Negating the family: Ritual and Dionysus in modernist utopia

Abstract

Formations such as gangs stand in a complex relationship to other, more conventional or socially normative groupings and collectives, such as the family. This article probes the gang’s function as a kind of alternative family and as a lens through which to view the relationship between family and non-family groupings. The tension between family and non-family is examined at the intersection between utopian order and Dionysian disorder as the gang incorporates elements of both. Drawing primarily on the utopian/dystopian fantasy of the German fin-de-siècle author Frank Wedekind, with reference also to other texts of the period (Thomas Mann, Alfred Kubin), and to 21st century cinematic reworkings of Wedekind (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, John Irvin), the article studies the Dionysian/utopian interface through the gang while conversely thinking the gang as a kind of Dionysian utopia, a in which family structures are undone in the name of an alternative erotic collective.