Fragile kinships: Family ideologies and child welfare in Japan

In contemporary Japan, exclusion from "normal" family forms often results in exclusion from caregiving relationships that last over time. This dissertation argues that the uneven distribution of care throughout the Japanese population is itself a category of difference, similar to other markers like class or citizenship, which maps onto durable forms of social inequality. The fact that caregiving is so often tied to a normalized family space becomes a social justice problem when that family space is lacking, appearing always as an ever-present normative absence. As a category of difference, this unevenness of care is also a hinge between shifting categories of "normal" and "abnormal" social relationships. This dissertation elaborates the ways in which inhabiting something called a normal family or a normal subject position is a heterodox process rather than a state of being: one appears as normal in a moment of doing, but one may as quickly be non-normal in a different moment, in a different setting.;While "the Japanese family" often emerges discursively as an object predetermined by affinal ties and descent, people touched by the child welfare system—those who grew up in state care, adoptive or foster parents, bureaucrats in charge of child welfare placements—are highly aware of the ways in which kinship ties are both contingent and emerge over time. While "traditional" Japanese cultural forms, like the extended family, may be represented as normatively inert, they are in fact always moving targets. In contrast to discourses that frame "the Japanese family" as a predetermined object, my ethnographic material illustrates the ways in which kinship emerges in embodied daily practice, through engagement with material forms that themselves index histories of care, and within bureaucratic and legal regimes that frame and enact ideologies surrounding kinship. In this dissertation's title, "fragile kinships" points to the ways in which kinship is constantly in flux, both created and transformed but also attenuated and fractured. The title also expresses the fragility of the articulation between family ideologies and the objective of providing for the wellbeing of state wards.