Play, Literacies, and the Production of Love in a Family Idioculture: Theorizing Momentous Desires

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: (Re)Considering the Critical and Affective Potentials of Playful Literacies (Table 11)

Abstract

This paper is about the relationship between literacies, love and intimacy in one family. It describes how a child, Ayla, and her father, [Author], collectively produced moments of love and intimacy across multiple modalities, from multiplayer videogames to oral storytelling, backyard play, and more. As such, it contributes one portrait–of many–of how families use literacies of play to produce and re-produce moments of love and intimacy, together.

Our analysis describes how these moments of love and intimacy emerged, in part, through [Author] and Ayla’s collaborative video gameplay in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly its second and third years. We illustrate how the (lack of) narrative of the video game Untitled Goose Game became entangled with a number of familial literacies enacted by [Author] and Ayla. To understand the enactment of these family-specific practices, we draw on literature related to idiocultures (Fine, 1979), or an orientation that culture is not a universal set of practices, but rather a set of practices that are specific to a particular group of people. Researchers have used family culture to describe family-specific traditions and practices (Goodwin, 2007; Keifert, 2021). We contribute the concept of family idiocultures to describe how multiple sets of practices and traditions, sometimes ephemeral, often develop within a family culture, like specific sayings in a given moment (i.e. specific songs when waking up in the morning) or rituals (i.e. bath -> book ->, bed), or even habits, (i.e. certain ventriloquized voices that belong to specific toys or stuffed animals).

We show how these practices and traditions developed through momentous desires. In the everyday moments of parent-child interaction, momentous desires refer to how parents and child feel like a moment needs something, something important and deeply significant to the moment itself even if it would seem mundane or ordinary when looking in as an outsider. For example, a father, [Author], telling his daughter, Ayla, a ‘goosey’ story while she sits on the toilet before bedtime. And Ayla improvising additions to the story to make the moment last longer, in part because she needs longer on the toilet and in part a desiring toward prolonging a silly joyful, lovingly intimate moment. And [Author], even while feeling bedtime encroaching, extending beyond what is ‘supposed to’, feels the moment's ordinary importance and builds on Ayla’s goosey improvisations. Through analyses of momentous desires such as these, we show how uses of literacy in the maintenance of family idiocultures produce essential threads in a family’s fabric of love.

Authors

• Ty Hollett, Pennsylvania State University

• Christian Ehret, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill