Catherine Opie’s Domestic is a series of large-scale chromogenic color print photographs portraying lesbian families and couples across the United States as well as a series of still lifes from the subjects’ households. The photographs were taken from 1995-1998 and are each about 40x50 inches. The images can be found on the Regen Projects website, where it was exhibited in 1999.
The series portrays a number of women living together in different situations in their own home environments, for example in their backyard, at their kitchen table, in their living room, or even floating in a swimming pool. A wide variety of relationships and people of different ages, as well as ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds are depicted. Some portraits show
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Firstly, her work addresses the idea of community and how it is defined, particularly in the case of a community as wide-reaching as the lesbian community in the United States. Catherine Opie stated in an interview that she wants to “focus on the idea of community, the individuals within that community, and how communities are formed” (Reilly 86), especially those that people “really don’t want to look at” (93) or acknowledge. By depicting a variety of different faces of the community, she gives them a voice and presents relationships between women as something ordinary, and yet unique and showing the individuality of each person. While the images depict “happy domestic moments” (86), many of them are also “suffused with longing” (86), partly due to Opie’s own desire for a long-term romantic relationship, yet also due to the hardships still faced by the queer community. Similarly, her photos contain a sense of emptiness and loss, which Opie describes as being due to her attempts to “capture, document people and places before they disappear” (94), especially due to her profound sense of loss of friends and community due to …show more content…
Strongly interconnected with adoption rights is marriage equality, which at the time of this work existed neither in the United States, nor in Canada, and while the work doesn’t explicitly refer to marriage, the impact of not being legally allowed to marry or adopt children is undeniable in queer families’ situations. The portrayal of non-nuclear families aids in their demystification; in portraying the families and couples engaged in everyday activities such as having a conversation on the couch or playing with their kids, the viewer is able to relate to the subjects, while appreciating their individualities. This also helps in creating a sense of visibility in a positive manner and to quell the fear of the “other”. Opie portrays her nostalgia for a “utopian notion of difference” (94), the “possibility of what America was set out to stand for: freedom, diversity” (95) in her art and believes that her identity as a political artist stems from her fear and exhaustion due to the “omnipresent xenophobia, homophobia” (95) in
Taste, which is, after all, the insecurity of the middle class, became the homosexual's licentiate to challenge the rule of nature,” (Rodriguez 124). This stereotype communicates to the general public that homosexuality or the ones that fall in the boxes of LGBTQ (and more) are the individuals that have taste in fashion, makeup, food, home decor, etc., also even by claiming to be something out of heterosexuality disrupted the laws of nature which is smart for Rodriguez to input in Late Victorians. In addition, the use of symbolism in Rodriguez’s essay regarding homosexuality is portrayed as a home. The Victorian houses that were built for middle-class individuals, which were being claimed by homosexual men to live in, marry, or start a family in, in San Francisco. The portrayal of home as a place of comfort, safety, and family were things that homosexual men (or women), and anything in between craved for in mortality like heterosexual beings. Apart from the symbolism, I noticed that Rodriguez liked metaphors, anaphora, hyperbole, and repetition in his
Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, documents the author's discovery of her own and her father's homosexuality. The book touches upon many themes, including, but not limited to, the following: sexual orientation, family relationships, and suicide. Unlike most autobiographical works, Bechdel uses the comics graphic medium to tell her story. By close-reading or carefully analyzing pages fourteen through seventeen in Fun Home one can get a better understanding of how a Bechdel employs words and graphic devices to render specific events. One can also see how the specific content of the pages thematically connects to the book as a whole. As we will see, this portion of the book echoes the strained relationship between Bruce Bechdel and his family and his attempts to disguise his homosexuality by creating the image of an ideal family, themes which are prevalent throughout the rest of the nook.
The idea of “family” is almost entirely socially constructed. From grandparents, to friends, to wives and fiancés, the means by which we decide who is related to us and who is not is decided by the person and their milieu. In Mignon R. Moore’s “Independent Women: Equality in African-American Lesbian Relationships”, Eviatar Zerubavel’s Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity and Community, and Franz Kafka’s The Judgement, this idea is tested. Who do we consider close enough to us to share our most intimate details and how do we choose them? Each piece offers a different view, which is the “right” way for each of the people described, whether broad (as in Zerbavel’s reading) or specific (as in Moore’s reading), but there are also many similarities in the ways family is defined and actualized.
In an Affidavit to the Family Court in 1990 in a case regarding cross-cultural adoption, Dr. Leo Steiner, a former director of the Aboriginal Community Crisis Team said, “A child who is conflicted about his identity is severely handicapped. He may have developed functional skills, but he is also subject to a gnawing, chronic self-questioning…” (Lloyd Dolha 2009). For many years, Aboriginal parents have had to live in complete fear that their children could be taken from their homes and be placed into Middle-Class-Euro-Canadian families at any particular time. The Sixties Scoop changed the dynamics of many families and the effect this unfortunate incident has on both the child taken and the parents lasts forever. In Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth, Drew Hayden Taylor takes the reader on a journey to understand Janice’s story; his outlook on the sixties scoop and the effect this trauma causes on the adopted child is visible within his play. Drew Hayden Taylor highlights the negative effects of the Sixties Scoop of how these children taken not only lose their native language and culture, they also have feelings of guilt and grief, and eventually have a cultural identity crisis.
The tragicomic Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel, is generally considered one of the most important pieces of the modern LGBTQ canon of literature. The graphic novel tells the story of Alison Bechdel’s attempt to find the truth about her father’s sexuality and what lead him to possibly commit suicide. Along the way, Bechdel finds her own sexuality. Bechdel’s choice to write about her and her father’s simultaneous journey to finding their sexuality was revolutionary at the time. Very few authors were writing openly about their own sexuality, and something even more revolutionary that Bechdel addressed was mental illness.
In Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel entitled Fun Home, the author expresses her life in a comical manner where she explains the relationship between her and her family, pointedly her father who acts as a father figure to the family as she undergoes her exhaustive search for sexuality. Furthermore, the story describes the relationship between a daughter and a father with inversed gender roles as sexuality is questioned. Throughout the novel, the author suggests that one’s identity is impacted by their environment because one’s true self is created through the ability of a person to distinguish reality from fictional despotism.
characters created to display a woman’s search for a way out of the bonds of her society.
In the graphic novel Fun Home, by Allison Bechdel, sexual self-discovery plays a critical role in the development of the main character, Allison Bechdel herself; furthermore, Bechdel depicts the plethora of factors that are pivotal in the shaping of who she is before, during and after her sexual self-development. Bechdel’s anguish and pain begins with all of her accounts that she encountered at home, with her respective family member – most importantly her father – at school, and the community she grew up within. Bechdel’s arduous process of her queer sexual self-development is throughout the novel as complex as her subjectivity itself. Main points highlight the difficulties behind which are all mostly focused on the dynamics between her and her father. Throughout the novel, she spotlights many accounts where she felt lost and ashamed of her coming out and having the proper courage to express this to her parents. Many events and factors contributed to this development that many seem to fear.
Trans-racial adoption has been and continues to be on the rise in many parts of the world. Throughout the years numerous questions pertaining to race and ethnicity have been raised. Ethnicity can be defined as a common belief that people with the same ancestry and genealogy should be associated together. While people of the same origin share common sociological aspects, people of the same race share a biological connection. Races are considered to be people who share many aspects of life, like the color of their skin and a common nationalism. A social class of people can be defined as individuals in a society who share the same socioeconomic status. It is a way to describe the social stratification of people in a society. It also gives remedial measures on coping with the issues of racial, religious and gender discrimination along with negative ethnicity that individuals may be faced when adopting a trans-racial child. This research paper covers the adoption of trans-racial children in regards to racism. There is also a discussion on the aspect of divorce in Canada. The following issues that lead to adoption are also included: The issues of poverty, and the experience of infertility.
Women have been given by society certain set of duties, which although change through time, tend to stay relatively along the same lines of stereotypical women activities. In “A Doll House” and “Simply Maria” we see the perpetuation of these forms of behavior as an initial way of life for the two protagonists. Nonetheless we see a progression towards liberation and self discovery towards the development as a human being by breaking the rules of society. Such attitudes soon find opposing forces. those forces will put to the test the tenacity of these women and yield freedom and ownership for their lives which are owned by others at the start of their stories.
Whether a created family is from previous heterosexual relationships, artificial insemination, or adoption, it deserves the same legal rights heterosexual families enjoy. Full adoption rights needs to be legalized in all states to provide a stable family life for children because sexual orientation does not determine parenting skills, children placed with homosexual parents have better well-being than those in foster care, and there are thousands of children waiting for good homes. The argument sexual orientation interferes with ones parenting skills is common belief that Charlotte J. Patterson identifies as myth in her work, Lesbian and Gay Parents and their Children, suggesting the belief that “lesbians’ and gay men’s relationships with sexual partners leave little time for ongoing parent–child interactions.” In the Who is Mommy tonight? case study, how 18 lesbian adoptive parents, 49 lesbian parents who formed their families biologically, and 44 heterosexual adoptive parents experience and perceive their parenting role, how they respond when their children seek them or their partner for particular nurturing, and how the parents negotiate the cultural expectation of a primary caregiver (Ciano-Boyce & Shelley-Sireci, 2002) is looked at.
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist and poet whose writing usually treats contemporary issues, such as feminism, sexual politics, and the intrusive nature of mass society. While she is best known for her works as a novelist, her poetry is also noteworthy. One of her notable poems, “Habitation,” discusses the seriousness of marriage. The speaker basically gives a message that the marriage is not a game or a play; rather, it is a serious, unstable condition that calls for a lot of effort and attention to maintain harmony. In “Habitation,” Atwood uses simple, basic images such as the forest, desert, unpainted stairs, and fire to give a realistic view of marriage. In addition, these images give the poem optimism about unstable conditions of the marriage that can be improved to a happy marriage as a result of effort and attention between couple.
In the novel Picturing Will by Ann Beattie, readers get to identify with the characters after seeing the world in their eyes. The novel, discusses the life of Jody who is a single mother, raising a baby, Will, by herself after her husband ,Wayne, leaves her with no explanation and maintaining her love life with her boyfriend Mel. Mel wants Jody to move with him to New York and Jody doesn’t feel comfortable with that which is why she tries to delay it. Wayne moves to Florida and remarries a woman, Corky, who wants a baby desperately even though her husband wants nothing to do with children. Beattie describes the flaws in the marriages thoroughly which gives the audience a picture of how Will’s parents are working through their marriages, whether it’s a traditional marriage like Mel and Jody’s or a more contemporary marriage like Wayne and Corky’s.
In her essay, entitled “Women’s History,” American historian Joan W. Scott wrote, “it need hardly be said that feminists’ attempts to expose ‘male biases’ or ‘masculine ideology’ embedded in historical writing have often met with ridicule or rebuttal of as expressions of ‘ideology.’” Scott’s essay discusses the efforts of female historians to both integrate themselves into the history disciples and their struggle to add and assimilate female perspectives, influences, and undertakings into the overall story of history. She also talks about the obstacles and potentially biased criticism that female historians have received and faced upon establishing themselves as accredited members of the historical academic community. One of these historians is Natalie
By positing the lesbian as ‘excess’ in the patriarchal system we may fail to note the identities that function as ‘excess’ within our own newly created lesbian community.