This afternoon, I picked up a book on Barbara Kruger, an artist that I wrote about in a blog post earlier this week, from the local library. It’s awesome! (Thanks AMP for suggesting that I look at her stuff). As I was watching women’s volleyball on the Olympics, I found this image, a magazine cover she did in 1992:
It’s from 1992 and all about family values rhetoric. Cool. I don’t have time to read the Newsweek article right now, so I’m just posting it here, along with a few other links I found related to this image:
The following is part one of my series on family values from my feminist debates class.
THE CLASS: CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST DEBATES (GWSS 3004)
First, a little background. Since I came to the U of M in the fall of 2006, I’ve taught a course on contemporary feminist debates five times. Each time I taught it, I aimed to trouble students’ assumptions about what was at stake with some popular feminist issues, such as: reproductive rights, equality in the workplace, and family-as-patriarchal-institution. I chose readings that complicated their ideas about debate as being for or against an issue (as in the case of pro-choice/pro-life) and worked to get them to recognize what J Butler describes as the “irrepressible complexity” of who and what feminism is.
For our unit on feminist family values, I selected readings that went beyond the typical “mommy wars” debate (between career and stay-at-home moms) and the rejection of the Family as an oppressive, patriarchal institution to explore how our understanding of the family in the early 21st century is dominated by the family values rhetoric of the Christian right. We traced the history of “family values” rhetoric and then explored ways to rethink and reclaim feminist (and queer) families and values. As I taught the course, my readings and topics for this section evolved with my increased interest in queer feminism.
The essays that we read for this unitare all responding to a particular moment within American popular/political culture when rhetoric about family values was frequently used to critique feminism and to position feminists as against the family and family values. See my timeline for some general dates related to our discussion.
One oft-cited example of connecting the promotion of family values with the critiquing of feminism is Pat Robertson’s remarks in a 1992 letter opposing Iowa’s equal rights initiative*:
The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.
*Note: When I originally posted this entry earlier today, I indicated that the Robertson quotation came from the 1992 Republic Convention. After further research, I determined that this was not the case (see here for more information).
Another notable (and perhaps the most popular) example of connecting feminism/feminist goals with the erosion of the family and its values is Dan Quayle’s (in)famous comments about the fictional character, Murphy Brown in May of 1992:
It doesn’t help matters when prime time TV has Murphy Brown — a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman — mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another `lifestyle choice’. I know it is not fashionable to talk about moral values, but we need to do it. Even though our cultural leaders in Hollywood, network TV, the national newspapers routinely jeer at them, I think that most of us in this room know that some things are good, and other things are wrong. Now it’s time to make the discussion public.
— Vice President Dan Quayle addressing the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco and criticizing Murphy Brown’s decision to be a single (highly successful) mother, 5/19/92.
[Note: I created an in-class exercise with these above quotations in which students spent about 5-10 minutes free-writing some responses to my questions about them: Is feminism necessarily counter to family values? To morality? Is it possible to redefine the family and family values? If so, how?
Important to note is that Quayle’s comments on Murphy Brown are part of a larger speech in which he claims that one of the primary causes of the LA riots (which happened in the summer of 1992 right after the police who beat Rodney King were found not guilty) is the erosion of traditional family values. (As I will discuss later, discussions of the erosion of family and family values by the right is frequently linked to racist rhetoric and the demonizing/pathologizing of black mothers and families). Here is a transcript of the entire speech and a news clip with an excerpt from the speech:
As an aside: Did you watch the entire clip? What do you make of the juxtaposition, by the newscasters, of the clip about Dan Quayle and his description of Murphy Brown as mocking the importance of fathers with the clip about Robert Reed (Mr. Brady) and the revelation that he had died of AIDS and not cancer? Is this merely coincidence that one clip leads to the next? Or, is some connection being encouraged in the viewer?
It would seem that for both Robertson and Quayle, feminism poses a serious threat to the family and its values about “right and wrong”? But, why is feminism such a threat? Why does feminists’ desire to work for an equal rights amendment (Robertson) or a feminist’s choice to be an unwed mother (Quayle) elicit such extreme responses? What anxieties/fears about white masculinity do these feminists claims tap into (see Chloe’s post for more on this)?
In her essay, “It’s All in the Family,” Patricia Hill Collins focuses her attention on “the family” part of family values by exploring “how six dimensions of the traditional family ideal construct intersections of gender, race, and nation (63) and produce/reinforce gender/race/nation hierarchies. She argues that it is crucial for organizations –feminist or Black Nationalist, for example–to be critically aware how they use/invoke ‘family.’ For more on this article, check out my chart and notes for it.
In their various contributions to the Feminist Family Values Forum, Lloyd, Jimenez, Steinem and Davis focus much of their attention on the “values” part of family values. Indeed, the purpose of the forum was to bring a wide range of women together to talk about what values actually mean and what values feminists want to embrace and promote. See some of my notes for these readings (along with readings by M Pardo and V Lehr).
In bringing all of these readings together, I want us to be curious about:
What are families? What are their values?
Is feminism bad for families and their values?
What sort of values do feminists promote?
What does it mean to value something?
Why is language about values (and morality) so exclusively linked with one particular vision/version of the family?
What differences do you see between the phrases “family values” and “families values”?
WHAT IS THE FAMILY IN “FAMILY VALUES”? Drawing upon the readings from the past two weeks, our discussions (in class and on the blogs), and your own observations, write down some thoughts on these different aspects of the “family.”
PATRIARCHAL WHITE MIDDLE-CLASS CAPITALIST HETEROSEXUAL NUCLEAR “NATURAL”
My 6 year old daughter Rosie created and posted the above sign on our door a few weeks ago. It’s in opposition to the proposed Minnesota Marriage amendment. Rosie passionately believes that you should be able to mary [sic] who you want. Yep, she’s awesome.
Yesterday, as I was looking through various sources on virtue ethics, I came across a book that I checked out of the U of Minnesota library years ago: Bill Bennet’s The Book of Virtues. In fact, I checked this book out around the same time that I started this blog. I know this because I remember checking it out as I was reading and writing about Peter Sagal’s The Book of Vice.
Since first mentioning this book on my blog, I’ve thought about creating some sort of response and/or alternative to Bennet’s call for and list of virtues. My own children’s book of virtues? A critical essay dissecting the problems with Bennet’s approach? An edited collection with essays on various feminist (and queer) virtues? Yep. I’ve tentatively (and rather vaguely) imagined all of these approaches. But, since I’ve been too busy teaching and researching and writing other things (and trying to raise two young kids while struggling to cope with my mom’s diagnosis and then death from pancreatic cancer), I haven’t had enough time to follow through on any of these (rather ambitious) plans. Instead, over the past three years, I’ve sprinkled in random musing about these virtues into my blog posts. Note: I hope to cull this blog sometime soon and collect many of those musings. I’ve also made family values, which Bennet uses The Book of Virtues to promote, a frequent teaching topic for one of the classes that I’ve taught many times for the U of M Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Department.
Inspired by my revisiting of Bennet’s introduction to the book, this week I’m working on collecting and archiving some of my past class summaries from my lecture notes, handouts and course blogs on family values in my feminist debates course. As I’ve mentioned in other blog posts, I’m in the process of migrating my material from my U of M blogs and archiving my teaching resources. I hope to post them in a ridiculously long blog entry by the end of the week.
For now, I want to offer up a question that makes me curious. In the introduction, Bennett argues that his book is a “‘how to’ book for moral literacy” that can provide kids with valuable resources for how to develop a moral/good/admirable character. His vision of moral literacy includes the following character traits:
Self-Discipline
Compassion
Responsibility
Friendship
Work
Courage
Perseverance
Honesty
Loyalty
Faith
Question: What traits do you think are necessary for moral literacy?
This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s is currently at the Walker Art Museum here in Minneapolis. I’m really excited to see it. My sister saw it in Chicago and said it was great. She recommended that I pay particular attention to two artists: Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger. While Kruger’s name didn’t sound familiar, I am familiar with Holzer. I briefly wrote about her awesome twitter account, JennyHolzerMom, a few months ago. In that post, I lamented the fact that Holzer didn’t seem to be tweeting anymore. I checked it just now, and she does have a few more, like this one:
IF YOU’RE HUNGRY FOR THE TRUTH YOU CAN WARM UP SOME LEFTOVERS; I’M NOT MAKING MORE TRUTH WHEN THERE’S GOOD TRUTH JUST SITTING IN THE FRIDGE
— Jenny Holzer, Mom (@JennyHolzerMom) June 7, 2012
and this one:
SOCIETY CONDITIONS YOU TO THINK YOU HAVE FREE WILL BUT REALLY IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE WHAT HAT YOU WEAR, LET’S GO, EVERYONE ELSE’S IN THE CAR
— Jenny Holzer, Mom (@JennyHolzerMom) June 6, 2012
After doing a quick google search for Kruger, I realized that I had seen her work before–I think on a book cover? I like how she combines images with text, especially in this image to the left. I want to do so more research on her; I just requested a book from 2010 about her from the Minneapolis Public Library.
UPDATE: I decided to experiment with Pixelmator and create a response image to put beside Kruger’s “no” image. Here’s mine (which I put together really quickly—through the process of doing it, I learned a few new techniques):
Yesterday I posted this image. It was inspired by some theories/ideas that aim to resist the demand to have a positive attitude and just be happy. In this post, I want to offer a few passages from these theories as a way to engage with and make sense of the image and my motivations.
SMILE OR DIE!
This phrase is a reference to Barbara Ehrenreich’s talk for RSA Animate (see transcript here). In this talk, she critiques “the ideology of positive thinking,” in which people are encouraged expected to have a positive attitude, act as if “there’s nothing wrong” and “just put a smiley face and get on with it.” The problem with this “delusion of positivity” is that it conceals or suppresses any dissent to or questioning of the larger structures that create conditions for our unhappiness. She says:
What could be cleverer as a way of quelling dissent than to tell people who are in some kind of trouble – poverty, unemployment etc – that it’s all their attitude, you know that that’s all that has to change, that they should just get with the programme, smile and no complaining. It’s a brilliant form of social control
So, the command to “smile or die!” is also a demand to not question, not worry and not think about why it might sometimes be good to not be happy. Now, Ehrenreich is not against joy or expressing/experiencing happiness. Instead, she’s against the larger ideology of positive thinking that demands that we suck it up, don’t complain, be cheerful and spread our good feelings to others.
KILLJOY
This idea of spreading good feelings and the ideology of positivity is one of the central themes in Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness. This book and Ahmed’s critique of the “happiness industry” are big inspirations for my image. I’ve written about the feminist killjoy in past posts. Here’s one of my favorite passages from Ahmed about the feminist killjoy:
Say, we are seated at the dinner table. Around this table, the family gathers, having polite conversations, where only certain things can be brought up. Someone says something you find problematic. You respond carefully, perhaps. You might be speaking quietly, but you are beginning to feel “wound up,”recognizing with frustration that you are being wound up by someone who is winding you up. Let us take seriously the figure of the feminist killjoy. Does the feminist kill other people’s joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced or negated under public signs of joy?
The killjoy is someone who refuses to just smile and be happy. Who is willing to be angry or worried or unhappy. Or who will always necessarily fail at being happy in the ways that are demanded of them (ways that usually include a narrow heteronormative/capitalist future and that require living within and therefore reinforcing certain norms).
I JUST WANT YOU TO BE HAPPY
Throughout the book, Ahmed reflects on a phrase that she repeatedly heard as a child: “I just want you to be happy.” She’s particularly interested in the “just want” of this phrase and its implications for thinking through how we understand our own happiness to be tied to others and their willingness to go along with what we imagine to be the right kind of happiness. In describing how this phrase gets uttered, she writes:
We can imagine the speaker giving up, stepping back, flinging up her arms, sighing. I just. The “just” is a qualifier of the want and announces a disagreement with what the other wants without making the disagreement explicit.
To exclaim that you “just want” someone to be happy is not simply to disagree with their approach; it is to claim that their approach will only lead to unhappiness and is therefore bad or not the “right” way to live. And it is to ignore or actively suppress their vision of happiness and joy all for the sake of their “true” happiness.
In my lecture notes from a Queering Desire course that I taught in 2010, I discuss what it means to be happy in the “right” way:
the very hope for happiness means we get directed in specific ways, as happiness is assumed to follow from some life choices and not others” (54).
What life choices are supposed to lead to happiness and which are not? Who gets to decide what leads to happiness and how are those decisions made?
The face of happiness, at least in this description, looks rather like the face of privilege. Rather than assuming happiness is simply found in “happy persons,” we can consider how claims to happiness make certain forms of personhood valuable (11).
Promoting happiness promotes certain ways of living (over others) and certain types of families (11).
“Ideas of happiness involve social as well as moral distinctions insofar as they rest on ideas of who is worthy as well as capable of being happy ‘in the right way'” (13).
In “A Response to Lesbian Ethics,” Marilyn Frye (rightly) asks, “Why should one want to be good? Why, in particular, would a woman want to be good? (56). Her short answer: you shouldn’t. Her longer answer: The demand to be a good girl is intended to keep women in line, to pit them against each other–the “good girls/ladies” vs. “the bad/rebellious women,” and to prevent them from challenging dominant systems of power and privilege.
Be Nice?
This question is inspired by one of my posts from February about Pinterest’s etiquette rule: Be Nice. I wish I had taken a screen shot of the rules; Pinterest has since changed the rule to “be respectful” (which is a much better choice, IMHO). The idea of being nice has specific gendered connotations. I could write a lot about the whole “mean girl” phenomenon (which I taught in my Pop Culture Women course back in 2007…I’ll have to dig up those notes; I don’t think I posted them on that blog, which was my first one ever).
I think I should spend a lot more time writing about why “be nice!” troubles me. It has something to do with how little “being nice” seems to do with expressing care or concern or respect for others. I think it also has something to do with my disdain for etiquette, especially as it relates to “proper” discipline/behavior for girls/women. This disdain for etiquette and manners reminds me of a recent problematizer that I posted.
