Notes on The Neutered Mother, or Toward a Queer Socialist Matriarchy

This tribute to Martha Fineman focuses on a key work that, to me, occupies one of the highest points in the intellectual arc of her career, namely her pathbreaking 1995 book, The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies. Below, I read it from the perspective of queer theory. I first consider its unqualified demand for the abolition of marriage, and then turn to its commitment to refocusing family law on the figure of the Mother¿a predecessor of the vulnerable subject, a theoretical construct that has come to dominate Fineman¿s more recent work.