Foucault and Family Relations: Governing from a Distance in Australia

by Malcolm Voyce

Overview

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 Foucault’s 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498559706
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	05/14/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	220
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Malcolm Voyce is professor of law at Macquarie University.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Social Context of Farming

Chapter 2: The Dispossession of Aboriginals from Land: An Application of Foucault’s Theories on Race and Sexuality

Chapter 3: Property and the Governance of the Family Farm

Chapter 4: A Reading of Divorce Judgments and Reflections on “Spatiality” and “Sexuality”

Chapter 5: Governing at a Distance: The Role of Trusts in Structuring Family Life in Rural Australia

Chapter 6: Towards a ‘Family Provision Jurisprudence’: A Case Study on the Farming Inheritance Cases

Chapter 7:Towards a ‘Family Provision Jurisprudence’: A Case Study on the Farming Inheritance Cases

Chapter 8: Governing the Rural Family in Australia from a Distance: The Family Provision Act and the Role of ‘Expert Knowledges’

Editorial 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

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