BRAIN IN THE AIR

Family stories participate in the formation of culture as they imagine and reproduce ethnic identity. This essay examines grandmother (memere) stories in Franco American families as the cultural location of a global moment where family, white ethnic identity, and gender intersect. Within a transnational feminism and performative theory of family story telling which historicize and situate cultural texts, grandmothers become linked with the motherland and mother tongue in the imagination of Franco American identity. The analysis of a corpus of memere stories identifies both the performative agency and constraints on traditional ethnic women within structures o gender, culture, and power. The performance of memere stories enchants the grandmother asa cultural icon and reproduces the Franco American family. However, the formation of cultural identity through family storytelling in memere stories is a problematic achievement because it is built upon myths of cultural purity and goodness, "although narrative strategies complicate these images. I was thirteen when my mother was pregnant-again-with the baby who would unsettle the symmetry of my profound place in the middle: I had three older brothers and three younger brothers, one older sister and one younger sister. Then another baby sister makes ten: the Langellier tribe, clan, family. Someone at school, in one of those clusters of kids, a boy, said, "geez, Kris, don't your parents know about birth control. "It got a laugh and Igot red-faced, fell silent, felt the embarrassments of adolescence. More than by anything else, I have felt defined by my big family, a family size I interpreted in terms of our Roman Catholicism. But not yet in terms of my ethnicity, of being a French Catholic family in an area of French Canadian immigrants, the Bourbonnais, Kankakee, and St. Anne of our families that formed the Little Canadas (les Petits Canadas) of the Midwest.

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