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(Re)Defining Legal Parenthood and Kinship: The Limits of Legal Change in the Finnish Child Custody Act of 2019
Full text linkThis article examines how Finland took a role as an international predecessor in separating the parent’s right of access from custody, biology and legal parenthood. It addresses the (re)defining of the legal reference fields of kinship, family and parenthood in the process of rewriting the Act on Child Custody and Right of Access in Finland. Through an examination of the discourses of the legislative process, it shows how the Finnish legislation has moved from an emphasis on biological origins towards a more flexible and individualised conception of kinship. The analysis focuses on how the Child Custody Act works to recognise various marginalised positions, while leaving others unattended. Through a close examination of the changes to the Act, the article highlights the simultaneous processes of de-marginalisation of certain structures of kinship, and the marginalisation of others. The article concludes by predicting the direction of future developments in legislation concerning kinship, family and parenthood, based on prevalent trends of legal development, and the limits of what can presently be recognised by the law, and why
“Thank God, I have a Separate Dwelling”: Restructuring Kinship through Grandmaternal Sidelining in the Heterosexual Families of Russian Natural-Parenting Mothers
Full text linkThe way mothers parent, and if and why they choose to do something, is significantly regulated by diverse discursive formations and social institutions, such as the state, medicine, law, rooted attitudes, and societal norms. What lies behind these regulations is the idea of a specific relatedness between mother and child – kinship. In this article, I analyse how natural parenting influences kinship and relatedness in the families of Russian mothers who practise it. Based on my original study, and inspired by Marilyn Strathern’s ideas, I show how natural parenting challenges the conventional Russian form of mothering, which is characterised as extended and socially integrated, and results in a certain nuclearisation of the families of self-identifying ‘natural mothers’. The nuclearisation implies the re-definition of the role of elder kinsfolk as secondary to the child, and pushes them to the margins of the Russian natural mothers’ children’s kinship systems. It is brought about by mothers who distance their own parents and who seek, in this way, to disrupt the flow of what they see as ‘old’ and ‘out-dated’, even harmful knowledge on childcare. However, this requires various significant resources from the mothers performing natural parenting
Review Essay: Little Books, Big Horror: Review of Night of Mannequins, Taaqtumi, and Anoka
Full text linkThis review essay considers Stephen Graham Jones' Night of the Mannequins, editor Neil Christopher's Taaqtumi: An Anthology of Arctic Horror Stories, and Shane Hawk's Anoka
Introduction to the Special Section
Full text linkIntroduces the Special Section on Reimagining the Margins of Kinship, explaining its origins, the questions it addresses, and the four papers that make up the Section
Speculative Possibilities: Indigenous Futurity, Horror Fiction, and The Only Good Indians
Full text linkAn exciting movement in literature (as well as art, music, gaming, and other forms of media) that is presently exploding throughout our media streams in the twenty-first century is that of Indigenous futurism. This concept, which owes its namesake to scholar Grace L. Dillon and her work Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012), seeks to explore the possibilities of alternate pasts, presents, and futures, offering a fresh perspective on the beauty, power, and resilience of Indigeneity. One writer delving into this movement is Stephen Graham Jones, prolific author of many novels and short stories including his most recent works The Babysitter Lives (2022), The Backbone of the World (2022), “Attack of the 50 Foot Indian” (2021), “How to Break into a Hotel Room” (2021), My Heart is a Chainsaw (2021), “Wait for the Night” (2020), Night of the Mannequins (2020), and “The Guy with the Name” (2020), and The Only Good Indians (2020). Although Jones’s contributions to the literary world are extensive, there has been relatively little scholarship dedicated to his continuous experimenting in varying genres, forms, and subject matters. Likewise, scholarship on Indigenous futurism is also quite scarce, especially as it is developed through the literary genre of horror fiction. This work extends both scholarly conversations by analyzing Jones’s The Only Good Indians as a work of Indigenous futurism, specifically as it relates to rewriting the past, present, and future through various methods of Native slipstream. Fictional newspaper headlines and articles, a concentrated insistence on rationalization coupled with the inability to achieve such measures, and varying points of view combine to create a novel that is a hauntingly beautiful depiction of resiliency and possibility for an alternative future in which Indigenous worldviews replace the damaging cycles created and perpetuated by Western ideologies—positioning The Only Good Indians as an exceptional contribution to the field of Indigenous futurism, in addition to substantiating that both horror and futuristic fiction can serve as an effective medium of decolonization.
Keywords: Indigenous futurism, decolonization, horror, Stephen Graham Jones, speculative fictio
Using your Learning Style Effectively.
Full text linkAn individual’s learning style refers to a choice in the method they process information, acquire knowledge and review content presented to them in a teaching environment (Curry, 1981). This article will discuss how to identify your learning style and top tips on how to best utilise it to optimise your learning experience
Working Together against the Criminal Justice System, Forced Treatment, Interlocking Oppression, and Common Sense: Disability, Criminal Justice and Law and Decarcerating Disability
Full text linkThis piece reflects on some resonances between Disability, Criminal Justice and Law and Decarcerating Disability, suggesting that they are part of a shared political and intellectual project that a) interrogates common sense practices of penalty and disability care through an interlocking oppression lens centring colonialism, racism, disability, and capitalism, and b) helps us to question the lines between violence and nonviolence in response to distress and disability
Mobility, Social Reproduction and Exploitation: A Critical Legal Perspective on the Tension between Capitalism and Freedom of Movement
Full text linkA wide range of literature has placed social reproduction at the centre of migration processes. Although diversified, this body of literature has rarely focused on exploring, in depth, the entanglements between mobility and reproduction. In this article, I argue that, from a critical legal perspective, such entanglements are crucial for developing a feminist view on borders and migration that goes beyond the analysis of the female component of migration processes. On the one side, such a focus reveals the extent to which regimes of mobility control are structured around and, at the same time, reproduce a conceptual separation between production and reproduction. On the other side, the challenge that the reproduction and maintenance of life poses to capitalism highlights what is at stake in the tension between border regimes and the claim for freedom of movement. Seen from both these competing perspectives, human mobility appears constitutive (rather than functional) for contemporary social reproduction processes, as much as circulation is for production
The Law of Social Reproduction
Full text linkMy argument in this paper is that the law has a critical impact on structuring the subalternity of social reproduction. Namely that the hierarchical order in the production/reproduction relation depends on the marginality of the legal field to which the legal recognition of social reproduction is entrusted: family law. In particular, I claim that the way in which family law constructs the core of reproductive labor, i.e. care and housework performed for free for spouse, children, elderly parents, disabled members of the family and the like, represents the matrix of the inequalities that arise from the marginalisation of social reproduction in the public discourse
A Bridge through Time: The Epistolary Form and Nonlinear Temporality in Stephen Graham Jones’s Ledfeather
Full text linkThis article explores how Stephen Graham Jones adapts the epistolary form in his novel Ledfeather to create a new textual space capable of depicting nonlinear, spatialized time. Jones’s evolution of the epistolary mode creates a two-way temporal bridge within his narrative where past, present, and future can interact. This experimentation with the epistolary form acts as a rumination on the limits of a western, linear understanding of time when coping with historical and ancestral trauma. His subsequent deconstruction of the epistolary form then mirrors the collapse of the novel’s two independent timelines as they conflate to become a single, interactive and cohabitated temporality that spans generations. As the novel progresses, the barriers between the two primary narrative timelines of Doby Saxon and Indian Agent Francis Dalimpere began to wane, and this fracturing of time is mirrored by each narratives’ respective forms slowly collapsing, as well, until the Dalimpere sections become less epistolary, and Saxon’s sections increasingly take on formulaic standards of the epistolary mode. By collapsing the two timelines and merging the respective forms of each section, Jones introduces a new hybridized textual space which speaks to a nonlinear conception of temporality, giving space primacy over time in mapping history, memory, and narrative
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