Gender, genealogies & the new families

Abstract

Are the new families we are studying now really ‘new’? Some historical examples about English and American intellectuals living in Europe suggest that the most varied arrangements were made by couples or social groups that, nevertheless, continued to present themselves as ‘families’. And also to document their genealogies in the most traditional form, ‘forgetting’ the relationships that did not produced descendants or, even if they did, were most unconventional. It is also worth asking if the formal structure of the genealogies, as we learned to express them, do not induce this erasure of history.