Abigail Garner
Autor(a) de Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is
Obras de Abigail Garner
Associated Works
Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: True Tales of Love, Lust, and Friendship Between Straight Women and Gay Men (2007) — Contribuinte — 103 cópias
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Sexo
- female
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Estatísticas
- Obras
- 2
- Also by
- 1
- Membros
- 205
- Popularidade
- #107,802
- Avaliação
- 3.8
- Resenhas
- 2
- ISBNs
- 3
- Favorito
- 1
More specifically, almost everything I read in this book reminded me of the challenges and fraction points that occur in the experience of Children of Deaf Adults (CODAs). Hearing children of Deaf adults are from the Deaf community but never really in it; they have a rich cultural experience as children that they aren't allowed to return to as they grow older; they struggle with how to claim their families and often really appreciate or sometimes only feel truly comfortable spending time in groups of people with similar background; and so on. On the other hand, Deaf children of Deaf adults do not need to engage the identify formation quests of their peers at similar ages, which puts them simultaneously ahead and outside of the culture to which they belong in their teens and early twenties -- just like queer children of queer adults. Additionally, in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I was investigating the Deaf experience in books mostly from the 1980s and early 1990s, there was also marked attention to exactly the same political question of whether these families should even exist. There are areas where the LGBTQ and Deaf family experiences differ, of course -- such as the potential lack of heterosexual relationship role models for the queerspawn and the pressure to translate in adult-adult interactions from an early age for the CODAs -- but on the whole, the dynamics are eerily familiar.
As a result, I place Families Like Mine in direct conversation with Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, which focuses on what he terms "horizontal identity formation" -- the creation of identities that differ from the "vertical" identities that your parents can and will transmit to you. Families Like Mine addresses the inverse of Far From the Tree: rather than mainstream parents making sense of and trying to successfully parent children with exceptional primary identities, Garner's book on LGBTQ families focuses on what it means for the child to have their parents' culture rooted in a niche subculture that is uncommon, their families questioned by the mainstream, and the children's legitimacy within the culture questioned even by the members of the culture itself. Families Like Mine is not an academic treatise, but it is specific, engaging, easy to read, and offers well-deserved attention to a different dimension of "horizontal" identity formation.… (mais)