Other mothers

Other mothers

Ryan Schram

ANTH 2654: Forms of Families

22 October 2015

Available at: http://anthro.rschram.org/2654/12

Lecture outline

• Back To The Future Day is 21 October 2015
  • Why don't we have flying cars?
• Essay topics: finding contradictions in culture
• Change as a dialectic
  • Thesis, antithesis, synthesis
  • It's kind of like being pregnant. A woman is a mother when she is recognized by her child.
• Surrogacy as synthesis
  • Wombs for rent
  • New kinds of agency
• The limits of performativity
  • 'Kinship is part of who you are' versus 'Kinship comes from what you do.'
  • Are these different cultural constructs, or two sides of the same coin?
  • You can performatively enact kinship, but you can't do it alone.