Lesbian Characters In The Fosters

The Fosters deeply engages with social issues, unlike the quotidian inclusion and ideological underdevelopment in The Kids Are All Right. Visibility of lesbian characters in The Kids Are All Right is apolitical and constrains queer visibility. The homonormative depiction with access to formal marriage and reproductive rights obviates social issues and suggests the attainment of LGBTQ equality. Whereas The Fosters, albeit homonormative inclusion, effectively criticizes the ideological system that embed the character narratives. Specifically, The Fosters’ meaningfully represents family that is diverse and challenges the tropes of kinship. To illustrate, Lena alerts Stef to a racist comment she makes and follows up with an explanation of why her

The exclusive images of gender conforming, sanitized femme lesbians in these productions make unavoidable “a persistent discomfort with his or her sex” (APA 2000, 581; Moody 2011). Binaries inexorably demand people define themselves in hierarchal knowledge structures, whereby heterosexual gender-conforming identities are privileged (Hammock 2009; Seidman 1997). Considering the context in which the privileged dominant culture knows the marginalized, and how minorities know themselves. Van Leer (1995) uses DuBois’s concept of a “double consciousness” to describe how minorities do not know themselves directly but rather, through lens of dominant culture. In this way, their identities are constructed by the dominant culture’s narrative of them. For instance, Jules’ ‘coming out’ to Paul indicates her achievement of self-awareness. ‘Coming out’ is akin to the confession of one’s sins, a confession of the unnatural and presupposes the repression of one’s sexual self. She declares her negative subjective identity over and against the contrast of her opposite sex relations. Opposite sex relations are a positive form of cultural identity and so Jules’ rejection of this cultural identity suggests that she in insane and is not to be taken seriously at the same time, just as heterosexual society does not take homosexuality seriously and continues to reinforce negative self-abjecting attitudes (Hammock 2009). What this tells us more broadly about The Kids Are All Right and The Fosters, is that there is a risk lesbian and queer parents formulate their identity through knowledge structures and their inferiority and Otherness (Hammock 2009). This is significant because many queer people struggle to see themselves as parents because there are so few representations of queer parents (Veldhoven and Vernon 2009). Heterosexism leads lesbian and