Introducing 

Prezi AI.

Your new presentation assistant.

Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.

Loading…
Transcript

The Family

Values agenda:

  • Is constituted by, and reconstitutes, colonial ideologies of race, gender, sex difference

  • Is deeply connected with and serves neoliberal interests, hegemonic ideology of "growth" & "development"

Mont Pelerin Society

(est 1947)

Rockford Institut

1976, Rockford, Ill.

Human Rights Gone Awry: Myths and Facts Regarding Internatinoal Human Rights Affecting Women and Children

World Congress of Families, the Heritage Foundation & the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society

Allan Carlson

& John Howard

Edwin Feulner- member and former president of MPS & current treasurer

1973, Washington D.C.

Sharon Slater, President of Family Watch International

Nigerian Bar Association Conference, 2011.

Lagos, Nigeria

1996-7, Rockford, Ill.

Productive economies, growth

(Re)productive sex

Sexual rights as dangerous to economic growth

A "backstage" neoliberal ideology, which demands and requires the availability of productive bodies directs the "front stage" operation and diseemination of Family Values

"sexual difference and the gender binary became basic tenets of the ideology of racial hierarchy and white supremacy during processes of nation formation in the West" (Kitch 2009)

The WCF was founded as a project of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society in 1997 by Allan Carlson and John Howard. The Howard Center describes itsef as a "center for research on the natural family"

The WCF describes itself as:

"an internatinoal network of pro-family organizations, scholars, leaders and people of goodwill from more than 80 countries that seek to restore the natural family as the fundamental social unit and the "seedbed" of civil society"

WCF is also supported by the Heritage Foundation which has been considered to be one of the most influential conservative research organizations in the US since the Reagan presidency

The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973 by Edwin Feulner who was the former president and current treasurer of the Mont Pelerin Society

Heteropatriarchy - "the social power structure that creates and maintains the heterosexist binary of masculinity and femininity and the associated expectations (gender performances) determined to biological sex" (Elder 2003)

"The world homosexual itself seemed to conjure up some anxieties about miscegenation, as the "barbarously hybrid word" was a mix of Latin and Greek, even referring to "shades of gender" and "sexual half-breeds" (Jackson 2011)

The Mont Pelerin Society

Aims:

Family Values and Neoliberal organising

Formed in 1947 under the leadership of Albert Hunold and Friedrich August von Hayek in order to strategize against what Hayek described as the threat posed to elite control and capitalism due to the rise of socialism post-WWII

Participants in the first meeting in Geneva included neoliberal intellectuals in the US and Europe

Discussions aimed to reinvigorate liberalism - creation of term "neoliberalism"

Developed strategy involving the establishment of anti-socialist centers of knowledge that would be capable of producing and disseminating neoliberal knowledge (the advocacy think tank) in any subject area

Plehwe and Walpen (2006:31)

1. To show how neoliberal ideology materially supports, and is connected to, Family Values organizations and understand how FV is constituted by, and reconstitutes, western hegemony

Founders of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society and the World Congress of Families, Carlson and Howard had previously established the neoliberal think tank - the Rockford Institute - in 1976.

Carlson and Howard also were members of the Mont Pelerin Society

Heritage Foundation founder, Edwin Feulner, is a former president of the MPS and its current treasurer

Mignolo's (2009) Colonial Matrix of Power

2. To show why the Family Values must be taken seriously as a threat to social justice along multiple axes of difference

&

Neoliberalism - implemented in 1980s by Thatcher & Reagan as a "radical confrontation" to state-regulated economics of Soviet Union

Globalisation - emerged as the "rhetorical term used to describe imperial designs in the remaking of global coloniality"

Western hegemony is "held together by two pillars of enunciation: the racial and patriarchal foundation of knowledge without which the colonial matrix of power would not have been possible to be established"

(120)

Critical Discourse Analysis in context of globalisation, neoliberal hegemony

Discourse is a key site for the analysis of ideology in the context of globalisation (Fairclough)

Colonial Ideologies of Difference

Family Values agenda in Africa & "developing world"

Neoliberal control over knowledge occurs in networks of intellectuals and think tanks, constituting key sites in the analysis of agents and structures of neoliberal globalisation and globalisation of neoliberalism (Plehwe & Walpen 2006: 33)

Racial difference & white supremacy

Gender difference & white male superiority

Superiority of western civilization, liberalism & Christianity

The US Christian Right and Family Values

Heteropatriarchy

Heteronormativity

Neoliberalism

The US Christian Right has been promoting Family Values internationally since the 1980s

-Family Values abroad has material and conceptual links with the western neoliberal project

-Family Values promoted through international government agencies (UN, IMF, World Bank)

Family Values largely driven by conservative intellectuals and organisations subscribing to, and promoting, Christian values in US and international politics

Designing and advocating social policy which upholds:

  • The superiority of families composed of heterosexual, married couples and their biological children
  • Conviction that families that don’t conform to this standard are a moral and social threat (Stacey 1994).
  • Belief that the human rights of women (to control their own fertility) and of lesbians and gays to equality are forms of neocolonial, “progressive” intervention (Herman and Buss 2003).

"Family Values" in Africa and the racist heteropatriarchy of neoliberalism

Haley McEwen, Wits Centre for Diversity Studies

Critical Philosophies of Race: US - SA Comparative Perspectives

Learn more about creating dynamic, engaging presentations with Prezi