Societys conception of a family is deeply entrenched in

heteronormativity. This also functions as a huge solvency

deficit to the aff. Society conceives of a family as a married
man and a woman with straight children, anything else isnt
worthy of attention.
Hudak, Jacqueline, and Shawn V. Giammattei. "Doing family:
Decentering heteronormativity in marriage and family
therapy." Critical Topics in Family Therapy. Springer
International Publishing, 2014. 105-115.
What would family therapy teaching and training look like if we were to deconstruct the core concept of family? In this essay, we begin that conversation by addressing the issue of heteronormativity and the profound impact it has upon the ways we think about and legitimize

The words marriage and family,

are central to some of the
most fiercely debated issues of our time
), there remains no definition of family in the public consciousness
that refers to same-sex couples with children.
relationships.

the nomenclature of our profession,

. Despite the increased visibility of gay men and lesbian women, and the increasingly younger ages at which youth come out (Savin-

Williams, 2005; Tanner & Lyness, 2003

In fact, in the not too distant past, the notions of lesbian mother, gay father or lesbian/gay family would have been

nonexistent and the constitutive terms seen as mutually exclusive. We are further challenged to incorporate the discourses of a younger generation that refuses to define itself within the binary construction of sexual identity and chooses instead to live out narratives of queerness,

In contrast to these
cultural shifts,
{we continue} to engage in heteronormative discourses
seen clearly,
by the frequency with which the language of marriage
couple and family is used
without naming heterosexuality
attention must be given to the importance of cultural discourses and
language as they shape and impact the conception of both reality and
legitimacy
This silence around heterosexuality maintains it as the default
position, a position of dominance and superiority
, the descriptive terms,
couple, or family refers to heterosexual couples or heterosexual families.
Then there are couples and families who have to be named gay or lesbian
because otherwise they are invisible. Within these heteronormative
discourses, heterosexuality and heterosexual forms of relating are considered
the norm.
heteroflexibility, ambisexuality (Morris, 2006; Savin-Williams, 2005). Current research (Diamond, 2008a, 2008b) compels us to incorporate the idea of sexual fluidity into our thinking about life trajectories.

our field continues

for example,

in theory, training, and conference plenaries

. As postmodern

theorists have posited,

(Bruner, 2002; Flax, 1990, Harding 1990; Lather, 1992; Hare-Mustin, 1994, 2004). What is silenced or left unsaid is of tremendous consequence. As Rachel Hare-Mustin (1994) stated, We do not only use language, it uses us. Language is recursive:

it provides the categories in which we think, (p. 22).

. For example

This maintains the illusion that only LGBT individuals have a sexual orientation and that it is unnecessary to examine the development of heterosexuality. As post-modern, feminist family therapists, we begin by situating ourselves in relation to this

work. I (Jacqueline), one of the authors, am a second generation, European-American, middle-class woman who has practiced and taught family therapy since the early 1990s, always with a focus on issues of gender, power, diversity and social justice. I was in a heterosexual marriage
for thirteen years and am the mother of two children. In my mid- forties, I divorced and became partnered with a woman, necessitating that I come out to my children, family, and community. I (Shawn), the other author, am a second generation Italian-American, upper middle-class
married man who has practiced family therapy since 2000. I have been teaching family therapy and specifically about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues in therapy since 2002. Similar to Jacquelines, my work always has a focus on gender, power, diversity, community, and
social justice. I have identified with the LGBT community since I was very young, but have spent many years trying to be normal and straight for my family. I have had long-term, significant relationships over the years with people of different genders. If pushed to choose a category,

heteronormativity
{is} the dominant
and pervasive belief that a viable family consists of a heterosexual mother
and a father raising heterosexual children togethe
each of us would identify as queer because that best represents the fluidity of our life trajectories and who we are today. We contend that

, defined as

r (Gamson, 2000), is an organizing principle that shapes and constrains family therapy theory,

practice, research and training. Perlesz, Brown, Lindsay, McNair, deVaus and Pitts (2006) make the following distinction between it and heterosexism: We have defined heteronormativity as the uncritical adoption of heterosexuality as an established norm or standard. Heterosexism is
the system by which heterosexuality is assumed to be the only acceptable and viable life option and hence to be superior, more natural and dominant (p. 183). Aptly described by Oswald, Blume and Marks (2005) as a vast matrix of cultural beliefs, rules, rewards, privileges and

heteronormativity is buttressed by claims about what is considered

normal and healthy for individuals, couples, and families.
Heteronormativity sustains the dominant norm of heterosexuality by
rendering marginal any relational structure that falls outside of this norm.
Further, heteronormativity renders the diversity of human sexuality and
identities invisible
. This creates a
category of other in our culture, which is rendered invalid or pathologic
sanctions (p. 144),

. This invisibility is marked by the fact that there is limited language to describe sexual minority experience and identities within dominant discourses

al. What little

language there is often creates false binary systems that are inaccurate representations of the actual lived experiences of many individuals. Given this lack of language, we often are left with the antiquated and imprecise categories of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT).

The heteronormative presumption, that everyone is heterosexual unless

proven otherwise, is best expressed by the concept of the closet, a
metaphor for keeping one's sexual orientation and/or gender or sexual
identity a secret

. Sedgwick (1990) called the closet the defining structure for gay oppression in this century, (p. 71). Kenji Yoshino (2006) described it beautifully: It was impossible to come out and be done with it, as each new person

erected a new closet around me, (p. 16-17). Gender, Sexuality and Family Intrinsic to heteronormative assumptions are ideas about correct or normal gender, sexuality, and family. Oswald, Blume and Marks (2005) point out that it is the combination of these three structural

Heteronormativity entails a convergence of at least

three binary opposites: real males and real females versus gender
deviants, natural sexuality versus unnatural sexuality, and genuine
families versus pseudo families
All of the markers of
adulthood - dating, marriage, and parenting - are traditionally tied to
heterosexuality
components that constitute heteronormativity as a system of privilege. Oswald et al. state:

(p. 144). The construction of binary opposites creates the illusion of an actual boundary between various genders and identities and privileges one side over

the other. Gender, sexuality and family are intrinsically linked, and as Oswald et al. state: Doing sexuality and doing family properly are inseparable from doing gender properly(p. 144).

. Adult competencies associated with heterosexuality are distributed on the basis of gender (Spaulding, 1999). Achieving mature adult status is most commonly measured by milestones that are linked to traditional heterosexual

gender roles and behaviors. The transformative use of gender as a verb is worth noting, as it was important in breaking down essentialist and binary assumptions about masculinity and femininity. Queer theorist Judith Butler (1990) introduced the notion of gender as an act or
performance rather than a quality intrinsic to ones inherent nature. In this paradigm, gender is what you do at particular times, rather than a universal of who you are. Historically it was believed that people were inherently male or female, gay or straight, and each of these was
dichotomously opposed to its counterpart (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). This essentialist narrative of gender and sexuality continues to be a powerful and privileged narrative in our culture (Fausto-Sterling, 2000; Laird, 2003)

The family is a meat grinder of gender normativity that nothing can

escape. The monogamous long term relationship forecloses the
possibility of all alternative family structures. Masculinity and
femininity are reproduced throughout the entire social field. Hardt
and Negri write,
Michael Hardt, Professor of Literature at Duke and Antonio Negri,taught at Universit de Vincennes
with K all-stars Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida. Commonwealth. 2009. p. 160-2.
the family
is the principal if not exclusive site of collective social experience , cooperative labor
The family is perhaps the primary institution in contemporary society for mobilizing the common. For many people, in fact,

arrangements, caring, and intimacy. It stands on the foundation of the common but at the same time corrupts it by imposing a series of

the family is a machine of gender normativity

that constantly grinds down and crushes the common. The patriarchal
structure of family authority varies in different cultures but maintains its
general form; the gender division of labor within the family, though often critiqued, is
extraordinarily persistent; and the heteronormative model dictated by the family varies
remarkably little throughout the world. The family corrupts the common by imposing gender
hierarchies and enforcing gender norms, such that any attempt at alternative gender
practices or expressions of alternative sexual desires are unfailingly closed
down and punished. Second, the family functions in the social imaginary as the sole
paradigm for relationships of intimacy and solidarity, eclipsing and usurping all
other possible forms. Intergenerational relationships are inevitably cast in the parent-child model (such that teachers who
hierarchies, restrictions, exclusions, and distortions. First,

care, for example, should be like parents to their students), and samegeneration friendships are posed as sibling relationships (with a band of

All alternative kinship structures, whether based on sexual

relationships or not, are either prohibited or corralled back under the rule of
the family. The exclusive nature of the family model, which carries with it
inevitably all of its internal hierarchies, gender norms, and heteronormativity,
is evidence of not only a pathetic lack o f social imagination to grasp other forms of intimacy and solidarity but also a lack
of freedom to create and experiment with alternative social relationships and
nonfamily kin ship structures.35Third, although the family pretends to extend desires and interests beyond
the individual toward the community, it unleashes some of the most extreme forms of narcissism and
individualism. It is remarkable, i n fact, how strongly people believe that acting in the interests of their family is a kind of altruism
brothers and sorority sisters).

when it is really the blindest egotism. When school decisions pose the good of their child against that of others or the community as a whole,
for example, many parents launch the most

ferociously

antisocial arguments under a halo of virtue, doing all that is necessary in the

Political
discourse that justifies interest in the future through a logic of family
continuityhow many times have you heard that some public policy is necessary for the good of your children?reduces
the common to a kind of projected individualism via one's progeny and betrays an extraordinary
name of their child, often with the strange narcissism o f seeing the child as an extension or reproduction of themselves.

incapacity to conceive the future in broader social terms.36 Finally, the family corrupts the common by serving as a core institution for the
accumulation and transfer of private property. The accumulation of private property would be interrupted each generation i f not for the legal

Down with the family!not, of course, in order for us to

become isolated individuals but instead to realize the equal and free
participation in the common that the family promises and constantly denies
and corrupts.
form of inheritance based on the family.

Compulsory heterosexuality is a social disease that erases

anything different than it.
Griffin, Gwendolyn. Women and Language, http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G120852452.html AJM

Heterosexism is a pervasive social disease which is widely (and silently) accepted throughout
family, media, and society. Nearly all the media (which constantly reflect the focuses and desires of society) is exclusively heterosexual. The
way our society is constructed and the influence media have in society only work to implement heterosexism. I question the ways which
individuals may strive to cast out heterosexism, how we may refute compulsory heterosexuality, i.e., heterosexism. In turn, I hope to shift
societys reference points such that people that they are, (including asexuals, bisexuals, and homosexuals) are considered by our society to be

Wittig calls heterosexuality a political regime. Following

from this, heterosexism is the enforcement of that regime. The
overbearing presence of heterosexism within our society only
highlights the hierarchy of heterosexuality over homosexuality.
Heterosexuality is given more validity, more location, and infinite
space to speak. As a result, homosexuals live in silence,
unrecognized and invalidated. Unrecognition is the forerunner of
these. If one is not presented in the everyday language and images surrounding us, one is in essence dismissed. As a
homosexual, one has to fight for the notion that we even exist. It is
by and from this recognition that violence against homosexuals is
allowed to go virtually unchecked. Knowing this, one cannot help but have some grain of fear arising from
normal. Monique

having to question whether or not one is protected. This is also the fear of not being accepted by friends, coworkers, family, and
acquaintances. In not having some part of ones self recognized, one may lead a fractured identity in which the homosexual aspect is muted.

The barriers constructed by

heterosexism would try to mold us. We must resist. We must speak
until we are heard. We must fight the barriers, stand up for
ourselves as our whole (not fractured) selves. We must work to undo
the myths surrounding homosexuality, which flow form the stream of
unrestrained ignorance. We must educate. That is the ultimate purpose of this paper: education.
The following are examples from old journals of mine, added in an attempt to personalize this essay, in order that one might realize: it is
not all just abstract theory; the personal is indeed political.
There is not space for that part to speak in the everyday realm.

And, Wages are a tool of heteronormative domination used to reentrench the ideal that the man of the house earns enough so that
the woman can stay at home and fry up his dinner. Living, or family,
wages re-entrench this belief.

Jaffe, Sarah. "A Day Without Care." Jacobin Magazine. N.p., n.d.
Web.
A hundred years ago [Benjamin] Franklin said that six hours a day was enough for anyone to work and if he was right then, two hours a day ought to be enough now. Lucy Parsons spoke those words in 1886, shortly before the
execution of her husband, Albert. The two had been leaders in the eight-hour-day movement in Chicago, which culminated in a general strike, a rally, and the throwing of a bomb into the crowd in Haymarket Square. Albert Parsons,
along with three other anarchists, was hanged for the crime, though hed already left the rally by the time the bomb was thrown. Lucy kept up the fight for the rest of her life, working with anarchists, socialists, the Industrial
Workers of the World, and the Communist Party for the cause. Women like Lucy Parsons were at the heart of the struggle for the shorter work week, an integral part of the labor movement until the end of the Depression, which saw
the forty-hour week enshrined in law after the defeat of Hugo Blacks thirty-hour-week bill. As Kathi Weeks writes in Hours for What We Will: Work, Family and the Movement for Shorter Hours in Feminist Studies 35, after World

wages
were constructed historically with reference to the family
The
eight-hour day and five-day week presumed that the worker was a man supported
by a woman in the home, and it shaped expectations that his work was important
and should be decently paid, while womens work was not really work at all
War ii, the demand for shorter hours was increasingly associated with women workers, and was mostly sidelined as the forty-hour week became an institution. Not only

I am thinking here of the female wage

and the family wage but hours, too,

, Weeks notes.

(even though, as Weeks

notes, the gender division of labor was supported by some paid domestic work, done largely by women of color). The postwar labor movement focused on overtime pay and wages, leaving the womens issue of shorter hours mostly
forgotten. But the power of the eight-hour-day movement was that it didnt require the worker to love her job, to identify with it for life, and to take pride in it in order to organize for better conditions. The industrial union movement
rose up to organize those left out of the craft unions, the so-called unskilled workers who recognized that they were not defined by their work and that they wanted to be liberated from it as much as possible. That, in their minds,
was what made them worthy of respect, not their skill level or some intrinsic identity. The fight for shorter hours unified workers across gender and race, class and nationality, skill and ability. It did not require the valorization of
mans work or the idealization of womens natural goodness. It is a curious fact that in todays climate of increased work for less pay, some of the highest-profile strikes of the last year have called for morehours. As labor and its
supporters cheered the strikers at Walmart and at New Yorks fast-food restaurants, it was taken for granted that these part-time workers (some two-thirds of them women) should be calling for more work. Part-time work and flexible
time have been touted as solutions to the problem of work-family balance, which is somehow only ever considered to be a womans problem. In the postwar era, as Erin Hatton writes in The Temp Economy, temp agencies pushed

low pay was acceptable because the

workers were presumed to be married, not real workers who needed a familysupporting wage.
part-time temp work as a great, flexible option for women who wanted to earn a little extra pin money. The temp agencies

Hatton notes that by the 1980s, temp agencies were spreading their model of work, with its low wages and part-time schedules formerly associated with women into the rest of

the economy, contributing to what Leah Vosko calls a feminization of work in the entire economy. In To Serve God and Wal-Mart, Bethany Moreton shows how Walmart too built its global empire on the backs of part-time women
workers, capitalizing on the skills of white Southern housewives whod never worked for pay before but who saw the customer service work they did at Walmart as an extension of the Christian service values they held dear. Those
women didnt receive a living wage because they were presumed to be married; today, Walmarts workforce is much more diverse yet still expected to live on barely more than minimum wage. The end of welfare in the 1990s
pushed poor women into low-wage part-time jobs that neither paid them enough to support their families nor provided benefits. Flexibility considered a good thing when granted to those at the top of the ladder is now a a
demand on workers, like those at Walmart who are scheduled by a computer that predicts staffing levels based on the previous years sales, regardless of their needs or family commitments. Single mothers who work low-wage jobs
have to hold their entire week open and waste money on complicated child care arrangements because they never know whether theyll be scheduled for five or twenty-five hours. This makes it difficult to hold down two jobs
and puts part-timers in a crunch if they have to worry about child care. To gain any hope of a full-time position or access to promotions, workers must be available around the clock though in practice they rarely get enough hours

Work
is a gendered
construct,
established and maintained through recourse to a heteronormative
family ideal centered around a traditional gender division of labor.
. The structure
of benefits, too, is built around a heteronormative model, assuming that a full- time
male worker gets health insurance through his job and that a part-timer doesnt
need such things.
to pay the bills. Weeks notes that certain jobs are constructed as part-time because they are generally done by women.

time, including full-time, part-time, and overtime,

she argues,

And in For Love And Money, Candace Howes,

Carrie Leana, and Kristin Smith point out that part-time work reduces job attachment each additional hour per week increases a workers odds of remaining in the workforce by 2percent

There is no definition, under the Fair Labor Standards Act, of what a part-time worker actually is. So we see workers striking for more hours as well as better pay, rather than

demanding that they be paid a living wage for those few hours. The eight-hour movement, it should be remembered, demanded eight hours work for ten hours pay; a lessening of working time without a corresponding decrease in
wages. Both men and women who worked too much embraced this demand. Today, we see workers demanding full-time employment in order to be taken seriously as much as to make more money. Womens work, Lisa Ruchti
notes in her study of hospital nursingCatheters, Slurs, and Pickup Lines, is a term used by sociologists to indicate the correlation between the jobs that women do and the jobs that pay less and offer fewer opportunities to advance.
Feminist economists, she notes, have argued that part of the reason womens work does not pay well is that it emphasizes tasks women should do naturally. She further notes that it is useful to distinguish work historically done
by women from work that is gendered feminine. We see examples of this emphasis in Moretons work on Walmart, in the way the women working as clerks were presumed to be naturally good at helping customers, while men were
presumed to be natural managers and quickly promoted. (Liza Featherstone documents the groundbreaking lawsuit by Walmart women in her book Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Womens Rights at Walmart.) Ruchti
points out that women have historically been idealized as naturally (i.e., biologically) more domestic, submissive, pious, and pure than men, and that nursing and teaching were held out to them as careers that allowed them to
exercise their natural talents. Dana Goldstein has written about how the romanticization of womens natural goodness was used to mask the real reason that women teachers were sought when the US public school system was
founded: theyd work for lower wages. Howes, Leana, and Smith note that studies of pay by occupation found that interactive service jobs, which include care and sales jobs, come with a pay penalty even when controlling for
education levels, unionization rates, cognitive and physical skill, and the amount of women doing the job. Feminine work, as Ruchti calls it, is valued less. It is a surprise to see Walmart workers striking at all; Moreton notes that the
way the company played up its values made women hesitant to complain about their employer. Paula England, Nancy Folbre and Leana point out (also in For Love And Money) that workers who identify with their companys mission
earn less. This is even more obvious in the caring professions, where workers are directly responsible for the well-being and health or education of others and where, more than in sales jobs, the work is identified with womens

Women are the

ones expected to do the caring raising children, helping elderly parents, and
perhaps supporting both at the same time. Work norms have been shaped by this
belief, pushing women into jobs that uphold gender stereotypes.
natural skill and place. The notion that care work should be provided for love rather than money has often served to legitimate gender inequality, argue England, Folbre, and Leana.

Folbres research suggests that patriarchal institutions

force women to overspecialize in care provision, and Ruchti found that conventional definitions of femininity tend to obscure the fact that care is work by defining it as an intrinsic characteristic of women. Good nurses and other

. This romanticized view of care workers

deflects attention from the low wages and long hours that caregivers work, and
serves to justify those low wages.
caregivers are the ones who do the work for altruistic motives. Bad caregivers are motivated by money

The care industries are experiencing a surge in growth: Howes, Leana, and Smith write that home healthcare and services for the elderly

and people with disabilities are now the industries with the fastest and second-fastest rates of growth of employment in the US. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2010 Population Survey, work in the paid care sector was 24
percent of all employment. Yet increased demand hasnt driven up wages. Instead, real wages fell for home care workers between 1999 and 2007, and despite the Obama administrations push for new rules that would guarantee
home care workers minimum wage and overtime pay, as of this writing, those rules have not been finalized. Meanwhile, K-12 teachers, who remain mostly women and are expected, as Goldstein notes, to be naturally caring, have
borne the brunt of states austerity policies, facing layoffs, pay freezes, and anti-union attacks. Nancy Harvey, who runs a daycare center in Oakland, California, told me in an interview that child care providers are also exempt from
minimum wage requirements. The state agencies that pay for subsidized child care sometimes wind up as much as two months late with pay. She and other care providers keep the children regardless of whether they are paid. Most
of us dont have any kind of health care, we dont have retirement, we dont have medical, dental, vision. With the subsidized program we are entitled to ten paid holidays a year. That means if youve been in the business for five

We dont have a voice at the table. We have people

making decisions that have no concept of what its like to walk in our shoes. Child
care and adult care providers are written off as babysitters and companions
who dont need wage protections
years, if youve been in the business for forty-five years, you get ten days, Harvey says.

; a report from the National Domestic Workers Alliance last year detailed rampant abuses of live-in nannies and domestic workers, yet

California governor Jerry Brown vetoed a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. These workers are on the low end of the spectrum when it comes to pay and respect, even among other care workers. K-12 teachers and nurses are
professionals who make professional salaries, need specialized education, and often have union contracts. Child care and adult care providers, by contrast, have more in common with the rest of the low-wage workforce. They often
work part-time and not year-round, have fewer protections, and are more likely to be immigrants and people of color.

Discourse matters
(Laura Shepard, Lecturer in International Relations and International Law,
Women, armed conflict and language Gender, violence and discourse,
March 2010, http://journals.cambridge.org, RL)
language matters, that words are constitutive of reality. There are
words that have been excised from our vocabularies, deemed too damaging to use .
In our personal lives, we know that

There are forbidden words that children whisper with guilty glee. There are words we use daily that would be meaningless to our
grandparents. Moreover, the cadence and content of our communications vary by context; words that are suitable for the

In our personal lives, we admit that words have

power, and in Formal politics we do the same. It is not such a stretch to admit the same in our
Professional lives. I am not claiming that all analysis must be discourse-theoretical must take language seriously to be
policy-relevant, for that would clearly be nonsense. I am, however, claiming that post-structural theories of
language have much to offer policy makers and practitioners , and arguing that in
order to understand how best to implement policy we first need to understand how
a policy means, not just what it means. That is, we must understand a policy before we
can implement it. This article argues that we need to engage critically with how that
understanding is mediated through and facilitated by our ideas about the world we
live in. If we are to avoid unconsciously reproducing the different forms of oppression
and exclusion that different forms of policy seek to overcome , we need to take seriously Jacques
boardroom may not be appropriate for the bedroom or the bar.

Derridas suggestion that il ny a pas de hors-texte.5