Deconstructing family: A case study of legal advocacy scholarship

For activist legal academics, advocacy scholarship is a form of political action. In this view, the stories that the law tells help to shape the fabric of social life. Thus the ability to produce legal stories represents an important political resource, especially if these narratives are embraced by the law. This thesis explores the story of family offered by legal academics in legal periodical literature. The legal literature they produce is designed to employ the transformative power of law in the service of a reformist vision of society.;The advocacy scholarship examined in this thesis subjects family to a deconstructive analysis. Family is presented as an invention of dominant societal interests that seek to regulate (i.e., repress) sexuality. Family's exclusive links to heterosexuality, it is argued, alternatively marginalize and seek to normalize non-conforming sexualities. The solution is to radically transform family, either by including non-conforming sexualities within family or by abandoning the legal category of family altogether, along with the distinction between family and non-family.;Such deconstruction of family encounters substantial public resistance when it is expressed outside of the legal realm in the normal political process. Here legal academic writing proves to be useful to radical reformers of family. Such scholarship represents an opportunity to use the transformative power of law in a way that helps to constitute social life while remaining within the protective field of the law. For radical reformers of family, such strategic considerations demonstrate the value of legal advocacy scholarship as a form of political action.