The kids are all right but the lesbians aren't: Queer kinship in US culture
2012; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 15; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1177/1363460712459311
ISSN1461-7382
Autores Tópico(s)Reproductive Health and Technologies
ResumoThis article examines the troubling erasure of queer difference (and particularly feminist and lesbian difference) in the seemingly benign and inclusive depiction of gay parents and gay kids. Focusing on the hit film about a family headed by two moms – The Kids Are All Right – I wonder what representations of gay kinship push at the boundaries of familial normativity and which ones simply paint the traditional picket fence in rainbow hues? Why are we seemingly so stuck on alternative and diverse families and never get to counterkinship and deep difference? Why can’t gay parents ever get laid (by the same sex they supposedly desire)? Most curiously perhaps, why are most of the parents we see in popular representations (with the exception of The Kids Are All Right) male even when the statistics tell us otherwise? Why are all (televisual, cinematic) parents so wonderfully “accepting” of their queer progeny even as we know queer kids are still getting kicked out of their homes in the “real world” of not so hip family life? An examination of contemporary representations in popular television and film reveals a complex combination of newly inclusive and potentially challenging images with tired and dangerous odes to a universalism that reasserts normative heterosexuality and further effaces feminist critiques of hegemonic family formations.
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