cover image The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency

The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency

Martha A. Fineman. New Press, $25.95 (388pp) ISBN 978-1-56584-760-6

The director of Cornell University's Feminism and Legal Theory Project, Fineman here imagines legal structures that put caregivers--parents, children of the elderly, spouses, partners or others--at the center of a web of recognitions and subsidies, a framework that works to""reconceptualize and transform our notions about the family and its relationship to the state and other social institutions."" Fineman (The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies) seeks to change how society defines and supports families, traditional or otherwise. Fineman finds that in the U.S.,""collective responsibility...is privatized through the institution of the family,"" and that U.S. domestic policy is oriented toward""the delivery of social goods only in the case of family default."" This set-up has allowed, on the one hand, a kind of deregulation of social goods as delivered by corporations and other sources, and on the other, a relative lack of support for many kinds of caregiving relationships, including same-sex households and partnerships. Fineman argues that the U.S. must extend the shield of privacy, in its legal sense, around such caregiving relationships, and support all of them with a guaranteed set of rights and subsidies. Putting caregiving, rather than sexual affiliation, at the center of policy, would reflect a recognition that""merely being financially generous with our own mothers or... wives will not suffice to satisfy the share of societal debt we generally owe all caretakers."" While non-scholars should be able to follow Fineman's use of jargon and legal precedents, her book is largely theoretical, and lacks the case studies, anecdotes and reportage that would make her ideas more immediate to lay readers. Anyone who calls for""the abolition of marriage as a legal category,"" as Fineman has done previously and does again here, is bound to raise hackles, but Fineman makes an interesting case.