Constructed Reality

I read an excellent article today by Ruthann Robson titled Resisting the Family: Repositioning Lesbians in Legal Theory. The thesis of the article is that lesbians shouldn't be too quick to adopt the rhetoric of "our family is just like yours" because the concept of "family" is a culturally constructed artifact that carries with it particular expectations--in the context of 21st century America, these expectations include monogamy, shared finances, age equivalency, and cohabitation, while excluding polygamy, independent living, age differentials, etc. In other words, the quest to gain legal protections and equality can easily result in lesbians consciously or unconsciously being co-opted into "mainstream" expectations of what their relationships "should" look like.

The article is a great reminder that so much of what we consider reality is in fact culturally constructed: concepts like "family," "adulthood," "marriage" and "gender" may have some empirical correlatives but they can all also be stretched or narrowed depending on culture. Being "feminine" in Victorian England is a very different thing than being "feminine" today, and reaching "adulthood," the "age of majority" or the "age of consent" has not always implied reaching the magical age of 18 years old (despite what most people today tend to assume). The reason this is important is that when people assume that these concepts are "natural" and that "things have always been this way", they refuse to acknowledge the possibility (or desirability) of changing them. Thus, the value of history and anthropology in showing us how things used to be different and the value of science-fiction in helping us imagine how things could be in the future.