Out now: The Family Flamboyant
Summary
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Interrogates the normative heterosexual family from feminist, Jewish, and queer perspectives.
The Family Flamboyant is a graceful and lucid account of the many routes to family formation. Weaving together personal experience and political analysis in an examination of how race, gender, sexuality, class, and other hierarchies function in family politics, Marla Brettschneider draws on her own experience in a Jewish, multiracial, adoptive, queer family in order to theorize about the layered realities that characterize families in the United States today. Brettschneider uses critical race politics, feminist insight, class-based analysis, and queer theory to offer a distinct and distinctly Jewish contribution to both the family debates and the larger project of justice politics.
“The Family Flamboyant is a spirited testimony to the richness and multiplicity of family life, and a model of how reflections on one’s own experience and scholarship can illuminate one another to mutual advantage. This book is a welcome addition to the bookshelf for anyone interested in the complex ways in which people enter into and sustain family relationships.” - Mary Lyndon Shanley, author of Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption, and Same-Sex and Unwed Parents
“The strength of this book is the passionate voice of Brettschneider and her ability to harness it for a fresh discussion of the place of Jewishness in American multicultural thought. The writing is truly impressive.” - Matti Bunzl, author of Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna
“What is really impressive about this work is Brettschneider’s integration of personal anecdote with philosophical insight. She reads the meaning of her own life within the debates of identity politics, and this method serves her very well. The reader is captivated by her personal narrative and duly impressed with the insight she garners.” - Lori J. Marso, author of Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity: The Lives and Work of Intellectual Women
At the University of New Hampshire, Marla Brettschneider is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy, holds a joint appointment in Political Science and Women’s Studies, and is Coordinator of Queer Studies. She is the author of several books, including Democratic Theorizing from the Margins.
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SUNY Press