Traditional Family Ideals
In Patricia Hill Collins' article "It's All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation", she introduces the idea of the traditional family ideal. For generations in America, the “perfect family” has often been depicted by a heterosexual married white couple. The “American Dream” has always portrayed this, along with two kids, and a white home with a picket fence. While people in these exact circumstances don’t necessarily live the “ideal” lives, this is what our society has formulated as the goal. This family is exposed to the highest levels of privilege society has to offer.
Before speaking about the many ways in which we can resist the traditional family, I would like to further address the intersectional inequalities which present themselves in numerous aspects of life. A couple of years ago I came across this video which perfectly explains privilege, class, and social inequalities. This video can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K5fbQ1-zps. It portrays the many aspects in which we have no control, that give certain people the upper hand in life. Unfortunately, the circumstances surrounding traditional family ideals allow for inequality throughout different races, sexualities, and social classes.
Resistance to traditional hierarchies would look like any family which strays beyond the expected norm. This could include a single mother or a family with two fathers. Resistance could be a multi-racial couple or one which goes against social norms, having the father be the stay at home parent. This works to abolish the stereotypes and expectations which are placed upon different people within a society. I believe that this sort of resistance would be very effective, as compared to the efforts of other strategies political movements use in an attempt to bring about change because the change will, and always has, started with an individual. Our generation, as compared to our parents' generation, is widely more accepting of the straying from gender roles assigned to humans centuries ago. There are more and more women securing the role of the “bread-bearer” in families. This is because women are now taught from an early age that they can achieve the same things as men can. The normalization of families that do not “fit” the perfect standards allows children to see that they can succeed even if they do not fit the “perfect” criteria. This brings up the very important sociological theory of deviance that contends that people come to identify and behave in ways that reflect how others label them. This occurrence, known as labeling theory, can be reflected in the many years in which we taught girls that they were inferior to men in education, later leading to a submissive life. Families that strip their children of the chance to fall under patriarchal norms stand up to a new form of government and society, in which all people are given better opportunities to succeed at equal rates.
Hi Anastasia, I absolutely agree with your view on how people are recently starting to go against the traditional family ideals and one can see a family in all kinds of forms. The labelling theory is something I have just recently learned about myself as well. People are unaware of the fact they unconsciously internalize the things that people say to them about them. They believe the judgment of someone else right away when it comes to hearing comments about their personality or their looks especially, which is why social media platforms like instagram are such a hot spot for people to get hurt and look for validation. So while I agree when you say that girls are being taught more often now that they can achieve the same amount of success as males and this in turn is leading to more female success in the recent years, I would also like to disagree and add that it must not only be the fact that girls are being taught this in class and told it by their parents and so on, but also the fact that girls themselves must be believing and knowing deep down that they have the capabilities to do what men can do and succeed as well. From my own experience, I don’t think that girls are born thinking that they’re weaker or less capable than boys, but it’s conditioned into us through society as we get older. So our recent successes are a mix of encouraging words from teachers, parents and other near and dear people as well the environment that has changed in our favor to let girls think how they want to think when they’re younger. If a girl thinks she can be a business owner when she grows up, no one is going to forcefully push her to only think about being a stay at home mom when she gets older. We can see examples of this in Disney movies that have started to stop portraying girls as unhappy and soft flowers that are hopeless and fragile until a man shows up.
ReplyDelete-Runa Siddiqi