Foucault and Family Relations: Governing from a Distance in Australia

(Hardback)

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Foucault and Family Relations: Governing from a Distance in Australia analyzes how notions of property ownership were instrumental in maintaining family stability and continuity in rural Australia, outlining how inheritance and divorce laws functioned to govern the internal relationships of families to assist the state to rule from a distance. Using a selection of Foucaults ideas on the family, sexuality, race, space and economics this books shows how property operated as a disciplinary device, which was underpinned by technical ideas, such as surveying and cartography. This book uses legal judgments as a form of ethnography to show how property, as a socio-technical device, allowed a degree of local freedom for owners. This aspect of property allowed the state to stimulate ideas of local freedom to assist in ruling from a distance, demonstrating how the rural family as a domestic unit became a key field of intervention for the state as the family represented a bridge to larger relationships of power.

Reviews

Foucault and Family Relations is a highly illuminating study of the importance of the family as a device for the historical advance of liberal colonialism in Australia, as well as for the critique of liberalism globally. Voyce shows us the darkness of connections between family, sexuality and race, and reveals the family for the colonial, patriarchal and heteronormative stooge which it so often was and still is. -- Julian Reid, University of Lapland
Malcolm Voyce brings Foucault to life in an original and perceptive understanding of farm succession in Australia. The book will appeal to those concerned with the ways the law has shaped, and is shaping, property relations among farm families. -- Geoffrey Lawrence, University of Queensland

Author Bio

Malcolm Voyce is professor of law at Macquarie University.