Fictions of the Family Workshop

From ancient texts like Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus to contemporary works including Julia Armfield’s Private Rites, the family bears a fundamental relationship to fiction. This workshop  set out to explore the family as a specifically political fiction. In its heteropatriarchal form, the family has been a vital tool in the reproduction of colonialism and capitalism. Today, the authoritarian right mobilises fantasies of the nuclear family in peril to bolster oppressive structures of power. At the same time, exclusion from the heterosexist and white supremacist  nuclear family, particularly for queer communities and those of colour, has led to a flourishing of ways of doing family otherwise that feed the political imagination. Today on the left, ‘family abolition' has become a shorthand for the inequalities and insecurities of privatised reproduction and property, and a horizon for social transformation. At this time, engagements with the family increasingly take literary form, as fictional texts explore the psychosocial coordinates of different ways of doing, and being, family. Insisting on the political importance of fictional texts and the fictional character of politics, this workshop centred, in all their forms, political fictions of, and against, the family, as well as those for different kinds of family, that seek to radically reconceive it.

This workshop was organised by the Brighton team as part of their work on Political Fictions. The workshop included a keynote by Clare Hemmings (LSE) on Family Memory Archives, a series of panels on different themes, a creative writing workshop and an evening event with Brighton University lecturers and novelists, Bea Hitchman and Craig Jordan-Baker (a member of the CAPONEU team) on the place of family in their work, and the relationship between family and fiction.