tuesday afternoon: Is that actually in the book? It totally blows my mind that would be in a book about educating children.
It is indeed in the book, and it doesn't even scratch the surface of the way that daughter has been raised. However, I have to tell you, the stories that unmarried, 'identified as heterosexual' Australian sociologist Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli tells about her biological daughter Stephanie are difficult to believe. Even if the essence of the accounts are true, I have never heard of a 1st grade child who was so well-versed in psychosocial pretzel logic.
Nevertheless, here are excerpts from chapter 7 (page 71) of Queering Elementary Education, "My Moving Days": A Child's Negotiation of Multiple Lifeworlds in Relation to Gender, Ethnicity, and Sexuality." (Bold and bracketed text is mine; Italics apparently are from Pallotta-Chiarolli's previously published works.)
...[O]ur child is "queerly raised." She travels within and between multicultural and multisexual world as well as undertaking geographical journeys: to and from Adelaide, where she was born, raised principally by Italian migrant grandparents while we worked full time,...to and from Sydney, where her father lived for two years while she was three and four and where she attends queer events with her parents' friends; and to and from Melbourne, where her father is now primary care-giver supported by a network of multicultural and multisexual friends as my work takes her away at regular intervals....To be "queerly raised" is to interrogate the taken-for-grantedness of such fixed categories and the way society divides people into "normal" and "abnormal," "natural" and "unnatural," according to their locations in these categories...[it is] to thrive in the destabilization and disruption of normalizing discourses of family, gender, and compulsory heterosexuality. It is an upbringing that encourages stability in mobility, security in change, clarity in ambiguity.
...this chapter explores the kinds of understandings, negotiations, and dilemmas "queerly raised" children experience...For example...How does a child respond to AIDS phobia at school when HIV-positive persons, and griveing over AIDS-related deaths, have been a part of one's life since birth?
Here is an excerpt from Steph's story [for show-and-tell] entitled "My Moving Days":
[Stephanie] interrogates defintions of Truth, Reality, Purity, and Identity constructed by dominant social discourses, thereby revealing the Truths, Realities, Impurities, and Identities that these discourses say do not exist at all or exist only in forms they can control and distort as being "wrong" or "strange."
I go to Sydney sometimes especially at Mardi Gras time and have fun with Mum and her friends. We go to interesting shops and restaurants. I was in the Mardi Gras one year pretending to be Alan and Malcolm's daughter. I wore my purple fairy costume and waved a wand and the gay flag. Lots of people took pictures and I was on the news...I love my life. It's exciting.
..."Queerly raised" children are agents. People are, and always have been, active agents in the constitution of their unfolding social worlds...Their personal world is "an emergent, situated, negotiated one where considerable variation becomes possible."
Getting ready for school one morning, seven-year old Steph asks, "What's artificial insemination?"I ask, "Were you interested in what Uncle Matteo was saying last night?" I had been chatting to a gay Italian friend, Matteo about his daughter, a baby he'd had with a lesbian and his plans to have another. Steph had been sitting with us silently listening.
Steph nods. "If they don't have sex, how can they have babies, that's all I wanted to know, really. At school we learned that it takes a man and woman who are married to each other to have a baby, but Uncle Matteo is gay and he isn't married. But I know he's had a baby."
I explain how many gays and lesbians are now becoming parents without having sex with each other. And this leads to a chat about women's decisions about having sex and babies, and that leads on to how women should never let anyone explain their sexuality. And this leads to a conversation about what else was missing from the "sex education" lessons in school -- the clitoris! We talk about the book Steph has at home showing where the clitoris is. The question comes: "But why didn't they show it in the book at school? I looked for it but the teacher acted like nothing was there. I know it's there." Steph has been taught that it is the clitoris that gives her pleasure when she masturbates.
Steph picks up her schoolbag. She's ready for another day at school, and as we head out the door, she says with a scornful snort, "They don't say all the truth at school but I know it anyway."
...A "queerly raised" child can "travel" between these "worlds" and inhabit more than one of these worlds at the very same time.
When Steph [was] three, I am tucking her into bed one evening and am about to read her a children's version of The Swiss Family Robinson. "No, I'll read it to you," Steph says, which means she'll tell the story through the pictures.There is one picture where the parents stand in the middle of their sons, one son next to his father, and two, with arms around each other's shoulders, next to their mother. Steph describes the family, pointing to the people as she goes: "This is the father. This is the first son," pointing to the boy on his own. "This is the second son" -- and then to the third son next to his brother -- "and this is the second son's boyfriend."
...Steph's writing and experiences of agency exemplify children's great potential to demonstrate and transcend categorical limitations, oppressions, and the splitting of concurrent realities inherent in the heteronormative, Anglocentric, and phallocentric need to homogenize, categorize, and simplify...
One evening, as we wait for [now ten year old] Steph's computing class to begin, three girls around twelve years old come cheerily in to collect some material for their next class. They look confident and speak assertively, arms and hair swinging. I notice Steph has taken my hand and is squeezing it.I look across and notice a faint shy blush on her ace. "What's up, Steph?"
Steph is still staring at the girls. She whispers, "Which one do you like?"
"All of them. They look like nice, smart young women."
Steph persist (sic). "No! I mean, which one do you like?"
"Which one do you like, sweetie?"
Steph nods her head toward the long-haired girl in jeans and T-shirt who's doing most of the questioning in articulate computer-speak. "Do you like her too?"
"Yes, I do," I reply.
Steph smiles slightly, pleased, still not taking her eyes off the girl.
"What're you feeling, Steph?"
Steph smiles shyly. She shrugs and looks at me with embarrassment. I squeeze her hand. "It's okay, Steph. She's gorgeous, and if you think that, that's fine. Enjoy those feelings, there's nothing wrong with them."
In the meantime, Steph also has crushes on two boys. Getting out of the car one afternoon with a friend who's come to play, she looks at the houses across the street and declares, "I wish Peter and Anthony lived there. Then I could see both of them."
Her friend looks scornfully at her. "You can only love one person."
"Who says?"
"That's the way it is. Unless you're a lesbian."
"If I was a lesbian, I'd want Peter and Anthony to be girls. Anyway, maybe I'll love no one. Maybe I'll love girls or boys, or both. Maybe lots of both!" And she laughs cheekily as her friend remonstrates.
...As I write this chapter...[o]ne of Steph's friends, a girl in her early teens, has now confieded to Steph and to us that she thinks she is a lesbian. She can't tell her own parents, she says. She can't tell anyone else at school. Steph has now become her confidante, and we can hear them chat into the night during sleepovers...
Special note to angelisa: If you haven't been scared away from FR, the above citations from an advocate of the destruction of the nuclear family are a perfect example of what I meant in my response to your post about 'people who fall in love.' When you scratch the surface and the Barney the Dinosaur world of "I love you, you love me" flakes off, what you get are hardcore, seriously subversive people who have a grand strategy of social re-engineering, even to the point that they will send their children as "agents" to influence the rest of ours.
The sex positive agenda strikes again. Not just content with teaching the mechanics of reproduction or even birth control/STDs, the sex positive agenda seeks to celebrate sex acts at all ages of youth, from child to adolescent to teen. There are no moral judgements (just against rape, although rape fantasy is considered perfectly fine).
Getting out of the car one afternoon with a friend who's come to play, she looks at the houses across the street and declares, "I wish Peter and Anthony lived there. Then I could see both of them."Her friend looks scornfully at her. "You can only love one person."
"Who says?"
"That's the way it is. Unless you're a lesbian."
The bold faced lines are also BALD FACED LIES.
How can someone make a moral decision to say that polygamy is wrong if homosexual relations are "normal"?
Also, at the tender age of these kids, there is no "steady" relationships. This is why some advise against sexual relations with someone who is just a passing fling. It unleashes a whole lot of emotional distress that some people just aren't able to handle.
And how can you love "just one person"? Do you only love one of your parents? Only your immediate family? Only the people you go to school with??? Must there be a sexual component to love? Can't you love someone (friend, family, God, pet...) without getting sexual?