Displaying Family: Die Kraft des Demonstrativen

The modern family is understood less as kinship-based community of life and fate, but rather relies on shared and actively constructed spaces of experience, conceptualized as “doing family” and “displaying family”. While these approaches focus on intrafamily practices of organisation and self-assurance, this article targets medialised behaviours aimed at attention maximisation. Fathers and mothers have conceptions of what constitutes an intact family, orienting their everyday actions according to ideals and narratives and implementing staging strategies, for example, with the help of social media or within the framework of (family) events like weddings, the first day at school, and children’s birthday parties. Subsequently, the family apparatus is operationalised through its institutionalisation as well as subjectivisation, objectivisations, and practices to theoretically underpin medialised forms of “displaying family”. In doing so, distinction potentials are brought out. The thesis of the essay is: Especially middle-class families, by orienting their family actions towards visibility and appreciation, induce an interfamily competition that reveals unevenly distributed resources and thus increases pressure on families.