Rearticulating the Aunt: Feminist Alternatives

of Family, Care, and Kinship in Popular

Performances of Aunting
Patty Sotirin
Michigan Technological University

Laura L. Ellingson
Santa Clara University

The aunt in contemporary Anglo-American culture is a deserving though

oft-overlooked cultural identity for critical feminist analysis. This article
examines selected performances of aunting in contemporary U.S. popu-
lar culture to illustrate how the cultural work of aunting articulates both
dominant and transgressive constructions of family, care, kinship, and
feminine agency. The quiet transgressions of popular aunt figures offer
potent sites for progressive feminist rearticulations of family life and
kinship relations.

Keywords: aunt; articulation; feminist analysis; popular culture; family; kinship

The aunt is a familiar figure in personal and popular familial narratives. Yet
this familiarity admits considerable performative variation. Being an aunt may
involve daily caretaking or sporadic visits, intimate connections or estrangement,
benevolence or neglect (Ellingson & Sotirin, 2006; Sotirin & Ellingson, 2005).
An aunt may be like a friend or a stranger, like a mentor or an intimidator. An
aunt may be kin through blood or marriage or by being designated as an honorary
relative. Across these variations, the aunt remains a female gendered role, a fea-
ture that, as we will show, infuses but never wholly determines the cultural work
of aunting.
We contend that the aunt as a gendered cultural identity and aunting as a set of
feminine-associated relational practices offer critical opportunities for feminist
reimaginings of family, care, kinship, and feminine agency. Yet aunts and aunting
have been overlooked as sites of feminist cultural analysis. In contrast, several cele-
brations of the cultural, familial, and personal significance of aunts have appeared

Authors’ Note: The first author wishes to acknowledge the supportive feedback of colleagues at Michigan
Technological University: Dr. Heidi Bostic, Dr. Ann Brady, the Gender Reading Group, and Dr. Jennifer
Daryl Slack. An early version of this article was presented by both authors at the 2004 National
Communication Association Conference in Chicago.
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Volume 7 Number 4, 2007 442-459
DOI: 10.1177/1532708607304538
© 2007 Sage Publications

442
 Sotirin, Ellingson • Rearticulating the Aunt 443

in recent trade publications (Cunningham, 1997; Sturgis, 2004; Traeder & Bennett,
1998). In one popular tribute, Aunties: Our Older, Cooler, Wiser Friends, Traeder and
Bennett (1998) assert that aunts are unheralded cultural resources whose contributions
to child rearing, family support, self-development, relational knowledge, and kinship
are invaluable. In Aunties: Thirty-Five Writers Celebrate Their Other Mother, Sturgis
(2004) depicts aunts as nurturing, independent, eccentric, exemplary, and strong.
Even as we concur with these claims for the significance of aunting, we cau-
tion that such popular accolades too often discipline the cultural work of aunting
by drawing facile analogies between the aunt and the cultural ideal of the mother
(“my aunt is like a mother to me”) and linking aunting to the nuclear family and
patriarchal kinship. We offer a critical analysis of these associations and the ways
they undermine the progressive potential of aunts and aunting as important fem-
inist resources for challenging and changing conventional understandings and
practices of family, care, and kinship.
Our analysis focuses on aunts in mainstream popular culture venues because
these figures imaginatively “embody” the aunt in stereotypic, readily recognizable,
and broadly familiar performances that offer a visible and accessible focus for fem-
inist critique. We do not intend to survey or typify these figures but to trace the
configurations of meanings and practices that are enacted in and make sense of
particular aunt figures and that render aunting both culturally complicit with and
a site of transgression against dominant traditions and power relations. In other
words, we explore the sociocultural articulation of the aunt and aunting practices,
that is, the juncture of relations and forces that render any particular aunt per-
formance both familiar and open to feminist rearticulations.
We begin with a brief explanation of articulation as a methodological perspec-
tive and then turn to four well-known aunt figures drawn from contemporary,
mainstream, Anglo-American popular culture. We distinguish conservative from
transgressive elements in these popular performances of aunting to show how the
aunt might be rearticulated as a rallying point for progressive feminist conceptions
of family, relationality, and feminine agency.

Rearticulating the Aunt

Articulation as a methodological perspective attends to the conjunction of dis-

cursive and material forces within a particular field of relations through which iden-
tities such as aunt and practices such as aunting come to be understood, enacted,
challenged, and changed. Such conjunctions are structured by sociohistorical rela-
tions of power, privileging some articulations over others (Hall, 1986, pp. 53-54).
Dominant articulations are those that affect a historically tenacious context of pos-
sibilities, as when the analogy of the aunt as mother links the identity of the aunt
to a culturally celebrated ideal of the mother so that aunting becomes meaningful
within and accountable to the meanings and practices of this ideal.
444 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • November 2007

The task is to map the connections that organize the intelligibility and agency of
any particular identity, experience, or practice. As articulations, popular aunt figures
are not merely entertaining representations; rather, these figures are nodal points in
a complex of contingent but persistent and often uneasy connections that make up
the aunt as a familiar cultural identity and aunting as a form of feminine agency.
For example, aunts who appear as central characters in family narratives are often
cast in a maternal caretaking role: Auntie Em in the classic film The Wizard of Oz,
the title character in the film Auntie Mame, Aunt Bee in the classic television series
The Andy Griffith Show, and, more recently, Aunt Helen in the film Raising Helen.
The easy conflation of aunting and mothering in these popular enactments articu-
lates the pernicious assumption about women’s inherent maternal capacities and
familial responsibilities. The analogy of aunting as a kind of mothering associates
the aunt with other dominant identities and practices as well: the nuclear family,
stereotypic femininity, and self-sacrificing maternality. However, when our experi-
ences with and as aunts are uncritically understood in these terms, the potential of
aunting as an alternative relational dynamic is rendered both difficult to imagine
and politically compromised.
This brings us to the task of rearticulation. As Slack and Wise (2005) point
out, articulation “draws attention to the contingent relations among practices,
representations, and experiences that make up the world” (p. 2). It is this contin-
gent aspect of articulations that offers political and strategic potential for feminist
critique because any particular conjunction of relations can always be rearticu-
lated. We find in the performance of each aunt figure evidence of quiet trans-
gressions that depart from and unsettle culturally dominant articulations. By
quiet, we mean that these are not openly defiant or militant features of the aunt-
ing performance but rather moments of uneasiness, ambivalence, difference,
deviance, or even resilience that link aunting to historical and political struggles
over family relations and feminine roles. In calling attention to such linkages, we
challenge the articulation of particular popular aunt figures to conservative mod-
els of family, maternality, and kinship and rearticulate each of them to feminist
change efforts variously promoting inclusive family models and practices, an eco-
nomic revaluing of care, relational autonomy, feminine wisdom and sensuality,
and racial justice.

Aunt Bee: Uneasiness in the Selfless, Loving Maternal Aunt

The aunt as maternal caretaker with primary responsibility for her nieces and
nephews is a familiar figure on the popular culture scene. This figure links aunt-
ing explicitly to the (White, middle-class, historically recent; cf. Glenn, 1994)
cultural ideal of the mother as the selfless and loving center of the family, the icon
of psychosocial nurture and care in the context of intimate dependencies and
domestic demands. Our example is the popular figure of Aunt Bee on the classic
sitcom The Andy Griffith Show (Leonard, Thomas, & Flicker, 1960-1968).
 Sotirin, Ellingson • Rearticulating the Aunt 445

The Andy Griffith series debuted in 1960 and aired for eight seasons, making it
one of the most popular family sitcoms of the 1960s.1 Since then, the show’s popular-
ity in reruns and on the Internet (cf. Clark, n.d.; Clark & Beck, 2000; Robinson &
Fernandes, 2004) has cast it as part of what Kompare (2004) calls our American
television heritage, the cultural production or reproduction of shared memories,
histories, and meanings that constitute what is commonly taken to be the American
experience, in this case, the nostalgia for small-town, “traditional” family life cen-
tered around the nuclear family and anchored in selfless maternal care.
The links among the aunt as mother, the nuclear family, and cultural yearning
for American small-town life are starkly evident across the episodes of The Andy
Griffith Show that centrally feature Aunt Bee (about 55 out of 249 original
shows). Aunt Bee mothers both her nephew, widower and Sheriff Andy Taylor,
and his son, Opie, in the absence of a wife and mother. Given that the show casts
her as the maternal center of the Taylor family, she invites nostalgia for the per-
sonal fulfillment of the nuclear family, its nurture, resilience, and strength, offer-
ing cultural reassurance that the bosom of the family is larger than the biological
mother (a reassurance physically embodied in the plump, matronly dowdiness of
actress Frances Bavier).
This reassuring image of the patriarchal nuclear family is enhanced by the sit-
com’s depiction of Mayberry as a small, unsullied, Southern town where family
remains at the center of social and community life, an image deeply rooted in pop-
ular imagination. As the mother figure in this scenario, Aunt Bee assuages socio-
cultural anxieties over loss, absence, and instability—of the mother, of the home,
of community, and of intimacy. The aunt as mother is in the home, the home is
in the heart of America, and all is well.
Yet Aunt Bee transgresses the assurances of this depiction of traditional
American family life. First, her presence unsettles the insularity and stability of
the nuclear family. By standing in for the absent mother, Aunt Bee completes and
yet marks an absence in the familial triangle, creating a dynamic imbalance that
unsettles even as it affirms the psychosocial value of the mother and the nuclear
family. In addition, Aunt Bee belies the cultural promise of feminine fulfillment
in marriage, home, and family. Several episodes revolve around Aunt Bee’s need
to be needed, her ongoing insecurity about her place in Andy’s home and affec-
tions, and the patriarchal relation between Andy as provider and protector and
Aunt Bee as domestic and dependent.2
We are not implying that Aunt Bee is secretly a subversive figure; certainly, this
character is quite effectively recuperated into dominant narratives of feminine
dependency, masculine agency, patriarchal domesticity, and heteronormativity.
Yet even as Aunt Bee appears to deny that the personal is political, that domes-
ticity is oppressive, and that maternality is an ambivalent experience, her ongoing
unease calls attention to the emotional costs of the maternal ideal and the gen-
dered inequities of caretaking and caregiving that continue, despite progressive
efforts during the past several decades, to structure familial relations. It is her
446 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • November 2007

transgressive uneasiness that invites our rearticulation of aunting to feminist

visions of economic restructuring and families of choice.
For example, Aunt Bee’s “spinster aunt” arrangement with her nephew—
exchanging care for (White, middle-class) economic and affective security—casts
her as a “prisoner of love,” to use feminist economist Nancy Folbre’s (2001) phrase,
whose affective investment in caring labor binds her to the domestic sphere and
essentializes her contributions. The maternal aunt, like other care providers who
take on affective commitments along with their caretaking responsibilities, is dis-
advantaged in both intimate and economic relations. Loving care is both highly
prized and poorly compensated. Against the cultural ideal of self-sacrificing loving
care, Aunt Bee’s uneasiness and vulnerability resonate to the egregious exploitation
of caring labor in contemporary U.S. society. It is time, Folbre warns, to redistrib-
ute the responsibilities for care more equally across stratifications of gender, class,
and race and to encourage familial relations and public policies that provide gen-
erous economic and social rewards for quality care. Rearticulating Aunt Bee’s spin-
ster bargain to a feminist critique of the economics of care casts Bee as a political
rallying point for such a revaluation of caring labor.
In addition, although the Taylor family appears quite conventional—even a
paragon of natural (heterosexual, middle-class, Christian) family values—it is not.3
Aunt Bee and Andy as parenting partners fulfill neither the procreative warrant of
the normative nuclear family nor the sexual monogamy required in conservative,
Christian family mandates. This exclusionary and restrictive vision of the family
enjoys both mythic status and political currency in American cultural politics
(Coontz, 1992; Frank, 2004). As exemplified in the conservative Christian “Doctrine
for Natural Families” advanced by the World Congress of Families (2005), the het-
erosexual marriage with (biological) children is the nuclear core of the family and
the primal and sovereign political and economic basis of American life, dedicated
to procreation, the accumulation of private property, autonomous parental con-
trol, and a gendered division of roles and capacities (women as first and foremost
“wives, homemakers, and mothers” and men as “husbands, homebuilders, and
fathers”). The doctrine demands that the natural, nuclear family be the structuring
principle of kinship and community relations and national economic and political
relations and policies.
Counter to this doctrinal view of the nuclear family, the Taylors enact an asex-
ual, nonprocreative model of family life based in extended kin relations and affec-
tive commitments of choice rather than in institutionalized sexual and marital
relations. In the course of the series, Aunt Bee dates a number of eligible men,
whereas Andy has a steady girlfriend. These dating relationships transgress the emo-
tional self-sufficiency and sexual monogamy of the natural family ideal and in effect
model a more communal and sexually open family arrangement, one the Taylors
seem to prefer. In one episode, “Wedding Bells for Aunt Bee” (Bullock & Sweeney,
1962), Bee invents a fiancée so that Andy will feel free to marry. Instead, he fore-
goes the opportunity to enter into a potentially procreative marriage in favor of the
alternative family arrangement and mutual commitments he shares with Bee.
 Sotirin, Ellingson • Rearticulating the Aunt 447

In her cogent argument for the normalization of gay and lesbian families,
Stacey (1999) warns against the intolerance, prejudice, and disrespect of conser-
vative mandates and public policies that denigrate and disadvantage unconven-
tional family arrangements and relationships because such repressive models of
family life diminish the creativity and diversity of social life overall (p. 398). The
quiet transgressions of Aunt Bee’s partnership with Andy articulate to feminist
calls for a more self-reflexive, inclusive, nonessentialized, and progressive under-
standing of family and social life (Coontz, 1999), an understanding that pro-
motes diverse, responsive, and creative models of kin and care. In this sense, the
maternal aunt serves as a rallying point for recognizing and reclaiming non-
nuclear familial relationships, extended kin care arrangements, and same-sex and
nonprocreative parenting partnerships as valid social forms.

Malevolent Aunting: Recontextualizing Care,

Autonomy, and Home

The psychocultural anxieties that aunting as mothering both inspires and

assauges are given exaggerated expression in the analogy of the malevolent aunt.
These are custodial aunts who fulfill their responsibilities for taking care of their
nieces and/or nephews in ways that are negligent, harmful, or exploitive. For
example, in the wildly successful children’s fantasy by J. K. Rowling (1998)
about apprentice wizard Harry Potter, Harry, the protagonist, lives with a malev-
olent custodial aunt. In all the books in this popular series, Aunt Petunia suffers
Harry’s presence in her home with resentment, cruelty, and grudging provision.
Likewise, in James and the Giant Peach, an award-winning children’s book (Dahl,
1961) and an animated movie version with the same title (Burton, Di Novi, &
Selick, 1996), Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker make their orphaned nephew
James’ life miserable until he finally escapes them by rolling away inside a giant
peach. In both depictions, the custodial aunt is not loving and selflessly devoted
but disdainful and mean.
The malevolent aunt treats her nephews and nieces with a personalized malev-
olence that transgresses deeply entrenched Western norms of child care, nurture,
and family relations as loving and benevolent. As custodial caretakers, malevolent
aunts such as Aunt Petunia, Aunt Spiker, and Aunt Sponge affirm by perverting
the cultural value and romance of maternal care. These figures embody the mon-
strous perversion of the aberrant mother, “the most dreaded of all the monstrous-
feminine symbols” because she perverts “maternal instincts [that] are supposed to
be innate” (MacDonald, 1995, p. 152). In the link between aunting and mother-
ing, the malevolence of the aunt is cast as both immoral and unnatural, a perver-
sion of the feminine mothering instinct. And yet the malevolent aunt’s malicious
ill treatment of her nieces and nephews transgresses any simple dichotomy between
the good and the monstrous mother. Unlike Aunt Bee, these aunts do not mother
their nephews but enact aunting as personalized malevolence, unsettling the essen-
tialism that grounds the analogy of aunting as mothering.
448 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • November 2007

Rearticulated to feminist perspectives on care and autonomy, malevolent aunt-

ing demonstrates a personalized relational ethic that facilitates relational auton-
omy and illustrates the potential of aunting as an alternative to rather than a
substitute for mothering. The personalized malevolence of these aunt figures real-
izes a form of relational intimacy that refuses to objectify or instrumentalize the
other. To paraphrase Hardwig’s (1989) characterization, intimate relations may be
realized in ways that deny the singularity of the other. That is, when I love you
because you are my niece or nephew, I reduce the singularity of you to the qual-
ities of the aunt–niece or aunt–nephew relation. In contrast, Harry’s Aunt Petunia
despises Harry because he is Harry, not because he is her nephew or has been left
on her doorstep. Although we prefer benevolence, malevolence also can be the
basis for a personalized intimacy.
In the context of such personalized malevolence, both Harry and James exer-
cise the introspective, imaginative, and volitional skills that realize self-definition
and autonomous action (Meyers, 2000, p. 166). Harry Potter comes to reflect on
and eventually to act on the differences between his magical life at Hogwarts, a
resident school for witchcraft and wizardry, and the injustices he suffers in his
aunt’s home. Likewise, James’ aunts, through their exploitation and negligence,
provoke his imaginative travels via the magic peach. We do not claim that popu-
lar narratives cast malevolent aunts as intentionally nurturing autonomy in their
nephews or nieces. On the contrary, this form of maternal aunting transgresses
cultural expectations that caretakers will protect children from danger and attend
to their needs with care and affection. Nonetheless, these transgressions enable
the competencies that realize autonomous action.
Autonomy, in Freidman’s (2000) words, “involves choosing and living accord-
ing to standards or values that are, in some plausible sense, one’s ‘own’” (p. 37).
Against the masculinist, rational individualism that equates autonomous action
with the unreflective goals of self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and the protection of
rational self-interests (Code, 1991), feminist reconceptualizations of autonomy
begin with the insight that the capacities and competencies of autonomy are not
developed in isolation and through self-transparency but in the context of rela-
tional commitments and identifications and are exercised in social contexts.
Relational autonomy entails exercising the skills of introspection, imagination,
and volition in the context of multiple relationships and shared commitments
among particularized others (Friedman, 2000, p. 44). The potency of aunting as
a context for relational autonomy is dramatically illustrated in the fifth volume of
the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling, 2003),
when we learn that Harry’s autonomy depends on his aunt’s protection. Their
aunt–nephew relationship is itself the context for this dynamic of autonomy and
dependence.
When intimate relationships are abusive, it is particularly critical that
oppressed parties are able to reflect on the nature of their abuse and reject the
commitments that bound them to their oppressors in the context of alternative
relationships and commitments. Just so, Harry Potter is able to distance himself
 Sotirin, Ellingson • Rearticulating the Aunt 449

from and reject the cruelty, hypocrisy, and resentment of his aunt’s family in the
context of his allegiance to his dead parents and to a magical community, whereas
James recognizes and escapes the oppressive avarice and self-aggrandizement of
his aunts first through reveries about the world beyond their house on the hill and
then by joining an interdependent community of personified insects living in the
giant peach.
It would take considerable speculation to suggest how each of these nephews
was able to distance himself from his aunt’s vicious psychological and physical
abuse to critically reflect on his investments in the aunting relationship or the
emotional and cultural resources each drew on to engage with an alternative
moral perspective. Suffice it to say, the malevolent aunting relationship itself sets
the context for the development and exercise of these skills and the emergence of
alternative, communally based identifications that enable Harry and James to real-
ize adventure, freedom, and self-determination. The lesson is that we cannot
afford to excuse any relationships—including mothering, familial, and intimate
relationships—from critical reflection by all parties involved. The malevolent
maternal aunt articulates a model of relational autonomy vigilant against the
potential for abuse and oppression inherent in the power differentials of conven-
tional family life.
Another ethically promising transgression of the malevolent aunt is her per-
version of the “safe haven” conception of home life. For Harry Potter and James,
home with auntie is neither physically nor emotionally a safe place. The central-
ity of mother to home life, the mother as home, is perverted; what is most famil-
iar and concrete, the places, relations, and experiences that shape childhood, are
rendered both suspect and dangerous in depictions of the aunt as malevolent care-
taker. This transgression resonates to a self-reflective and critical feminist per-
spective on the homogenizing norms of home life, those taken-for-granted aspects
that render home a place of comfort and safety.
As feminist scholars such as Rich (1977), Martin and Mohanty (1986), Pratt
(1988), and Coontz (1992) have eloquently acknowledged, the assurances of
“home” often obscure historical, material conditions of oppression, suppression,
and privilege by ignoring concrete differences and denying relations of domination
and exclusion. For example, White suburban comfort is built on taken-for-granted
geographic, racial, and class distinctions and exclusions. In contrast, malevolent
aunting makes a visible display of “the exclusions and repressions which support
the seeming homogeneity, stability, and self-evidence” (Martin & Mohanty, 1986,
p. 193) of our most treasured identities, particularly those secured within the
mother-centered home. This critical vision of identity, home, and family life artic-
ulates family as embedded in and responsive to concrete, historical, material cir-
cumstances and specific histories, desires, and possibilities. This is a vision of
family life as an uncertain and ultimately open and unfinished process that encour-
ages us to see our most intimate relations as politically and historically situated.
The aunt as a malevolent caretaker unsettles the ready analogy of the aunt as
mother and, in doing so, offers us a critical perspective on our assumptions about
450 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • November 2007

the loving mother as an essential figure of family life and childhood and the bad
mother as immoral and unnatural. Instead, we argue that malevolent aunting
points to the moral complexities, responsibilities, and relational skills of intimacy
and care and reminds us to remain ethically vigilant against the potential for
oppression and subjugation in both intimate relations and traditional models of
home and family.

The Aunt as a Witch: Sensuality, Kinship, and Praxis

The caretaking aunt is popularly embodied not only by a dowdy spinster

dedicated to making home comfortable for her men or by nasty aunties bent on
malevolence but also by a sexually appealing, single woman obsessed with con-
sumerism, heterosexual attractions, and physical appearance and adornment. This
contemporary refiguration is well illustrated in the maternal aunts in Sabrina, the
Teenage Witch, originally an Archie comic, then a film (Lambros, Davis, & Takács,
1996), then a popular 1990s TV sitcom (Ferber & Hart, 1996-2003), and in
Alice Hoffman’s (1995) popular novel Practical Magic and the movie of the same
title (Di Novi & Dunne, 1998).
As Vavrus (2002) notes about mainstream media representations of women, a
postfeminist logic underwrites these popular enactments of the aunt as a witch.
This logic admits feminist gains for women but holds feminism to be outdated,
superceded by women’s power to make individualistic “lifestyle” choices, particu-
larly consumer choices enabled by their (assumedly well-established) economic,
educational, and political independence. Along with dissipating the collective
social force of feminism, postfeminist logic entails a White, heterosexual, and elit-
ist perspective and appeal (p. 23). Yet despite their mainstream sexism, unac-
knowledged White privilege, and celebration of consumption, the popular
narratives of aunts as witches nonetheless transgress heterosexual and familial con-
ventions by centering pleasure, intimacy, and caring in female relationships,
extolling a female-centered and communal model of kinship and evoking a legacy
of feminine praxis.
Sabrina features a teen “apprentice” witch who lives with two custodial aunts,
also practicing witches. Similarly, three generations of Owen women in Practical
Magic share a family history of practice in magical arts.4 There is little homage to
paternal lineage among these women, nor is there a mother, father, or child struc-
ture; theirs are multigenerational feminine kinships based in shared knowledge,
interdependencies, and affections. In Sabrina, the aunts mentor rather than
mother their niece, conflating family, kinship, friendship, and apprenticeship.
Once again, this is not a heterosexually procreative model of family, nor does it
conform to traditional models of patrilineal kinship. Rather, aunting as an enact-
ment of female kinship transgresses such normative models and the cultural and
psychosocial orders they presuppose and support.
Aunting in these narratives is intertwined with the practice of magic and the
reproduction of an alternative mode of cultural life organized around a sensual
 Sotirin, Ellingson • Rearticulating the Aunt 451

engagement with nonrational forces. This is most evident in Practical Magic,

where sexual passion and sensual intensity combine in lush images blurring the
boundaries among bodies, pleasures, and agencies. In Sabrina, the use of magic
blurs fantasy and reality as Sabrina’s adolescent troubles are often both the incen-
tive and site of magical interventions that materialize her impulsive wishes.
These narratives of feminine kinship organized around sensuality, passion, and
impulse as material agencies transgress the strictures of rationalization and com-
mercialization, forces that more and more incessantly organize intimate life,
complement the boundedness of the nuclear family, and inform postfeminist
sensibilities (Hochschild, 2003a; Ritzer, 1996). Of course, the magic in Sabrina
and Practical Magic inevitably works to reinstate rather than transform the con-
ventions of middle-class American life and affirm the postfeminist logic of these
representations of contemporary women. Yet their obsessive interest in men and
their hyper-feminine appearances cannot fully assuage suspicions of a witch
coven of lesbians who might use their power to mount a serious challenge to the
current social order.
We want to be clear: There is little in the popular portrayals of witch aunts that
“authentically” represents the history of witches or the practices of witchcraft.
Instead, the popular witch figures we discuss are thinly drawn caricatures that
obscure historical contexts through flip reinventions. At the same time, these figures
articulate a persistent fear of and fascination with feminine alliances and praxis
that gains particular force in the context of the ongoing “crisis of masculinity” and
the social, political, and cultural “backlash” against feminism (Faludi, 1991). In
evoking cultural fears, fascination, and anxieties, even trite popular performances
intimate the vulnerability of dominant gender and cultural orders and acknowl-
edge feminine power. In such intimations and acknowledgments, the kinship of
popular witch aunts draws on transgressive legacies of gendered struggles over
social traditions and change (Ehrenreich & English, 1973).
As Nelson (1979) reminds us, “Between 1400 and 1700, approximately half a
million people, most of them women, were burned as witches” (p. 452). She
argues that this persecution was inspired by a shift in social and economic orders
from feudal to industrial life, but it was impassioned by a struggle over social con-
trol among the church, the state, and traditional agrarian and feudal sites of
power and relations of authority. Women in particular were marked as heretical
or seditious.5 Although the viciousness and complexity of this extensive period of
cultural struggle is obscured in cultural memory, a legacy of disruptive feminine
agency persists in the stereotype of the threatening witch. Manifestations of this
legacy in popular culture shift radically depending on the particular context. For
example, articulated to Oedipal dynamics of the family, the witch in popular
fairytales and their Disney remakes becomes a projection of the child’s anxieties
over vulnerability to maternal power; articulated to second-wave feminist cam-
paigns against patriarchal domination, the witch becomes an icon for cultural
separatism and a projection of sexual energy and anger.
452 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • November 2007

Set in the contexts of cultural misogyny, violence, fear, energy, and anger, the
witch aunt articulates legacies and forces of sensuality and struggle. Even the
campy exaggerations of Sabrina, the Teen-Age Witch and Practical Magic parody
heteronormativity and rearticulate relations of kinship and agency around
woman-focused identifications, alliances, and wisdoms. The witch aunts and
nieces enact family as a feminine kin space that enables a kinship-based praxis, a
way of acting in the world and bonding together that intercedes in and trans-
gresses dominant cultural and heteronormative orders. In this, the witch aunts
highlight what Franklin and McKinnon (2002) call the fluid relationality of kin-
ship, that is, contextualized connections and disconnections that cannot be guar-
anteed by biosocial claims, whether blood, property, or legal fiat.
We suggest that the “kindredness” that binds popular witch aunts and nieces is
constructed in the context of cultural fantasies and anxieties over feminine identi-
ties and agencies, blurring lines among natural–supernatural, mentor–apprentice,
reason–sensuality, and even feminism–postfeminism. Rather than a structuring
principle organizing cultural relations on the basis of biosocial pregivens, kinship in
these enactments can be rearticulated as a cultural agency mobilizing and mediated
by particular conjunctures of forces—historical, political, economic, religious, tech-
nological. Rearticulating kinship around feminine spiritualities and sensualities
affects a relational force that connects across and through the definitional bound-
aries of normative family life. Despite the postfeminist logic underwriting these
popular sitcoms and movies, the witch aunts intimate the potential of aunting as a
transgressive cultural agency reorganizing pleasure, care, knowledge, and commu-
nality around feminine relations and logics.
We turn now to a final example of aunting that links the exploitation of car-
ing labor to the maintenance of racial oppression and privilege.

Aunting as Domestic Slavery

A familiar yet “invisible” image of aunting is embodied in the Black mammy,

a fictional image of the faithful, obedient, smiling house slave who embraces her
domestic responsibilities and loves the White family that exploits her (Manring,
1998). This image transgresses the banal and benevolent cultural figures of
the aunt that we have examined thus far, situating the cultural work of aunting at
the juncture of race, class, and gender oppressions (Collins, 1990). The familiar-
ity of the Black auntie or mammy as a domestic in the service of White families,
the embodiment of deference, obedience, and bountiful—though asexual—
nurturance, obscures the historical exploitation of Black women’s physical and
emotional labor and disconnects the mammy’s place in the White home from
her place in the Black family. The mammy is bound physically and economically
to the domestic sphere, even as her presence liberates the White woman from
domestic servitude.
One of the most famous and long-lived mammy images is Aunt Jemima, fic-
tional figurehead for a line of pancake mixes and breakfast syrups. The image of
 Sotirin, Ellingson • Rearticulating the Aunt 453

Aunt Jemima was created in 1893 to sell self-rising pancake flour, one of the first
convenience products marketed to both ease the burden of (White, middle-class)
housewives and to promote a lifestyle based on the regular consumption of con-
venience items (Turner, 1994). Although the visual appearance of Aunt Jemima
changed during the course of civil rights changes in the United States, all of the
Aunt Jemima images featured a wide, white-toothed smile in a dark face, perpet-
uating White belief in the benefits of servitude for Black domestics.
The mammy remains a powerful racist image of Black women’s essential apti-
tude for deferential, nurturing servitude. For example, in Bringing Down the House
(Amritraj, Hoberman, & Shankman, 2003) starring Queen Latifah and Steve
Martin, the Black woman’s presence in a White man’s life is readily accepted when
she is presented as a nanny and a housemaid but vehemently sanctioned when she
appears to be a lover or an equal (the movie also exploits sexualized and militant
images of the Black woman).
In late American capitalism, Wong (1994) points out that the mammy is cast
as multicultural in a spate of popular films depicting a caregiver of color and a
White employer (e.g., Alice, Driving Miss Daisy, Ghost, Grand Canyon, and Passion
Fish). In the context of the demographic and economic shifts of the 1980s and
1990s, Wong argues that “the figure of the person of color patiently mothering
White folks serves to allay racial anxieties” (p. 69) while retaining structural privi-
leges and maintaining the illusion of reciprocal respect. She acknowledges that this
caregiving figure draws on the legacy of the Black mammy. This contemporary
mammy aunt has become an apologist for a multiculturalism that obscures rather
than redresses historically and culturally embedded racism and sexism.
A similar mammy aunt figure has emerged out of the international traffic in
women as domestic servants, nannies, and aunties. In particular, women of color
who immigrate to the United States to care for and nurture the children of White
women are indentured within a domestic service system in which maternal love
itself is a prize commodity. As Hochschild (2003a) observes, this imperialistic
traffic in women commodifies maternal love and shifts the “‘white man’s burden’
to the dark children left behind” (p. 194) when their mother as auntie is forced
by economic necessity and opportunity to leave her own family and domestic
responsibilities to devote herself to the upbringing of her employer’s children.
Ironically, the children left behind are most often left in the care of relatives, usu-
ally grandmothers or aunts (Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2003).
The plight of the enslaved auntie highlights what Hochschild (2003b) calls an
international trade in love. She argues that the increasing commodification of
maternal love and family care that exploits women of lower class and/or of color
calls for a revision of domestic policies concerned with family life and, in partic-
ular, a revaluation of care services. In this sense, the mammy aunt might be said
to transgress her cooptation as an apologist for a commodified multiculturalism;
in such a struggle over social practices and policies of family and care, this aunt
figure is a vanguard in a political struggle over what care is worth in contempo-
rary American society and whose benefit or neglect matters. Aunting as enslaved
454 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • November 2007

caretaking articulates a politics of care that depends on racial, ethnic, and class
stratifications. It is critical that we rearticulate this figure to a feminist campaign
for global economic justice and accountability.

Rearticulating the Aunt

Stuart Hall (1992) reminds us that popular culture is the site of hegemonic
struggle over collective memories and visions of cultural life. In considering main-
stream popular performances of aunting, we have drawn attention to what is at
stake in accepting the implicit analogies that link the aunt to cultural ideals of
mothering and the family and failing to engage the conservative politics that often
accompany such associations. First, privileging an ideal model of mothering as the
essence of aunting stymies the relational agency of aunting by invoking the histor-
ical and cultural baggage of idealized motherhood. Aunting transgresses the myth
of the loving, self-sacrificing mother and the ideal of the natural, nuclear family and
affords an alternative relational perspective on how family arrangements and rela-
tions can be enacted and valued. Performances of aunting in mainstream popular
culture transgress normative mandates and constraints to articulate feminist visions
of moral intimacy, families of choice, a reinvention of feminine kinship, and a reval-
uation of care in economic and cultural relations.
Popular performances of aunting entail cultural struggles over feminine, femi-
nist, and postfeminist possibilities. We have shown how aunting may be transgres-
sive even as these performances pass as conforming and conservative. For example,
the power of aunts as witches and malevolent caretakers transgresses dominant
ideals for femininity and motherhood in ways that introduce into the cultural imag-
ination more complex models of moral conduct and intimacy. Hence, although
strong aunt figures may uphold gendered stereotypes and oppressions, they are
nonetheless suggestive of the capacities of feminine agency. In this way, powerful
aunts offer evidence of and inspiration for feminine agency as a viable force of
change in the constitution of gendered selves, families, and communities.
Taking the transgressive cultural performances of aunting seriously as we have done
here opens up discursive space for new visions of contemporary Anglo-American
family relationships that resist the pervasive vision of the natural, nuclear family,
grounded not in facts but in nostalgia for repressive, albeit simpler, gender roles
(Coontz, 1992). Alternative visions of what a family can be are vitally important at
this juncture because the proliferation of family forms has far exceeded public imag-
ination or accommodations for them. Gay and lesbian families, single-parent
families, families without children, families caring for nonbiological children, and
extended family configurations are increasingly part of the cultural landscape.
Transgressive performances of aunting unsettle taken-for-granted norms of mater-
nality and femininity and popular myths of family and kinship to admit such alter-
natives. Thus, the presence of aunts in popular imagination forces a crack in
hegemonic conceptualizations of family relations. We urge feminists to exploit and
 Sotirin, Ellingson • Rearticulating the Aunt 455

enlarge these fissures by articulating the aunt as a rallying point for promoting non-
nuclear relationships as valid modes of familial life.
Finally, the transgressions in mainstream popular performances of aunting
engage the implicit yet dominant links among mothering, family, and the state’s
role in regulating and legitimating relational practices and forms. We want to be
clear about the stakes involved in disarticulating maternal aunting from a conser-
vative image of the family and rearticulating this performance to progressive fem-
inist perspectives on kinship and intimacy. As the “Doctrine for Natural Families”
reveals, conservative ideals of mothering and family are tightly bound to demands
for state regulation and policy over what can legitimately be recognized as a
family. Butler (2004) contends that such a doctrine is premised in normative fan-
tasies of family and kinship linking heterosexual marriage, patrilineal relations,
and the role of the state in legitimating and regulating forms of intimate and
social life. In popular imagination, these conservative fantasies have come to orga-
nize the intelligibility of family debates and practical options.
Anthropologists and social historians alike have decried the restrictive and
patently ideological nature of these fantasies. In anthropology, kinship is recog-
nized as an enacted practice, increasingly indistinct from friendship, community,
property relations, and a plethora of other cultural phenomena (Franklin &
McKinnon, 2002). Likewise, some family scholars maintain that “family” is an
enacted relational and communicative practice (Jorgenson, 1989). Coontz (1992)
persuasively argued that the nuclear model of the family is a nostalgic and patently
ahistoric myth perpetuated in popular culture and epitomized by TV sitcoms. She
warned that popular myths of family deny the diversity, creativity, and lived con-
ditions of family life past and present and the possibilities for the future of families
(Coontz, 1992, 1999). Yet as Grossberg (2005) pointed out, the pervasiveness of
such myths and the passionate defense of conservative family values articulate a
hegemonic struggle over the location and nature of the intimate connections and
emotionally powerful social bonds constituting personal and social life (p. 102).
Rearticulating aunting to feminist perspectives resituates the aunt as a rallying
point for progressive reforms in this historical-political struggle over what kinship
and family can and should be.
The quiet trangressions of aunts in popular culture are easily overlooked. By
rearticulating the aunt, we seek to politicize this ubiquitous figure and to promote
the potential of aunting as a relational alternative especially suited to the vicissi-
tudes of contemporary intimacy and family life.

Notes

1. The cast included Andy Griffith as widower and Sheriff Andy Taylor, Ron Howard as
his son Opie, popular comedian Don Knots as Andy’s cousin and inept sidekick, Deputy
Barney Fife, and Frances Bavier as Andy’s and Barney’s Aunt Beatrice (Aunt Bee). Aunt Bee
became Bavier’s signature character. For a profile of the show and information about all the
characters, see the fan site, The “Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club,” maintained by
456 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • November 2007

Jim Clark at http://www.mayberry.com/tagsrwc/index.htm. There are also numerous fan

books, chief among them Clark and Beck (2000) and Robinson and Fernandes (2004).
2. For example, Aunt Bee was introduced into the Griffith bachelor household in the
premiere episode, “The New Housekeeper” (Elinson, Stewart, & Leonard, 1960). The plot
centers on Opie’s resistance to her and his eventual acceptance based on his realization of
her need to care for him and his father. In the episode “Andy and Opie Housekeepers”
(Adler & Sweeney, 1961), Andy and Opie deliberately mess up their home so that Aunt
Bee will feel needed when she returns from a trip. For plot summaries of all eight seasons
of The Andy Griffith Show and three seasons of Mayberry RFD, see The Andy Griffith Show
Episode Guide at http://www.zille.com/griffith/epguide.asp (Zille, n.d.).
3. In their research among family viewers, Hoover, Clark, and Alters (2004) report an
interview between researcher Diane Alters and Jim Mills, the father in a blended family,
about the influence of television depictions of the family on Mills’s own ideas and practices
of family. Mills singled out The Andy Griffith Show as an example of the classic television
shows that “contained many stories of goodness and demonstrated values that Mills felt had
been important for his own moral growth” (p. 63). Hoover et al. add a footnote about the
show’s Bible study fan groups that, according to Jerry Fann, who developed the “Mayberry
Bible Study” concept, were formed around the premise that “‘the show is filled with basic
morals and Christian principles taught by the Scriptures’” (Terwilliger, 2001, p. 2D, cited in
Hoover et al., 2004, p. 183, Note 14).
4. The novel and film share the title Practical Magic and the characters’ names but little
else. However, we gloss these differences here to focus on the tensions of recuperation and
transgression that are featured in both formats.
5. The Catholic Church institutionalized the indictment against women in the infa-
mous handbook for suppressing witchcraft, the Malleus Malleficarum, published in 1486
and widely distributed and used (Nelson, 1979; also see the summary by Chicago Covens,
1970). Women were denounced in this document as inherently sinful, vulnerable to the
devil, deceptive, wanton, weak of mind and spirit, and, most tellingly, given over to an
insatiable carnal lust (Dworkin, 1976).

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Patty Sotirin is an associate professor of communication in the Department of

Humanities at Michigan Technological University. She has published in such
journals as Organization: The Critical Journal of Organization, Theory and Society;
American Journal of Semiotics; and Text and Performance.

Laura L. Ellingson is an assistant professor of communication in the Department of

Communication at Santa Clara University. She has published in such journals as
Qualitative Inquiry and Health Communication and is the author of Communicating
in the Clinic: Negotiating Frontstage and Backstage Teamwork.