Título en español.

Abstract

This essay constitutes a challenge to rethink the category of the family. How should we continue to assume this category of analysis? As a natural category? As a reproductive structure of solid and defined relations or as a metaphor of the fluidity characteristic of modern times and its dramatic transformations at the domestic ambit? The author‘s proposal is to question the discursive suppositions related to the traditional meanings of the family which leave out the diversity, heterogeneity and complexity of subjectivity and traditional family constructions in contemporary times. She argues that discourses and structural changes have produced new arrangements in relationships and subjectivity while academicians and professionals continue to relate their analysis to life styles and family imaginaries that no longer exist. Assuming that modern families are complex, this essay suggests that family should be considered as a complex texture whose actions and interactions constitute challenges that should lead to new theoretical referents of a disorganized world, as the fluid result of a recursive process that may lead to the production of a theory of the world as it really is.