, Utopian fictionAbstract
In lieu of abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article:
The family is the cradle into which the future is born; it is the nursery in which the new social order is nourished and reared during its early and most plastic period.
(Sidney Goldstein, Marriage and Family Living, 1946)1
When Goldstein conceived the metaphor of the American family as the cradle of the future he was writing at a specific historical moment, ‘one to which the stresses of war, the uncertainties of the ensuing peace, and the emerging relationship between ideologies of the family and American national identity together lent an unparalleled ambiguity and anxiety about family life’ (Levey 2001, p.125). Nearly 60 years on, the same conditions seem still to apply not only to the United States, but also to many other countries across the globe. The linking of family to the social well-being of a nation and its individual citizens is a familiar rhetoric employed by politicians, religious leaders, social commentators, and scholars, who rely on the interplay between an actual social unit and its metaphorical extensions to produce an illusion of ‘the truth’. In a similar way, the notion of a ‘new social order’ offers the utopian promise of a better life than that which current or past social orders have provided. Again the force of the metaphor resides in its capacity to appeal to both the intellect and the emotions.
Metrics
References
Beck, Ulrich (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London, Sage.
Beck, Ulrich (1998) Democracy without Enemies. Cambridge, Polity Press.
Beck, Ulrich, and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim (2002) Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences. London, Sage.
Boothby, Neil (1996) ‘Mobilizing communities to meet the psychosocial needs of children in war and refugee crisis’, in R.J. Apfel and B. Simon (eds) Minefields in Their Hearts: The Mental Health of Children in War and Communal Violence. New Haven, Yale University Press, pp.149-164.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1986) ‘The forms of capital’, trans. Richard Nice, in John G. Richardson (ed) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York, Greenwood.
Burgess, Melvin (1999) Bloodtide. London, Penguin Books.
Castoriadis, Cornelius (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, MIT Press.
Ellis, Deborah (2002) Parvana’s Journey. Crows Nest, NSW, Allen & Unwin.
Fukuyama, Francis (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. New York, Free Press.
Fukuyama, Francis (1999) The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order. New York, Free Press.
Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar (2002) ‘Towards new imaginaries: An introduction’, Public Culture 14, 1: 1-19.
Gleitzman, Morris (2002) Boy Overboard. Camberwell, Vic., Penguin.
Jacoby, Russell (1999) The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in the Age of Apathy. New York: Basic Books.
Levey, Jane F. (2001) ‘Imagining the family in postwar popular culture: The case of The Egg and I and Cheaper by the Dozen’, Journal of Women’s History 13, 3: 125-150.
Lowry, Lois (1993) The Giver. Boston, Houghton Mifflin.
Lowry, Lois (2000) Gathering Blue. Boston, Houghton Mifflin.
Lowry, Lois (2004) Messenger. Boston, Houghton Mifflin.
Mark, Jan (2004) Useful Idiots. Oxford, David Fickling Books.
Mikaelsen, Ben (2004) Tree Girl. New York, HarperCollins.
Moylan, Tom (2003) ‘“The moment is here... and it’s important”: State, agency, and dystopia in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica and Ursula LeGuin’s The Telling’, in Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (eds) Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. New York and London, Routledge, pp.135-154.
Nix, Garth (1997) Shade’s Children. St Leonards, NSW, Allen & Unwin.
Pratchett, Terry (1998) Carpe Jugulum. London and New York, Doubleday.
Winter, Ian (2000) Towards a theorised understanding of family life and social capital: Working Paper No. 2, April 2000. Melbourne, Australian Institute of Family Studies.
