Avuncular

Literally, avuncular means like an uncle. Its nominative form, avunculate, refers to the specific relationship between male children and their maternal uncle. The word avuncular has been redefined as a gender position by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. She conceives of the avuncular as a range of relatives, male and female, who are related to children but who are not their parents. In this way they have a relationship and a responsibility to these children, usually the offspring of cousins or siblings, but their relationship is by its very nature tangential, or non-normative. For Sedgwick this places the avuncular in the realm of the queer, and establishes a normative link to the queer within the family unit. In Tendencies (1993), she writes, "Because aunts and uncles (in either narrow or extended meanings) are adults whose intimate access to children needn't depend on their own pairing or procreation, it's very common, of course, for some of them to have the office of representing noncomforming or non-reproductive sexualities to children" (p. 63). The male relative is part of a spectrum of older men who serve to offer "a degree of initiation into gay cultures and identities" (p. 59). This is not to suggest that there is necessarily a physical relationship between avuncular males and their young relatives, but that they serve as a kind of model for possible alternative sexualities. The female avuncular (often an aunt), serves as a kind of camp figure whose presence emphasizes the erotic nature of the male avuncular.

see also Family.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books.

Savoy, Eric. 1999. "Embarrassments: Figure in the Closet." The Henry James Review 20(3): 227-236.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

                                        Brian D. Holcomb

a·vun·cu·lar / əˈvəngkyələr/ • adj. 1. of or relating to an uncle. ∎  kind and friendly toward a younger or less experienced person: an avuncular manner.2. Anthropol. of or relating to the relationship between men and their siblings' children.

avuncular XIX. f. L. avunculus UNCLE; see -AR.