Tag Archives: children

it’s not just about marriage law

16 Saturday Mar 2013

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cross-posted from the family scholars blog.


April DeBoer (second from left) sits with her adopted daughter Ryanne, 3,
and Jayne Rowse and her adopted sons Jacob, 3, and Nolan, 4,
at their home in Hazel Park, Mich., on Tuesday.

We’ve been talking a lot lately, at the Family Scholars Blog, about the upcoming DOMA/Prop 8 cases before the Supreme Court and debating the cases for and against marriage equality. Sometimes “gay marriage” can seem like the only or most important issue for LGBT folks. In fact, many of us have had the experience of talking with someone who assumes that once gay marriage is legal then anti-gay prejudice and marginalization will — poof! — be a thing of the past. We’ll be able to put down our “activist” hats and embrace our mainstream status.

But the marginalization of LGBT individuals and families goes a lot deeper than marriage law. One such example comes from my home state of Michigan, which has some of the most restrictive laws in the nation regarding recognition of same-sex relationships — including a ban on same-sex partners adopting together. While heterosexual couples and single people are welcomed as prospective adoptive parents, gay and lesbian couples are explicitly denied the ability to provide their children with two legal parents.

 A lesbian couple who are parenting three adopted children have sued the state for the right to co-adopt. From the NPR story on their case:

As foster parents, Rowse and DeBoer shared legal guardianship of Jacob. When they decided to adopt the boy, they faced the same decision they’d faced with the two other children: which of them would be the legal parent. They chose Rowse, who is also Nolan’s legal mother. That meant DeBoer actually lost legal rights she had as a foster parent.

“I lose the right to make medical decisions for my boys,” DeBoer says. “I can’t enroll my boys in school. I am on an emergency card at school — I am listed as just an emergency contact person. I am not a parent. I am nothing.”

You can read the whole story over at NPR.

There have been a number of people at the Family Scholars Blog who have expressed varying degrees of concern about the sanctioning of same-sex relationships through marriage because they feel this legitimizes gay and lesbian parents as procreative partners in some way.

What I think gets lost in such abstract discussions — about same-sex couples somehow, in future, creating new life together — is the fact that LGBT parents are already parenting without the full legal recognition that, in hundreds of little ways, ties parents to their children and ensures kids will have their parents or guardians present for them — advocating and decision-making as necessary — throughout their childhood. Statistically speaking, LGBT parents are also generally caring for their own biological children or adopting children who would otherwise spend their lives in the foster system. Parents (straight, gay, lesbian, or otherwise) who have used assisted reproductive strategies, too, are parenting children who — regardless of their origins — deserve the security of knowing they will have access to their parent-carers when they need them.

The argument that legalizing same-sex marriage gives social approval to all manner of assisted reproductive practices glosses over the fact that by supporting restrictive adoption laws, marriage laws, and other legal restrictions on the recognition of same-sex families, those who oppose recognition of same-sex relationships  are actively marginalizing existing children and their parents.  You aren’t stopping future families from being created; people of all sexual orientations have, and will continue, to create families irrespective of the law. Instead, you’re stopping already-established families from accessing the full range of social supports that, as a nation, we’ve decided interdependent couples and parents with dependent children need to thrive.

Maybe your concerns regarding reproductive ethics are strong enough that such a cost is worth it to you. But I don’t think it’s honest or responsible to simply ignore the human cost of such discriminatory practices.

fun with amicus briefs! [doma & the supremes]

11 Monday Mar 2013

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cross-posted from the family scholars blog.

http://lesbianweddings.tumblr.com/post/12741646344
(via)

Thanks to Amy’s recent post that linked to John Culhane’s piece on the importance of amicus briefs, I spent a nerdy afternoon this past weekend browsing through some of the many briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in relation to the two same-sex marriage cases that will be reviewed by the court this session. They are all available to read in PDF at the American Bar Association’s website; you can also find a list at the SCOTUSblog. I thought I’d share a few highlights with you. Of particular interest to the folks at Family Scholars might be the brief submitted jointly by the Family Equality Council, Colage, Our Family Coalition, Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, the Center on Children and Families,  the Child Rights Project, and Sarah Gogin. Together, they seek to represent the children raised by same-sex parents as well as young people who experience same-sex desire as they look toward a future forming adult relationships. They begin:

The voices of children raised by same-sex parents — those who live every day within the family structure at the heart of these lawsuits — are too often unheard in debates about same-sex couples and marriage. Their stories are too often missing from discussions of “traditional” families or “family values,” and their personal experience too often discounted as irrelegant. Although those who oppose marriage for same-sex couples frequently make assumptions about the quality of the children’s family lives, the children themselves are rarely asked to explain what they actually experience.

Throughout the brief, they foreground the voices of young people who are growing up with LGBT parents, and their list of “authorities” (the brief equivalent of a bibliography) offers a valuable starting point for thosee interested in learning more about the experience of people who have grown up within LGBT households. As the brief asserts,

Although the Proponents [of Proposition 8] claim an interest in stabilizing the American family structure, the elimination of marriage for same-sex couples in California and the refusal to recognize valid married couples on the federal level have the exact opposite effect. Placing an official stamp of governmental opprobrium on the relationships of same-sex parents instead serves to stigmatize and de-legitimize the relationships, and, as a result, the children themselves.

Not to mention, the children of our nation who will grow into adult same-sex desires and relationships:

By officially sanctioning their exclusion from marriage and placing existing marriages of same-sex couples in the singular position of being “not marriages” for federal law, these measures exacerbate feelings of hopelessness about the future and perpetual “different-ness” that many LGBT youth already feel and discourage them from aspiring to full participation in civic life.

As an historian, I was also pleased to see both the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and the American Historical Association  (AHA) had filed briefs discussing the history of marriage law in the United States. The AHA draws on the scholarship of its professional membership to make several key arguments: that the federal government has historically deferred to state law when determining marital status; that the meaning of marriage is not limited to procreation; that marriage practices have changed over time, and that this is a strength not a weakness of marriage as a social institution. From their summary of the arguments:

Control of marital status is reserved to the states in our federal system. Marriage has always been understood as a civil contract embodying a couple’s free consent to join in long-lasting intimate and economic union. In authorizing marriage, states turn a couple’s vows into a legal status, thus protecting the couple’s bond and aiming moreover to advance general social and economic welfare. Throughout U.S. history, states have valued marriage as a means to benefit society. Seeing multiple purposes in marriage, states have encouraged maritally-based households as advantages to public good, whether or not minor children are present, and without regard to biological relationships of descent. …For two centuries before 1996, state marital diversity reigned, along with serious inter-state contestation, without Congress stepping in to create marital “uniformity” for federal purposes. Congress never took a position on a marital eligibility question pre-emptively so as to discredit a policy choice that a state might make. Before DOMA, federal agencies assessed marriage validity by consulting the relevant state laws. In historical perspective, DOMA appears as an attempt by Congress to single out particular state-licensed marriages for disfavored treatment.

The OHA, in a brief filed with the American Studies Association, takes up a slightly different aspect of the case.  They outline the history of discrimination towards sexual minorities in the United States, and pointing toward legal precedent for taking history into account when assessing the full weight of discriminatory practice:

As professional organizations devoted to the study of American history and culture, amici are not before the Court to advocate a particular legal doctrine or standard. But they wish to advise the court that the historical record is clear. Gay men and lesbians in America have been subjected to generations of intense, irrational, and often violent discrimination, commencing as soon as they emerged as a group into American public consciousness and continuing today.

The NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund reminds the court of its historic role in guaranteeing equal protection rights to all citizens, asserting that “The role of the courts is to safeguard the rights of historically subordinated groups by applying heightened scrutiny to laws like DOMA, that disadvantage them as a class.”

And finally, it was also heartening to see a number of briefs from religious organizations supporting marriage equality, including one filed on behalf of a truly heartwarming number of faith traditions: the Bishops Of The Episcopal Church In The States Of California, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, and Washington and The District Of Columbia; The Jewish Theological Seminary Of America; Manhattan Conference Of The Metropolitan New York Synod Of The Evangelical Lutheran Church In America; The Rabbinical Assembly; The Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association; Reconstructionist Rabbinical College; Rabbi Akiva Herzfeld Of Shaarey Tphiloh; The Union For Reform Judaism; Unitarian Universalist Association; United Church Of Christ; The United Synagogue Of Conservative Judaism; Affirmation; Covenant Network Of Presbyterians; Friends For Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, And Queer Concerns; Methodist Federation For Social Action; More Light Presbyterians; Presbyterian Welcome; Reconciling Ministries Network; Reconciling Works: Lutherans For Full Participation; and Religious Institute, Inc. (yes really!). Their premise is:

Americans are a religious people, but diversely so. Religious adherents differ on contentious issues, and religious bodies have themselves evolved and disagreed over time — on marriage as well as other civil rights and social issues. In view of that history and the wide range of modern religious thought on same-sex unions, it would be a mistake to elevate any one view on marriage above all others as the “Christian” or “religious” view. Indeed, it would be constitutionally inappropriate, because civil marriage is a secular institution … and the Constitution bars the government from favoring certain religious views over others … Religious freedom means that all voices may contribute to our national conversation, but particular religious perspectives on marriage cannot be permitted to control civil recognition of marriage for all.

These highlights represent just a handful of the perspectives filed with the court, and I encourage all of you to go explore on your own — and share what briefs spoke to you, and why, in comments.

quick hit: american sociological association on same-sex parenting and child outcomes

01 Friday Mar 2013

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cross-posted at the family scholars blog.

via Religion Dispatches.

The American Sociological Association has filed an amicus brief in the Proposition 8 case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court strongly supporting marriage equality as a positive step for child well-being. They also offer an extensive critique of the Regnerus study used in other amicus briefs as support for upholding the ban on same-sex marriage.

You can read the entire 32-page brief here (PDF) and Peter Montgomery at Religion Dispatches, above, discusses the critique of the Regnerus study specifically, with lengthy excerpts.

Here, I thought I would share the succinct conclusion from the brief itself:

The social science consensus is both conclusive and clear: children fare just as well when they are raised by same-sex parents as when they are raised by opposite sex parents. This consensus holds true across a wide range of child outcome indicators and is supported by numerous nationally representative studies. Accordingly, assuming that either DOMA or Proposition 8 has any effect on whether children are raised by opposite-sex or same-sex parents, there is no basis to prefer opposite-sex parents over same-sex parents and neither DOMA nor Proposition 8 is justified. The research supports the conclusion that extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples has the potential to improve child wellbeing insofar as the institution of marriage may provide social and legal support to families and enhances family stability, key drivers of positive child outcomes. The Regnerus study and other studies relied on by BLAG, the Proposition 8 Proponents, and their amici provide no basis for their arguments, because they do not directly examine the wellbeing of children raised by same-sex parents These studies therefore do not undermine the consensus from the social science research and do not establish a “common sense” basis for DOMA or Proposition 8.

While I would be the first to agree that just because something is said by a professional organization that doesn’t make it true (exhibit A: the classification of homosexuality as a pathological disorder), it is true that professional consensus backed up by a body of literature that consistently demonstrates a set of outcomes requires an equally strong body of evidence to refute. And the anti-equality spokespeople are not offering up that body of evidence.

I encourage those interested to at least skim through the ASA brief.

booknotes: histories and cultures of sexuality

05 Tuesday Feb 2013

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As promised, here is my round-up of recently-read titles having to do with various aspects of human sexuality, politics and culture.

Men in Eden: William Drummond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade by William Benemann (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). Let’s begin with the book Hanna referred to as the book about “mountain men humping!” Benemann takes as his subject a 19th century Scottish aristocrat, William Drummond Stuart, and through Stuart’s colorful life explores the contours of same-sex desire on the borderlands of “civilized” society. Stewart, a younger son who later in life inherited the family title from his older brother, came of age during the Napoleonic wars and served in the 15th King’s Hussars where he rose to the rank of Captain. After retiring from the army, Stewart traveled widely in the Middle East and North America — and in North America found the homosociality of the American West particularly amenable. Throughout his life, Stewart’s most enduring relationships were with men, including one French-Cree trader who he traveled extensively with and even took with him back to Scotland after assuming responsibility for the family’s estate; the couple lived for a time in one of the secluded lodges on the land, where Stewart kept all the material evidence of his travels abroad. According to Benemann, previous treatments of Stewart have gone out of their way to ignore the evidence of same-sex relationships in the Scotsman’s life. Benemann’s work is a thoughtful and nuanced challenge to this previous “closeting” of Stewart’s sexual self, taking those same-sex relationships for granted as a meaningful part of Stewart’s experience. Anyone with an interest in nineteenth-century Anglo-American sexuality and gender should definitely add this one to their reading list.

Documenting Intimate Matters: Primary Sources for a History of Sexuality in America edited by Thomas A. Foster (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Published as a companion volume to John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s seminal Intimate Matters (1988), this new primary source reader offers a thoughtful compilation of lightly annotated documents related to various aspects of sexuality in American culture from the colonial era to the present. A brief 225 pages, featuring selections from about seventy sources, this reader is best seen as a jumping-off point for further discussion and exploration rather than a source for full-text transcriptions. Each of the five chronologically-arranged sections are introduced with a brief preface on the sexual issues of the period in question, and each document likewise features a thoughtful introduction. While necessarily incomplete, given its length, Documenting Intimate Matters is admirably diverse in its socio-cultural and geographic scope as well as the genres of (textual) documents found therein. Some of my favorite include newspaper announcements from the 1780s-90s placed by men whose wives had deserted them to inform creditors the husbands would no longer take responsibility for their (ex?) wives debts; the angry diary entries of Frederick Ryman (1884)*, whose sentiments about women would not be out of place on anti-feminist blogs of today; and Susan Fitzmaurice’s 2002 reflections on the struggles of raising a child with Downs Syndrome in away that prepares them for a sexually active, sexually pleasurable, and sexually responsible adulthood. An excellent anthology for use in introductory classes.

*Full disclosure: Ryman’s diaries reside at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Family Pride: What LGBT Families Should Know about Navigating Home, School, and Safety in Their Neighborhood by Michael Shelton (Beacon Press, 2013). The latest addition to Beacon Press’s “queer ideas/queer actions” series, Shelton’s Family Pride is an accessible and nuanced snapshot of life in America for queer parents with children as we enter the 2010s. Centering the lived experiences of both LGBT parents and their children — through in-depth interviews Shelton conducted, as well as the growing body of relevant research literature — Shelton’s book should be on the bookshelf of every “family values” advocate (members of the Institute for American Values I’m looking at you!) as well as in the library of every queer activist and/or LGBT organization. While the title makes it sound like Family Pride is a handbook for queer families, in reality the volume is more of a status-quo assessment with some recommendations (from Shelton’s perspective as a therapist who has worked with queer families) for what queer families need in order to thrive. He does an excellent job of incorporating (I’d even argue prioritizing) the experiences of families who don’t often make “gay family” headlines: queer parents in straight marriages, parents who are in the closet, non-white families, families living with financial insecurity, families with uncertain immigration status, parents in prison or with a history of interaction with the law that makes calling the police for help an unthinkable solution to anti-gay speech or acts. My only quibble with Shelton’s framing is that he never explicitly defines an “LGBT family” as a unit made up of parents-plus-children in which at least one parent is queer — yet that is clearly his operational definition. I would have appreciated either a more explicit acknowledgement that this book focuses on parenting-while-gay OR an effort to include the voices of queer families that do not include children. We are, most assuredly, families too.

Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal by J. Jack Halberstam (Beacon Press, 2012). While in Austin, I snagged a copy of yet another volume in the “queer actions/queer ideas” series — Halberstam’s meditation on the playful, anarchic queer feminism burbling up through the actions and expressions within youth culture. Taking pop culture references from Sponge Bob to Lady Gaga, Halberstam argues for the liberatory playfulness of more fluid sex and gender identities that — rather than requiring taxonomical fixity — provide a sandbox full of tools and opportunities for self-expression. I’m an easy sell on this score: while I am at times skeptical about the power of pop culture expression to effect political change, neither am I threatened by sex and gender anarchy. I am comfortable in my own gender (fairly conventional, by 21st century standards — though I’d likely have been a shockingly difficult daughter in many an earlier time and/or place) and sexuality (fluidly bisexual, married, monogamous). And I see no reason not to afford others the opportunity

Hard to Swallow: Hard Core Pornography on Screen edited by Claire Hines and Darren Kerr (Columbia University/Wallflower Press, 2012). This excellent anthology explores the pornographic genre of “hard core” films from a variety of perspectives: through the lens of history, film studies, sexual politics, and more. The majority of contributions focus on the United States and Britain (the editors are lecturers at Southampton Solent University, UK), and despite the negative connotations of “hard to swallow” virtually all of the authors take for granted that pornographic film as a genre deserves serious consideration. Pornography, it is assumed throughout, is simply explicit representation of human sexual activities; the messages of that representation can be positive or negative, depending upon execution and interpretation. My favorite pieces include: Linda Williams’  ‘”White Slavery,’ Or the Ethnography of ‘Sexworkers’: Women in Stag Films in the Kinsey Archive”; “The Progressive Potential of Behind the Green Door” by Darren Kerr; “Reel Intercourse: Doing Sex on Camera” by Clarissa Smith,” and “Interrogating Lesbian Pornography: Gender, Sexual Iconography, and Spectatoring,” by Rebecca Beirne. At their best, these essays go beyond commonplace assumptions about pornography as inherently degrading, as without cultural merit, as a male-only pursuit. Williams’ piece examines the subjectivity of women in early twentieth century stag films, wondering what light surviving films might shed on performers’ agency. Kerr, in “The Progressive Potential…” revisits a film that has been understood as misogynist and asks us to think, again, about the centrality of female sexual pleasure in the narrative. Clarissa Smith pushes back against the notion that performers in porn “just have sex on camera,” suggesting that engaging an audience in erotic fantasy is, in fact, a difficult role for which real skills are required (can we all say “duh?”). And finally, Beirne’s contribution explores the nuances of voyeurism, performance, and sexual subjectivity in the work of lesbian pornographers.

The entire anthology was absolutely worth reading, though I had quibbles with various assumptions along the way: one author, for example, claimed in passing that “the consumption of pornography … is an essentially private past time, indulged in as an accompaniment or prelude to masturbation.” Yes … but also, no. Reading/viewing erotica can happen in many contexts, only some of which are solitary, and doesn’t necessarily lead to masturbation for all consumers, every time. Likewise, the uncomplicated statement that pornography “began as a male-only pursuit,” even if the author acknowledges that “that male-ness has been diluted in recent years,” is to ignore the long history of female pornographers and women who have enjoyed erotic material. Women + sexual agency is not, contrary to popular opinion, a twenty-first century phenomenon.

I continue to be fascinated, too, by the assumption (apparently played out in the majority of pornographic film) that straight men don’t like to see male bodies centered in porn: from the descriptions of works and from the analysis of the authors it certainly sounds like in mainstream “hard core” (explicit) pornography, it’s women’s bodies on display for a presumed male audience. Granted I’m queer, so. But in general, what I find visually arousing is the depiction of people having sex. People having sex in ways I can then fantasize about enjoying like they’re enjoying it. Watching a woman orgasm on screen is hot (to me) because ohgodohgod I know what that feels like, and if I were in her situation I’d be coming too. So I’m curious what’s happening for men who watch porn in which the role of the male actor is basically a two-step process. Step one: Get it up. Step two: Ejaculate on screen. Like, isn’t that kinda disappointingly … thin on material that encourages imaginative projection of yourself into the scene? It’s just this thing I keep thinking about, as I’m reading these pieces that assume because women’s bodies are the bodies depicted, therefore the audience is supposed to imagine having sex with them (therefore be someone who likes having sex with women) rather than imagine being them (a person, male or female, experiencing sexual pleasure). How would we analyze pornography differently if we assumed the viewer’s involvement with those on-screen was a process of empathetic identification rather than (positive or negative) objectification?

Lots to think about … and I’m footnote mining Hard to Swallow for oft-cited authors and works so I’ve already got several other books on pornography on order at the library and look forward to reviewing them here!

mobility in the city [a few thoughts]

28 Sunday Oct 2012

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Warning: This is a rambling post full of thoughts in progress.

My friend Molly is in the process of writing a book about parenting-while-feminist and in our little writing group, #firstthedraft, we’ve been talking about the politics of “babywearing” (carrying your infant and/or small child in a backpack or sling, etc.) versus strollers. My parents generally used packs — front and back — in the mid-80s when I was small, as well as wagons, tricycles, car seats, and various bike attachments, to tote us around. I don’t remember that we ever had a stroller per-se, but then we also lived in a small enough town that for daily getting around a car was essential and strollers were thus less so. But I do remember using strollers as a childcare provider in my teens, as a way to move toddlers I physically couldn’t carry over distances of more than a city block or two (about the distance they had the stamina to walk on their own). I never thought of child transport options as very political in nature.

Here in the city, though, I’ve learned, strollers are a Big Deal. Everyone has Feelings about them: how big they should (or shouldn’t) be, where they should (and shouldn’t) be allowed to travel, when (if ever) they are reasonable to be on public transportation. Parents and non-parents alike take all sides and sometimes blood is shed (or at the very least ill-will is fostered).

Last week, I suggested on Twitter that the whole problem might be solved if only we could create little steampunk baby carriers that were balloon or propeller-powered and could hover at about 7-8 feet from the ground. The caregiver could then walk along tugging the carrier along on a tether and strollers would take up the sidewalks and/or precious room on the T no more!

still from The Red Balloon (via)

(Though I suppose then we’d be arguing about low-hanging trees and awnings on storefronts. Sigh.)

I actually think identifying this social rough-and-tumble as one about strollers and parenting choices  says something about how we, as a society, compartmentalize parents and their (especially wee) children into the category of Other, a group of people who enter the public realm on sufferance from the rest of us — those of us who, we like to believe, only take up an “appropriate” amount of space on the T, on the sidewalk, who move at the right speed from point A to point B, and are able to time our inconvenient errands for those times when, even if we do take up more space then usual, we will somehow magically not slow down, crowd out, or inadvertently invade the personal space of our fellow city dwellers.

Those of us, in other words, who assume we have a right to be in public space when and how we need to … as opposed to those Other folks whose right to the public square only extend as far as their ability to imitate the space-taking habits of the default citizen (Us).

So what I want to talk a little bit about in this post is how, in an urban environment, especially if you do not own a car and/or are trying to get by using it a little as possible, you’re just going to get in peoples’ way. Even if you don’t have dependents to transport. Even if you don’t have serious mobility issues that require extra gear (walker, cane, chairAnd errands are going to take a lot of effort to complete. And chances are you’re going to need some sort of wheeled conveyance to get them done — unless you’re lucky enough that you don’t have a bad back or a bum wrist or weak ankle and can afford a gym membership and the time to bench press on a regular basis.

Errands in the city take much more time and planning, in my experience, than they did in the car-dependent town where I grew up (or perhaps, I should clarify, much more than they did for me and my car-owning family; for the folks in my hometown too poor to own a car, life was further complicated by a crappy-to-nonexistent public transit system). It’s something I’ve had to get used to, as a former smaller-town dweller turned urbanite. And I think perhaps this helps me see more clearly the similarities across types of transport-aides that some other people don’t — because we’re so used to tuning our brainwaves to “judge” when parents-and-children come into view.

Hanna and I finally bought this shopping cart this year

I’m going to use, as an example, the errand I ran earlier this week to pick up our first monthly allotment of winter veggies from Stillman’s farm where we are CSA subscribers. Stillman’s is out near Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and drives the produce into the city to various pre-scheduled pick-up locations. The closest pick-up point for us was in downtown Boston about two miles from where I work at the MHS. The pick-up time was 2-4pm.

Setting aside, for a moment, the privilege of having a job with a) an hour-long lunch break, and b) the ability to leave on an errand and not worry about getting in trouble if the subway is delayed and I get back a bit late, this sounds like a relatively easy transaction. Take a late lunch, go down, pick up veggies, return to work, take veggies home at the end of the day. If I were living in my home town, this errand would have taken about twenty minutes, maybe, leaving 40 minutes at either end to actually eat lunch.

In Boston, this errand means the following:

1. Remember to take the wheelie-cart with me to work (which means dragging it along on our morning walk of approximately three miles) so that I will be able to transport the heavy winter vegetables on my own.

2. At 2pm, walk to the closest T stop and wait for a train that will take me the right number of stops from Hynes Convention Center to Haymarket (approx. 10 minutes)

3. Maneuver the empty cart into the T, off the T, and up the escalator at Haymarket, and two blocks to the drop point (approx. 15 minutes).

4. Transfer the vegetables from the back of the delivery truck into the cart (approx. 5 minutes).

5. Stop at a nearby sandwich shop for a sandwich and iced tea — admittedly an “optional” step, though to go without would have meant foregoing a midday meal; as it was, I didn’t have time to actually eat the sandwich until I was walking home that evening (approx 10-15 minutes).

6. Carry the cart, maybe 45 pounds fully loaded, down the stairs to Haymarket station; they have an elevator but I didn’t have time to locate it; the elevators to below-ground stops are often poorly marked. The escalators go up, but not down.

7. The first T to pull into the station was headed in the right direction, but not to the appropriate stop. I got on anyway, since I was now starting to feel anxious about getting back to work roughly on time. In order to board the train, I had to lift the cart up the stairs and maneuver it around the other passengers to a quasi-secure “parking” spot midway down the car.

8. At Copley Square I had to transfer trains, meaning I needed to maneuver around standing passengers carrying the laden cart down to the platform, and then repeat the process boarding the train again. All of these situations were made comparatively easy by a) the fact I’m physically able to lift the loaded cart for short bursts of time, b) I was traveling mid-afternoon instead of rush hour, c) I wasn’t getting hate-stares from people who automatically resent the presence of strollers in the subway. (steps 6-8 took maybe 20 minutes).

9. At Hynes, I had to disembark and haul the cart up three flights of stairs (only one of which is equipped with an up escalator) to street level, and then wheel the cart from the station to the MHS. (5 minutes)

10. At the end of the work day, I knew that rush hour on the T precluded trying to get my shopping cart on the T unless I wanted to wait for 45 minutes to an hour for any train empty enough to accommodate me. Since I am able to walk, and didn’t have to rush home for any reason, I walked home — a distance of about 3 miles — pushing the cart ahead of me.

This is the labor it takes to do one errand in the city when you’re relying on public transportation and your own two feet. I’m not writing this post in a bid for folks to pity me — we made the decision to subscribe to the CSA this winter, after all, knowing the time and effort it would take to get our fresh veggies. But I do hope that focusing in on the logistics of one errand this way points out how most of us, at one time or another, even if we are able-bodied adults sans children moving around our environment, are awkward to accommodate. And also point out how the environment is as much “at fault” as the awkward human being in question.

Rather than bitching about those of us who crowd the sidewalk with shopping carts, strollers, or walkers, we might think about the assumptions that led to sidewalks being a certain width (i.e. that all those who use the sidewalk are people who can walk unaided and unburdened with goods). While some of us might be able to carry our children (or our groceries) in wraps or packs or tote bags, others may not be strong enough to carry 45 pounds of produce (or exhausted toddler) for three miles — or time our outings before/after rush hour in order to actually fit on the T without the other passengers complaining or resenting you.

More and more, I find myself thinking about how the ideal citizen-worker in our world these days is the perfectly-able young adult without any dependents, who never gets ill, and is somehow (magically) perfectly self-sufficient. Not only do they never behave awkwardly in public, take up more space than we think they should, turn up their music louder than we’d like, lose their train of thought in the grocery aisle, or fumble with their wallet at the cash register … they manage their bodies (and those of their children) and personal belongings so that the rest of us can imagine they are not there.

Oh, I’ve been there. I’ve been annoyed and judgy and exhausted and angry and in the headspace where I just want to get home and not deal with one more stranger ever anywhere. But that’s just not the way the world works. We’re all awkward, noisy, thoughtless, slow. We all take up more space, sometimes, than others think we should.

And it seems like an important exercise or practice for each of us to — regardless of how we feel and what we think of others’ choices and presence —  realize that they’re probably just trying to get around the city like we are, and that sometimes getting from point A to B is an awkward, clumsy process. One that does, in fact, take up space in the world.

And that we all, in fact, equally entitled to be mobile, and to move around the city when and how we need to in order to live our lives.

booknotes: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

16 Tuesday Oct 2012

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The books to review are piling up, and the longer they sit in the queue the more I feel obligated to be Insightful about what I’ve read. So in an attempt to resist intellectual overwhelm, here are a few shorter reflections on the books I read in the first half of October.

Lepore, Jill. The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death (Knopf, 2012). Harvard Professor of American history (and sometime MHS researcher) Jill Lepore’s latest work is a collection of essays, most of which began as pieces for The New Yorker, and are published here in expanded form. Despite its formidable title, Mansion is episodic rather than exhaustive, exploring American understandings of humankind — how humans begin, how we do and should live, how we die — in a series of engaging chapters on such topics as baby food (and breastfeeding), children’s literature (and children’s libraries), teaching sexual knowledge, parenting advice, and the medicalization of the end of life. Lepore is a skillful writer and deeply philosophical historian who believes passionately in the importance of translating her scholarly work into terms meaningful outside the academy. As an historian, I appreciate her deft use of primary source research in essays that range across time and space, making eloquent and thought-provoking connections between seemingly disparate historical events, cultural enthusiasms, and the persons and places of America’s past.

Strayed, Cheryl. Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar (Vintage, 2012). After my sister raved about Wild and Bitch magazine offered me a compelling and eloquent author interview with Cheryl Strayed, I realized it was time to read Tiny Beautiful Things. Over the years, I’ve definitely been exposed to the “Dear Sugar” columns Strayed wrote for The Rumpus, and in fact have a favorite quote from one such column right here on the feminist librarian (look to your left). Yet I’d never read “Dear Sugar” systematically, and in some ways I’m glad of that. While each individual column has power, taken together as a book-length collection Strayed’s attitude of kindness and care, the quality of listening and clarity of thought, become all the more beautiful and heartbreaking. The experience of reading Tiny Beautiful Things reminded me most strongly of the first time I cracked open Traveling Mercies. Cheryl Strayed’s voice is as raw and redemptive as Anne Lamott’s, though without the Jesus talk (for some of you that’ll be a plus, for others a minus — I urge you to read Tiny either way).

Summerscale, Kate. Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady (Bloomsbury, 2012). In the summer of 1858, one Henry Robinson appeared before the newly-created divorce court in London and petitioned for the legal dissolution of his marriage to Isabella Robinson on the grounds of adultery. His lawyer put forward as evidence Isabella’s extensive and detailed diaries, which her husband had discovered while his wife lay ill with fever. The diaries, Mr. Robinson argued, provided evidence not only of Mrs. Robinson’s unhappiness in marriage (she wrote openly about her hatred for her husband and her plans for desertion once her children were grown) but also of her desire for other men, and — most damning of all — her longstanding emotional, and perhaps physical, affair with a friend of the family. Summerscale uses court documents, family papers, and the press coverage of the trial to piece together the story of “Mrs. Robinson’s disgrace.” What emerges is a fascinating tale of Victorian marriage law, sexual morality, conceptions of mental health and madness, and the unstable boundary of fact and fiction.

Valenti, Jessica. Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores the Truth About Parenting and Happiness (Houghton Mifflin, 2012).  Valenti’s latest is a quick read that I polished off earlier this week while waiting for Hanna in the waiting room of her physical therapist’s office. Using her own, fairly traumatic, entry into motherhood as a launching pad to explore the modern culture of mothering and parenting, Jessica Valenti (founder and former executive editor of Feministing) follows in the footsteps of Judith Warner (Perfect Madness), Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels (The Mommy Myth) in critiquing the culture of “intensive mothering” and its unrealistic expectations of modern parents. For anyone who has read these earlier works (or, indeed, follows discussions about parenting in the feminist blogosphere), there will be little new here — though I think that in itself is noteworthy. Jessica comes from a generation or two past that of Warner, Douglas, and Michaels — yet still seems held hostage, to some extent, by the same societal judgyness around motherhood and family life. I found myself wondering, as I read, why the hell we continue to feel trapped by other peoples’ expectations. Obviously, public policy and law as a material effect on parenting options — but in the realm of “styles” and personal decisions it really should come down to what works for you and your family — if a given approach isn’t working, try something else.*

Which is part of the reason why I felt impatient with the way Valenti saves some of her most pointed criticism for proponents of “natural” parenting, whose philosophies and practices she felt betrayed by as a new mother coping with the aftermath of an emergency Cesarean and a daughter who needed months in the NICU to survive. While her own struggles are what they are and deserve to be articulated, this sometimes leads to lopsided critique — for example the pages and pages on the dangers of fanatic breastfeeding with only a single (very short) paragraph on the discrimination and judgyness leveled at parents who choose to (and are able) to nurse their kids. So it didn’t work for her, In a book that otherwise admirably refuses to take “sides” in the banner feminist parenting battles, I felt the treatment of the parenting practices Valenti rejected on a personal could have used more nuanced discussion from a feminist perspective.

*I actually think this holds true for any family, whether young children are involved or not.

in which I write letters: the problem with throwing religious home-educators under the bus

04 Tuesday Sep 2012

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Dear Claire,

I’m writing to you as a long-time reader of The Tenured Radical, as a fellow blogger, fellow leftist, and individual who spent the first seventeen years of my life learning outside of school — as did my fiancee, until she entered public high school. I wanted to respond to your post regarding home education and the religious right.

I realize that in our contemporary landscape “homeschooling” in the public eye has become virtually synonymous with conservative Christian organizations like the Home School Legal Defense Fund (which actually financed a lot of the court battles that made home education legal for families of all political persuasions), and families who take their children out of public schools for fundamentalist religious reasons. However, I find your characterization of home education “as a grassroots movement” being anti-intellectual and anti-citizenship troubling.

Yes, you are talking about a specific subset of home-educating families and philosophies, but throughout your piece you obscure the wide variety of motivations to home education and styles of learning and teaching by using “home schoolers” as a substitute for “fundamentalist-evangelical Christian conservative homeschoolers.” As a woman who grew up as part of the “grassroots” home education movement in Michigan during the 1980s and 90s, this erases my experience — and the experience of many of my contemporaries — whose home-based education expanded horizons, rather than limiting and controlling them.

You say in your post:

Public education is about putting citizens in the making in one place to talk to each other and learn together.  Is it an accident that when large numbers of voters fail to participate in a common enterprise with Americans not of their choosing that we have so little to say to each other during an election season?

I have seen a lot of anti-homeschooling liberals express similar sentiments, that home education is somehow inherently un-democratic because it removes children from the public square. This is a very limited understanding of the potential of learning outside of school, and in fact many of the progressive home-education folks I know would argue precisely the opposite: that home-based education takes children out of the age-segregated ghetto of school and brings them into the community at large.

As a home-educated child, rather than spending my days in a school building I volunteered at cultural institutions such as the public library and the local history museum, participated in community art classes and music groups, in sports activities and “field trips.” I held part-time jobs as a teenager that not only gave me excellent work experience but also further grounded me in the community. I was involved in church, another locus of social interaction and civic participation.

Obviously, this is not an automatic benefit of home-based education. But I would argue that exposure to a wide range of viewpoints, diversity, and the values of civic participation is not an automatic benefit of public education either. Public schools can be homogeneous, and educators narrow-minded, just like individual parents and families can be. My siblings both attended public high school for part of their grade-school education and benefited from that experience; my brother now teaches art in a public middle school. I am grateful that public provision of education is part of our nation’s commitment to its citizens, and feel that — like hospitals or roads! — public schools are our responsibility to fund whether or not we choose to, or need to, access those services.

Suffice to say, I believe it is a profound mis-characterization of home-education per se to suggest it is at root an anti-democratic, anti-public-spirited endeavor. Obviously, some people who make the choice to home-educate will do so for sectarian reasons, to withdraw from the society at large, because of profound disagreement with mainstream policies. There are examples to be found on the left as well as the right in this regard. But I would argue that this is a freedom-of-conscience decision. There is a long tradition in the United States of allowing parents to decide what the best method of education provision for their family is; compulsory education does not mandate form or content for good reason — local, familial, and religious priorities and needs vary. There is no “one size fits all” that would work well for the majority.

I believe that demonizing/scapegoating people who choose to home-educate for religious reasons actually threatens the freedom of all of us to form and organize our families as we see fit (see: same-sex marriage, polyamory, attachment parenting, etc.). It is certainly within our rights to point out that some forms of parenting foster us/them thinking — but home education is not the cause of that parenting outcome. It is simply the chosen method of delivery for some families. It is a tool, not a uniform ideology, and the values a family holds will shape how home education works for that family, rather than home education pre-determining an exclusionist, reactionary outcome.

In closing I want to thank you for your articulate, insightful blogging at The Chronicle; I have your blog in my Google Reader and regularly click in to read what you have to say. As a fellow blogger I realize that no one post can cover all aspects of an issue. In this instance, I just wanted to share my perspective as someone “on the ground” as a home-educated adult, who has been on the receiving end of fellow liberals’ suspicion of home-based education for many years! I think that the picture is (as always) much more complex than outsiders perceive it to be, and conflating “home education” with “reactionary conservative isolationist” does more harm than good.

Sincerely,
Anna

blogging at In Our Words: we can give them words: clearing space for children to explore gender and sexuality

14 Tuesday Aug 2012

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I wrote another post for In Our Words this week on how parents (and allies) can support children in their gender independence and sexual fluidity (I’m not sure why the editors lopped “sexuality” off the title I supplied).

To begin with, don’t conflate gender expression with sexual preference. Our culture does this constantly, whether in the assumption that princess boys will grow up to be gay or that women who are butch sleep exclusively with lipstick lesbians. Some of those boys will no doubt grow up with same-sex desires, and some women who refuse to wear skirts are queer. One does not lead to the other. While grown-up queers often retroactively identify nascent gayness in childhood gender rebellion (“I was never good at sports”; “I hated playing with dolls”) and the gender police often conflate gender non-conformity with queer sexuality, they’re two different aspects of identity and experience. Children negotiate gender roles from the moment of birth, when they’re assigned a gender and adults interact with them accordingly (see Fine and Rivers & Barnett in the reading list below).

Children are also sexual beings, it’s true, but sexuality in the adult sense is something we grow into. It’s a process. And presuming adult sexual preferences for a child — whether it’s teasing them about a playground “boyfriend” or assuming their gender non-conformity will lead to same-sex desire — is unfairly boxing them into predetermined categories. We cannot know what the gender and sexuality landscape will look like as they grow into adulthood, and we cannot know what words they will choose to describe themselves. All we can do is give them a multitude of words from which to choose.

You can check out the whole piece — including my “suggested reading” list (I’m a librarian after all!) over at In Our Words.

booknotes: confronting postmaternal thinking

31 Tuesday Jul 2012

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I’ve been threatening to write a review of Julie Stephens’ Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care (Columbia University Press, 2012) for over a month now but for some reason my thoughts will not gel. It’s a slim book that is trying to do lots of cultural work, pulling together threads of philosophy, political science, history, memory studies, feminism, and ethics. I had very intense reactions while I was reading it, but those reactions feel … half-digested still. In another six months or a year I may have to go back and give it another pass. A second reading might help clarify my reactions. In the meantime, here are some of my initial impressions and reactions.

  • As I said in my review of Love the Sin, Julie Stephens, in Postmaternal, is likewise critiquing our neoliberal conception of who gets to be a citizen, and who is a good citizen. She is particularly interested in the way care-giving and caregivers are tolerated only insofar as they manage to fit the norm of a citizen-worker. For example, she observes that workplace concessions to working parents — and especially working mothers — are often designed to streamline women’s return to full capacity as workers, to make invisible their care-giving responsibilities, rather than restructuring work and the workplace to accommodate care-giving cycles in family life. Her reflections on the role of  “worker” and the role of “mother” experience unstable moral and market values reminded me of Katha Pollitt’s reflections on how “stay at home mom” and “welfare queen” are two class-based conceptions of the same care-giving responsibilities, dependent on economic resources. Ultimately, care-giving in our society is an activity one only gets to perform if either a) it’s a monetized activity, or b) one’s obligations as a worker-citizen are met by one’s self or a proxy (e.g. husband). 
  • Stephens has made a deliberate choice to focus on care-giving as “women’s work,” a position that reminded me of the way in which Carol Gilliganrecognizes care and empathy as universal human abilities that have, historically, fallen to women in patriarchal culture. I was intensely uncomfortable with this choice — something I’d like to think about more deeply. While I understand her decision not to erase the way our culture genders care-giving, I’m less comfortable with the way respect for historically-feminine care-giving to an emphasis on gender difference. For example, she argues at one point that “the only way to address this failure [of neoliberal societies to account for the necessity of care] would be to reinvigorate the strands of feminism that are attuned to gender difference” (137). I can’t underscore enough how uncomfortable this makes me, and I think there are ways to address the erasure of the bodily aspects of care (e.g. breastfeeding, pregnancy and childbirth) Stephens is concerned about without gender essentialism — a type of feminism I would really rather not see revivified. Which brings me to my next point:
  • In writing about possible policy- and personal-level solutions to the modern-day marginalization of care — solutions that do not rely on the gender binary — I wish Stephens had referenced more queer activists and theorists, such as legal scholar Nancy Polikoff, whose work moved beyond the theoretical to lay out very concrete suggestions about how law and public policy could support and respect networks of care. And birth activist Miriam Perez, whose recent piece on trans birth parents suggests ways to take into account the embodied aspects of nurture without falling back on binary notions of gender.
  • I found Stephens’ use of oral history and memory studies literature an intriguing approach. In what I think is one of the strongest aspects of her analysis, Stephens examines the way mid-twentieth-century feminist activism around maternal and care-giving activities has been erased from cultural memory. She uses oral histories with “second wave” feminists as a way to recover these narratives and explore how their activism was never solely about getting ahead in a man’s world and rejecting the mother/motherhood/maternalism (as backlash culture has often argued). “[My] interviews [with “second wave” feminists] depart from culturally prevailing assumptions about work-centered feminism. Unexpectedly irreverent attitudes toward paid work are expressed,” she writes (91). I wish she had lingered a bit more on this relationship between feminist activism and how feminist activists remember their own life choices (and imagine the life choices of previous generations).
  • Building on these oral histories and the notion of a  forgotten politics of the maternal, Stephens argues that non-market relationships and care-giving are primary sites of moral and ethical development and action. Postmaternal is, in part, a call for neoliberal Western cultures (Stephens is Australian, and her sources are primarily Australian and American) to re-assert non-market values into political culture, reclaiming care as a non-marginal, legitimate activity even if it is not contributing to the national economy. As she writes,

“What a culture chooses to remember and forget has decidedly political character. In the deep discomfort surrounding the maternal in feminist reminiscence, it is possible to see a glimpse of an alternative politics where human dependency and vulnerability are imagined as the primary connection between people, not market performance” (70).

This assertion of an “alternative politics where human dependency and vulnerability are imagined as the primary connection between people,” and the connection Stephens draws between that political imagination and feminist activism is the strongest part of her argument. In revisiting/revising feminist collective memory to re-center a politics of care (which has always been present, but often actively forgotten) is what I would consider to be vitally-important work. And I hope to see her build on this aspect of her thesis — while perhaps letting go some of her reliance on gender essentialism as the path to that politics of connectivity.

I don’t think gender essentialism needed. I think we can honor the embodied experience of persons, even birth-and breast feeeding parents, without linking embodiment and the bodily aspects of care to femaleness and womanhood — at least in any more than an historical sense. I don’t believe there is anything wrong with acknowledging the historically-feminine nature of caregiving; I do believe there is something harmful about basing present-day efforts to re-center care on gendered notions of women’s particular abilities and priorities. I am hoping that we can use Postmaternal as a building block toward a more inclusive, more caring future — without relying on beliefs about gendered bodies and identities that have troubled our past.

All in all, I’m really glad I read Stephens provocative book and I’m looking forward to discussing it with friends — I’ve already promised to lend my copy to Molly (of first the egg) and I’m looking forward to what she has to say after reading it!

movienotes: brave

17 Tuesday Jul 2012

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Teenage Merida and her mother Elinor (via)

To escape the heat on Saturday, Hanna and I went to the movies and saw Brave (Disney and Pixar, 2012) which most of you have probably heard much of a muchness about since it was released back in June. There’s been tons of insightful, critical analysis of Brave and what it does and doesn’t do to advance our cultural narratives about girls and women. I’m not going to try and reproduce or summarize the conversation here — but a few of my favorite reviews/reflections come from Amanda Marcotte, Jaclyn Friedman, Heida, and Lili Loofbourow.

What follows are some heat-and-humidity-infused reflections on what moved me about Brave and thoughts about some of the non-Disney cultural narratives the movie may be drawing its inspiration from.

Spoilers below. Also massive rambling.

First and foremost, the most striking thing about Brave — and I’m far from the first person to point this out — is that the story centers on a mother-daughter relationship. Let me say this again: The story centers on a mother-daughter relationship. Just last week, my friend Molly tweeted about how her six-year-old son Noah has just started noticing all of the dead and absent mothers (thanks Freud and Jung!) in children’s literature. When parents aren’t dead, they’re most often either out-of-touch with their children’s lives or actively malicious. Often, for women, there’s a twofer with the dead-mother-evil-stepmother theme.

The lesson in these stories is, so often, that parents and children (and the generations they represent) are inherently in conflict, and that women are naturally rivals with one another — usually for power as represented by male attention/alliances).

In Brave, Merida and her mother are in conflict to begin with: Merida is a rebellious teenager (very much a modern American construct) and Elinor is a mother trying to do what she thinks is best for her daughter and letting her fear muddle her ability to see clearly what is best for her daughter. The narrative tension of Brave revolves around mother and daughter finding their way back to the quality of relationship they have lost, while incorporating into that relationship a greater — more adult — knowledge about themselves and one another.

I think the radical audacity of this storyline finally hit home to me in last act when Merida defends her mother (temporarily turned into a bear) against the clan leaders who believe they’re avenging Elinor’s death. And then when Elinor-as-bear comes to the defense of her daughter who is nearly killed by the real beast, Mordu. It’s a powerful thing to see, on screen, a princess defend her living mother from death rather than speaking in her absent/dead mother’s name. And an equally powerful thing to see a living mother, a fierce mother bear, coming to the defense of her girlchild — not only rescuing her from Mordu, but ultimately listening to Merida’s wish to delay any marriage plot until some nebulous future.

Let’s just say that when Merida says to her father and his soldiers, “I will not let you kill my mother!” I could feel the tears spring into my eyes. How often does a girlchild get a chance to say this in our Western fairy tale canon?

This reworking of the mother-daughter relationship speaks not only to our own interpersonal relationships, but also to the broader social narratives of generational tensions. I’m thinking especially here about feminist “waves” and the way we’re so often encouraged to think of feminist activism in generational terms, with overbearing, bitter, jealous mothers pitted against bratty, sexually-potent, ungrateful daughters. Brave points out that division between mothers and daughters — the failure to listen on both sides — obscures the true villain of the piece: adherence to (patriarchal) tradition borne of fear.* I’d argue that such a message is one we truly can’t get enough of in this world obsessed with generational rebellion and rupture. By seeing each generation as a threat to the one that preceded it, we’re hobbling our chances for deep, progressive change.

A few more (briefer) observations.

Merida owes much of her adolescent truth-telling, I suspect, to fictional fore-sisters such as Jane Eyre and Psyche. As Carol Gilligan argues in The Birth of Pleasure and more recently in Joining the Resistance, children — she would argue particularly girl children on the cusp of adolescence — are bellweathers and truth-tellers, pointing out the deceptions we practice on ourselves and one another, and demanding honesty from themselves and those around them. I’d also suggest that Brave‘s narrative lineage owes debts to Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, and to virtually every film produced by Miyazaki. Particularly Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, and (Hanna tells me, since I haven’t yet seen it) Nausicaa.

As with Into the Woods, we have themes of parents having to let their children grow up and forge their own path (see: Bernadette Peters’ brilliant witch) while not abandoning them wholesale (see: “You Are Not Alone”). The message in Brave as in Into the Woods is that heroes — regardless of gender — are strongest when working in cooperation with others, and that this message of community isn’t incompatible with forging a new path.

As in Miyazaki’s films, the protagonist(s) Merida and Elinor must learn values such as respect for others, harmony with the community, and a balance between the qualities identified as “masculine” and “feminine” in our culture. Merida is fierce and physically fearless, yet needs to learn the art of political persuasion and empathy for others. There is a subtler morality at play in Brave that shares closer kinship with Eastern folk traditions (in my admittedly limited experience) than it does with the fairy tales Disney usually draws on for inspiration.

And, of course, there’s the brilliant freedom of watching a film about a teenage girl that is decidedly not a marriage plot. Merida’s age is indeterminate, though her body is that of a young woman gone through puberty. She isn’t anti-sex, or anti-marriage even — she’s simply not ready to make the choice. As others before me have pointed out, to have a teenage girl in a mainstream film whose sexuality is indeterminate — meaning she could swing straight, gay, bi, fluid, or something else entirely: We don’t know. And, for once, it’s immaterial to the plot! — is a breath of fresh air.

This is the exact opposite of pretty much every princess movie — and even most YA novels! — out there on the market, because romance is a driving force in stories about adolescents. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing, but when coupled with heteronormative plots it means that girls look at the narratives about young adulthood and they see that they’re expected to be boy-crazy, or at least boy-interested. They could be boy-interested in the most kick-ass, gender-bending guy on the planet — but boys it almost always is expected to be. And if not boys, then girls (or girls and boys), and it’s always, always, always meant to be an all-consuming preoccupation.

Teenagers are expected, in our culture, to be preoccupied — for better or worse — with sex and relationships. And as a teenager who wasn’t personally driven to explore these things (except in a fictional, future-looking sort of way), I often felt really out of step with stories that depicted my concerns in that way. Merida’s maybe someday but certainly not now attitude toward romantic relationships, coupled with her deep, passionate involvement in her familial relationships, show how teenage girls (and, I’d argue, teenagers more generally) are more complex persons than our media so often portrays them to be.

My one frustration with Brave (and then I promise to stop rambling!) was the one-dimensional portrayal of the male characters, particularly Fergus (Elinor’s husband, Merida’s father). It’s understandable in a 90-minute film that some characters get short-shrift, but the buffoonish character of Fergus, coupled with Elinor’s  level-headed political thinking and parental role can all too easily be read according to the “smart woman married to a boorish man” trope of situation comedy fame (Simpsons and Family Guy anyone?). While the teenage boys put forward to compete for Merida’s hand eventually speak up for their own independent choice of spouse** they are also caricatures clearly meant to communicate “brawn but no brains,” “brash, vain hottie,” and “sensitive weakling.” Since Merida’s protests regarding marriage are valid regardless of the merit of her suitors, it seems like a poor choice to recapitulate harmful stereotypes about men in a film that is otherwise quite smart about women and gender.

I suspect that this shortcoming has less to do with Brave in particular than it has to do with the fact that our culture has still not answered the questions of masculinity posed by feminist thinkers and activists. We haven’t figured out how to tell a story about fully-dimensional, human women, that also includes fully-dimensional human men. In order to tell a story in which a mother and daughter are the central relationship, Elinor’s husband, her (much younger) sons, and Merida’s would-be suitors, cannot be taken seriously — must provide, in fact, the comic relief to an otherwise revolutionary plot. Which leaves open the question, of course, what place fathers, sons, and male lovers might have in this brave new world which Merida and her mother are building for the clans?

Some anti-feminists would argue there isn’t a place for men in the world Elinor and Merida seek to build. I’d argue it will be up to the men — and women alongside them — to discover and create that place for themselves.

*As an aside, the historian and feminist in me would really love to know the details of Elinor’s back-story. She and her husband seem to have a loving relationship, yet she clearly sees marriage to some extent as a political alliance. I yearned for a glimpse inside her head, so that we could understand some of the reasons for her fear, and the reasons for the decisions she made — both in pushing Merida toward a betrothal of political expedience, and then later in choosing to support her daughter’s desire to forge her own path.

**And seen through slash goggles, Hanna and I agree that in the final scene it’s clear at least two of them have found each other as potential mates!