Pride

Pride weekend makes me think about life here in North Carolina. I still can't believe that Amendment 1 was passed! I had seen so many "Vote Against Amendment 1" signs all around Durham. How could this have happened? Even my older child, age 8, has voiced an opinion about it, explaining that several friends at school have two moms. Now what would happen to these friends and their families? So even at age 8, a child can see the unfairness of such an amendment. It seems absolutely absurd to a child. To my child. To me.

Pride weekend gives us a chance to reflect on this amendment and on what means to be LGBTQA in North Carolina, in Durham, and at Duke.

On another note from my kids, my younger child, age 5, has been asking some interesting questions. On the drive to preschool each morning we pass by a Hardee's fast food restaurant. My child has been begging to go there and get some sort of bacon sandwich that he saw on tv. (The kid loves bacon!)

However, finding Hardee's marketing tactics to be offensive, I have tried to implement some consumer empowerment by refusing for my family to eat there. My child keeps asking, "Why can't I get my bacon sandwich there?"I tried to explain that Hardee's has extremely offensive advertising that promotes sexist attitudes and reinforces heteronormativity.

Unfortunately, my five year old does not quite get it. I am hoping that when my family attends the Pride events this weekend, it will become more clear to him. Having young children involved in Pride weekend is especially meaningful as they learn that each and every person is valuable on this planet just for being themselves. I once read an inspiring quote that stated, "Be yourself. Nobody else is better qualified!" Let's be proud to be ourselves!

Genna Miller, Ph.D.

Economics Department

The Games I play

I love watching T.V. but I hate commercials with a passion. To make the time go by faster I created my own game…spot the heteronomitivity in the T.V. commercial. Once you pay attention, it can be very interesting the ways a commercial for dental floss can squeeze in a heternomitive agenda. One of my personal favorites is a cat food commercial, which is so heteronomitive you almost forget about the cat.

This got me thinking, are there any commercials with LGBT influences? Well my friends the answer is yes, and I found a boatload of them on YouTube. The sad part is most of them are foreign, or only seen on Logo, but nonetheless they are still pretty cool.

Here are some of my favorites.

The gay one… This one is so cute that it makes you want to eat McDonalds everyday!

The lesbian one…. took me a moment, but I lol’ed when I realized what was going on.

The bisexual one… I can’t understand what they are saying at the end, but words aren’t necessary.

The transgender one… It was hard to find one that wasn’t borderline offensive, but I think this one does the trick!

My hope is one day theses will be a staple on mainstream T.V. Then maybe commercials will be less painful to watch.

Straight Until Proven Guilty

“Now imagine Y has a gorgeous girlfriend.”

‘A’ was setting up a joke over dinner, but before he reached the punchline. K, J, and I (me) had to stifle our giggles, somewhat judgmental giggles. The three of us know Y probably won’t be having a girlfriend anytime soon because he’s gay.

We were having a mini-awkward-fest on our side of the table while A continued the joke obliviously. I don’t mean to attack or accuse him, considering he had just met Y and didn’t know that he was gay. Rather, he is my jumping point to discuss what this implies about our interactions and what assumptions we make when we meet people. We tend to jump to the conclusion that people are straight, but such an assumption both indicates and reinforces the underlying prejudice associated with heteronormativity.

Heteronormativity, the idea that heterosexuality is the societal norm, can lead to a sense of mental segregation between straight people and LGBT individuals. Before I continue I will make one concession that probabilistically, any random person you meet has a 90% chance of being straight. That’s just the facts of the numbers. But consider that I am a part of the Asian population of Duke – there’s only a 22% chance that I’m actually Asian, yet anyone I meet will most likely be culturally aware enough to clarify that within looking Asian, I am actually Chinese. (It’s plenty funny when the odd person mistakes me for an Aztec Indian though. True story.)

What happens when we assume? We put people in awkward situations where they feel the need to explain their sexual identity. I would argue that this puts an unfair amount of social pressure on LGBT individuals to have to come out, therefore setting them apart (though I admit I can’t speak for how much autonomy we would like to inherently have as members of the LGBT community). Jessye’s post, “On Equality” does a good job of explaining the ways in which our society remains heteronormative and therefore, inherently having inequalities with respect to sexual and gender identities.

I believe that in certain respects, sensitivity towards LGBT can be treated the same way as racial sensitivity. When we meet someone, things go okay until we hit the awkward “What ARE you?” question. You mean, “What ethnicity are you?” or, “From what planet do you hail?” Going into a social interaction, most of us will keep in mind that our initial perceptions of a person’s skin colour, manner of talking, or clothes do not always tell us definitively where they are from and what ethnicity and nationality they belong to. We’ve reached a point where compared to some fifty years ago, the colour of your skin doesn’t matter that much. Stereotypes certainly exist, but on average we’re less predisposed to outright racism.

It’s much trickier since sexual orientation is not always as evident as something like skin colour. But part of being more racially sensitive is not just about having an understanding of what cultures are out there, but it is also keeping in mind that race isn’t something that should cause us to judge somebody. Similarly, we should not ignore the fact that not everyone is straight. There are two things we really need to do here then – first, we need to understand that for every person out there, sexual orientation is an additional and unique layer of identity and second, given a better understanding, we can then internalize sexual orientation as something that we don’t need to worry about in the first place (unless you fancy that person.)

Thanks to Chum Howe for providing this comic, entitled "Ethnicity."