AHA Session 171
Saturday, January 10, 2026: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Wabash Room (Palmer House Hilton, Third Floor)
Chair:
Kristin Celello, Queens College, City University of New York
Papers:
Comment:
Justine Modica, Cornell University
Session Abstract
Traditional notions of family have long served as the foundation of social stability, national identity, and moral order in the cultural landscape of the United States, past and present. Scholars like Elaine Tyler May have examined the legacy of Cold War-era obsessions with personal and family security in shaping contemporary understandings of family. Building on this discussion, the presenters in this panel explore various ways in which normative American family structures have destabilized throughout the twentieth century in response to sociopolitical, technological, and geopolitical forces. While cultural narratives and government policies often privileged a particular family model—heterosexual, nuclear, and anchored in biological reproduction—the papers in this panel reveal a far more fractured landscape. By bringing together histories of parenthood, transnational marriage, and reproductive medicine, this panel reveals the deep entanglements of family structures with twentieth-century geopolitics, state power, and social change. Spanning wartime displacement, transnational marriage, contested fatherhood, and reproductive technologies, these papers examine how individuals and communities navigated the legal, social, and emotional consequences of family disruption across national and ideological borders. Internal and external conceptualizations of what constituted a “good citizen” intertwined with expectations of proper family formation, and those who deviated, whether by virtue of their marital status, nationality, or reproductive capacity, found themselves at the center of cultural and political debates. Placing their work within the various frameworks of gender history, cultural history, legal history, migration studies, and the history of medicine, the papers in this panel argue that family was never simply a private institution, but rather a battleground where political anxieties, cultural ideologies, and individual agency collided.
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