Families and Capitalism

Catalog description

Despite highly romanticized and idealized views about family life, families play a crucial role in sustaining and organizing capitalist societies and inequalities by race, gender, and class. This course reviews classic and contemporary social theory to understand how family norms and behaviors shape and are shaped by political and economic structures. Students will learn about capitalism, racism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy, and engage with questions that connect these to family norms and behaviors. This includes questions like: why has gay marriage been outlawed until recently? Why were slaves denied marriage and family life? Why is caring for others disproportionately done by women and often unpaid? Why is poverty related to unstable family lives? Through engaging with this class material students will learn how to sociologically and critically rethink current family issues and the future of family life. Class structure and goals: This class requires carefully reading social theory texts (many of these texts might be dense, we will learn how to read them efficiently) and active participation in class discussion. Students will prepare short presentations, discussion questions, and write a research paper analyzing one policy related to family life (analyzing its politics and its relation to the social structures covered in class).