Doing Family via Family Scrapbooks

So in October, I temporarily stopped by posts on my dissertation. No, I don’t have my scholarly publications submitted or completed, but since then the American Sociological Association, the professional organization for sociologists, has come out in support of people writing about their research online prior to publishing in a scholarly journal. This means I can go back to writing on the topic without worrying if it will harm future publishing opportunities.

To catch up, my last dissertation post was about gender and scrapbooking.

This week, I will begin talking about doing family through scrapbooking.

Though not all scrapbookers memorialize the family in their scrapbooks, scrapbooks are a site where people can do family. Family photographs play an important role in family life and scrapbooks are a source of a family’s collective memory. A family’s history exists primarily through photographs and through the memories that are attached to those photographs (Noble 2004). Personal histories are actually validated by family albums (Beloff 1985).

Not only do people do family through their scrapbooks, but they transmit “family capital” through their scrapbooks. Scrapbookers are building “family capital,” that is, “build[ing] a habitus (an oversimplified definition of habitus is culture) in her children that is in line with what she [the woman in their study] considers to be a legitimate family type” (Goodsell and Seiter 2010:3). Children gain competence in the family type they are raised in and privileged family types (i.e., white, heterosexual, middle-class), offers advantages to the children now and in the future (Goodsell and Seiter 2010). (Side note: you don’t have to hop around the blogosphere too long to notice a clear pattern in family type among online scrapbookers).

Goodsell and Seiter (2010) argue that women are more likely to scrapbook than men because constructing the family is left to women. Not only do children learn how to do family through the scrapbooks produced [by their mothers], but they also “get to know their mothers (and families) better” (Kelley and Brown 2005).

Scrapbooks are a means of communication for families and I’ll save that topic for next time.

References:

• Beloff, Halla. 1985. Camera Culture. New York: Basil Blackwell.
• Goodsell, Todd L. and Liann Seiter. 2010. “Scrapbooking: Family Capital and the Construction of Family Discourse.” Bringham Young University.
• Kelley, Ryan E. and Charles M. Brown. 2005. “Cutting Up with the Girls: A Sociological Study of a Women’s Scrapbooking Club.” in The Eastern Sociological Society. Washington, D.C.
• Noble, Greg. 2004. “Accumulating Being.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7(2):233-56.

How do you think family is done (or created or performed or taught) through scrapbooks? Join the conversation below.

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Stephanie