This article attempts to contribute to the re-centring of the family in cultural debates. It explores ways in which nation and race are appropriated to fix ideas about white familial identities today. A white, nuclear version of familialism continues to be naturalized and privileged within representations of the family in the British popular media. Three distinctive versions of the family are identified: an ‘ideal’ nuclear version, a ‘dysfunctional’ family, and a ‘hybrid’ transformative category. Familial meanings are used to condemn defective families and the perverse activities of its individual members. Yet they are also drawn on to describe alternative, trans-nuclear, transformative relationships. Despite tensions between individualism and familialism and important attempts to re-invent the family along democratic lines, the white nuclear family remains a powerful ideological device for naturalizing hierarchies of race, class, gender and sexuality and therefore has implications for ongoing debates about identity politics.
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