The Multiple Meanings of Familialism

The notion that families should care for their own seems straightforward in its meaning. I suggest that it may not be. Building on the argument advanced in Sandra Levitsky's Caring for Our Own, and especially its focus on the discursive shaping of rights consciousness, I draw attention to three discourses that may be responsible for how the caregivers quoted in the book understand family responsibility. One is an American discourse about the limits of government; one is a therapeutic discourse that is enacted in the support groups from which the book's respondents mainly come; and one is a nativist discourse that pits the American-born against newcomers. I argue that these discourses inflect the meaning of family responsibility in distinctive ways.