Contemporary scientific knowledge informs us that genetic traits are transmitted by reproduction and birth, natural processes that form the building blocks of family and kinship in American society. Whereas science and biomedicine regard genetic transmission as a universal and natural biological process that takes place in all living things, conceptualisations of family and kinship are culturally produced. In fact, as long as we remain wrapped in our cultural mantles, we may fail to see that our most profound beliefs and practices, which we take for granted as natural, including those of family arid kin, are historically and culturally created. Kinship...

Although there is a great diversity of scholarly opinion as to the nature of family and kinship, when we focus solely on American society we become more certain about their meanings and significance, which go back to at least the Middle Ages.¹ In this chapter I briefly provide a broad overview of American ideas and practices concerning family and kin from their origins to the present in order to locate our contemporary conceptualizations within a historical context. I conclude the chapter with a consideration of the new reproductive technologies and their impact on contemporary notions of family and kinship.

Contemporary...

The historically developed traditional definition of family and kinship has culminated in the new genetics, a relatively recent phenomenon in Western scientific thought. Conceptualizations have changed over time, pointing to the historically contingent nature of what is accepted as reality and truth. Historically, it was held that the family and kin bestowed on their offspring economic and social standing, as well as such personal characteristics as physical traits, character, and health. There was a prevailing notion that character resided in the blood.¹ But while, generally speaking, people may no longer expect to inherit wealth, social characteristics, and even social position...

My focus in the first three chapters was on historical and contemporary issues concerning kinship and concepts of heredity. In this chapter we see the ways in which historically developed kinship relations and medically conceptualized genetic inheritance have variously reproduced themselves in seven healthy women who originate from families with breast, ovarian, or colon cancer; in the next chapter we will meet fifteen women who have experienced breast cancer. These narratives reveal the conflicts resulting from different interpretations of the disease’s etiology — the ways in which the women relate to family and kin and manage their illness in light of...

In this chapter I turn to the women who became afflicted with breast cancer; they have been patients already. As among the healthy women, the ideology of genetic inheritance is confirmed experientially for the patients who believed they had suffered from cancer because other members in the family had had it, a recurring theme in all the women’s narratives. How else could they explain the disease? Those who entertain an alternative etiological explanation of their affliction must exist with a conflict. Almost all, therefore, adhere to the prevailing genetic inheritance ideology by employing the same evidence as their physicians to...

In the last chapter we saw how women with a family medical history of cancer were variously guided by the ideology of genetic inheritance of disease. The majority of patients we met accepted notions about genetic inheritance while also entertaining alternative explanations of the disease. Of course, some of the women may have relegated alternative interpretations to occasional musings; only a few rejected, if incompletely, the belief that their affliction was produced by genetic inheritance. When patients act, informed by the ideology of genetic inheritance of disease, they perceive their actions as beneficial to themselves and their families. Or, as...

In the previous three chapters, individuals with family histories of cancer, breast cancer patients, and adoptees illuminated the ways in which the concept of genetic inheritance variously influences day-to-day experience. In this chapter I propose that one important consequence of contemporary genetic conceptualizations has been the medicalization of family and kinship, which came into bold relief in the preceding three chapters. I begin by exploring the notion of medicalization and its ramifications for contemporary understandings of kinship and family.

The concept of medicalization is not a twentieth-century phenomenon, of course. Promoted by a growing secularization, in the eighteenth and nineteenth...

In the previous chapter I explored the concept of medicalization. I argued that kinship became medicalized as a result of the prominence of molecular biology and genetics associated with inheritance of disease. In this chapter I examine some consequences of the ideology of genetic inheritance on both macro and micro levels of analysis. Paradoxically, the regnant ideology of genetic inheritance produces differing consequences on these two levels of experience. On the level of the broader society, the ideology of genetic inheritance forebodes a return to the era of eugenics. On the level of the individual, the medicalization of kinship may,...

My goal in this book has been to deepen our understanding of the way in which biomedical ideologies are played out in people’s day-to-day experiences. Specifically, my focus has been on the ideology of genetic inheritance and the ways in which it shapes current understandings of family and kinship in contemporary American society and influences people’s notions of normality and abnormality, agency and memory, while concurrently enmeshing them in numerous paradoxes. We saw that family and kinship relations were, until recently, conceived in terms of blood ties. Within the past several decades, however, the meaning and practices of family and...