Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture [Paperback]

Kelly Oliver (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0415913667 | ISBN-13: 978-0415913669 | Publication Date: April 27, 1997 | Edition: 1

Family Values shows how the various contradictions at the heart of Western conceptions of maternity and paternity problematize our relationships with ourselves and with others. Using philosophical texts, psychoanalytic theory, studies in biology and popular culture, Kelly Oliver challenges our traditional concepts of maternity which are associated with nature, and our conceptions of paternity which are embedded in culture.

Oliver's intervention calls into question the traditional image of the oppositional relationship between nature and culture, maternal and paternal. Family Values also undercuts recent returns to the rhetoric of a "battle between the sexes" by analyzing the conceptual basis of these descriptions in biological research and the presuppositions of such suggestions in philosophy and psychoanalysis. By developing a reconception of maternity and paternity, Family Values offers hope for peace in the battle of the sexes.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Kelly Oliver s Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Womanizing Nieztsche: Philosophy's Relation to the Feminine (Routledge, 1995) and Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-bind, and editor of Ethics Politics and Difference in Kristeva's Writings (Routledge, 1994).

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (April 27, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415913667
• ISBN-13: 978-0415913669
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,470,827 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kelly Oliver was born on July 28, 1958 in Spokane Washington. She graduated from Gonzaga University with honors in 1979 with a double major in philosophy and communications. She earned her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in philosophy in 1987. She has held teaching positions at various Universities, including George Washington University, University of Texas at Austin, and Stony Brook University. Currently, she is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

She has published 19 books on topics ranging from family, love, war, and violence to affirmative action, Hollywood films, and animal rights.