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Imagery In Nuclear Family

Decent Essays

“Nuclear Family” is a phrase that is very loaded with imagery. For me, this phrase is very heavily associated with the fifties, a time of pastel hardware, and boys and girls playing on the lawn as mom cooks dinner and waits for dad to come home from the office, imagery that is often reinforced by TV shows and movies set in this time. This picturesque family is so descriptive of modern American families, not just from what it shows, but also from what it leaves out. There’s never any People of Color in these portrayals, nor anyone on the LGBT+ spectrum. America is a nation for white heterosexual families, and they view any attempt to change this as an attack on their livelihood. The nuclear family set the new “normal” and those that fell outside …show more content…

This is a time where soldiers are returning home after fighting overseas for many years and starting to settle down. In 1940, homeownership was at 44%. By 1960, it had risen to 62%. Veterans were coming home and buying up housing in areas like Levittowns. These were sprawling complexes with many similar houses all making up one large neighborhood. The homogenous aspect of them tied to an equally homogenized family unit living within them, the nuclear family. The nuclear family as usually depicted is a working father, a stay at home mother, and two young children. Past that, the father is usually middle class, the children are one boy and one girl, and the families are white. The nuclear family is a very patriarchal idea, with the dad not being challenged in stature even by his own children, which is likely part of the reason they are always so young. Death of a Salesman actually offers something of a parody of this formula. We see the children older and challenging their father, who can no longer support his family. Even with works such as that, however, this is still viewed as the traditional family, even …show more content…

The typical portrayal is obviously very heteronormative. This was a time of the beginnings of the LGBT movement, so it’s not as if this just wasn’t a mainstream concept yet. It was willfully left out. The Kinsey Scale was a test created by Alfred Kinsey in 1948 that was used to determine whether someone was homosexual or heterosexual, and to what degree as well. Many would consider this to be ahead of its time, not only addressing issues like homosexuality, but also bi- and pansexuality, which some people still struggle to conceptualize. Despite there being an understanding of this level even back then, it begs the question why they were left out of any portrayals of “family” or “home”. This often led to issues within the community, such as Alison Bechdel’s father Bruce, as is detailed in her 2006 graphic memoir, Fun Home. In it, she addresses her father’s struggle to accept his homosexuality and his struggle with her being able to be out. "Sometimes, when things were going well, I think my father actually enjoyed having a family. Or at least, the air of authenticity we leant to his exhibit. A sort of still life with children." (Bechdel 13) In this we see her father struggling with his own sexuality as he tries to meet that expectation of a traditional family even though he knows he doesn’t fit within

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