Is the family in crisis? Or do crises crystallize in families' lived realities? Families as constitutive units of all social architectures are central to our democracies. In this book, scholars from cultural, gender, and media studies, lawyers, sociologists, and historians discuss how today's rainbow variety of families crosses borders and how cultural texts - sitcoms, films, novels, short stories, and political magazines from Europe (Germany, Italy, Spain) and the US - (de)construct, take part in, and mirror family discourses around topics such as fatherhoods, motherhoods, reproductive decisions, adoption, marriage, divorce, poverty, welfare, war, and the rhetoric of the nuclear family.

Eva-Sabine Zehelein is an adjunct professor of American studies at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and fellow at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. She specializes in 20th and 21st century North American literatures and (popular) cultures and leads the international and interdisciplinary research group »Family Matters«.
Andrea Carossois a professor of American literature and culture at the Department of International Languages and Literatures at Università di Torino, where he coordinates the post-graduate program in English and American Studies. His books includeCold War Narratives. American Culture in the 1950s (2012),Urban Cultures in the United States (2010), andInvito alla lettura di Vladimir Nabokov (1999).
Aida Rosende-Pérez is an assistant professor at the University of the Balearic Islands, where she teaches in the fields of American literature and culture, as well as gender studies. Her research has focused primarily on the politics and poetics of transnational feminism, with emphasis on the narratives and (audio)visual productions of contemporary Irish women writers and artists.