On the Family As a Collective Subjectivity

The family functions as a system, perpetuating itself through space and time. The family imposes prohibitions and proposes collective ideals, models, values, and norms. Family standards build appropriate ways of being and behaving, which legitimize different forms of stratification by ordering everyday experiences. In this sense, the family is an important source in the intergenerational reproduction of social inequalities.
However, the family is not an indiscriminate totality that assumes acquired routines and family recipes as a joint project between its members. Ritualized practices can also be conflictive between generations. Children and young people negotiate these inherited ways of being and extend the sociocultural constructions of inequality adding meanings, experiences, and subversive performances. Thus, the paper addresses what is a collective subjectivity and what brings the introduction of this concept for understanding processes of reproduction of social classes and other dimensions of inequality through everyday family life.