The Kids Are All Right: Queer Conservatism Under the Guise of Progressiveness

Jules (Juliane Moore) and Nic (Anette Benning) are two lesbians living a true middle-class American dream with a white picket fence, a house in the suburbs, and two beautiful children they conceived with the help of an anonymous sperm donor in Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right. However, when Joni (Mia Wasikowska), Jules and Nic’s eldest, turns eighteen, she contacts the sperm donor to arrange a meeting with her brother, Laser (Josh Hutcherson). Paul (Mark Ruffalo) is an “alternative” hippie type, who had no idea his sperm had been used. The kids and Pual meet and hit it off amazingly. This spawns Paul’s attempts to be in his biological children’s lives and ultimately threatens to break apart their family.

Focus Features 

This 2010 film is hands down the most heterosexual gay film I’ve ever had to watch in my life. It is homonormative from top to bottom. This family, while reared by two women, fits perfectly into the heterosexual ideals of American home life. One of the first scenes we get in the movie is of Nic coming home late to her two kids and her stay-at-home wife with dinner on the table. Nic is the breadwinner who’s pulled away from her wife because of work calls, has a drinking problem, and is annoyingly condescending about her wife’s passions. Jules is the stay-at-home mom with a desire to start a career with her artistic passions as her eldest is preparing to leave the nest, all while she strives to gain her wife’s approval and attention. These roles are ones I’ve seen played out in a number of straight comedy dramas that center around a struggling marriage. The goal of this film is oriented more towards assimilation to the norm than it is about pushing boundaries. “The Kids Are All Right (Kids) reinforces how the family portrayed in the film is just like everyone else’s (except for the lesbian aspect—and that’s not a big deal),” Tammie Kennedy writes in “Sustaining White Homonormativity: The Kids Are All Right as Public Pedagogy”. “In other words, not only are “the kids all right,” but also the whole family is “normal” (119). While I understand that in the fight for equal rights for the LBGTQ+ community, it’s part of the process to appeal to straight people, It’s a disservice to queer people to essentially straight-wash the entire story to do so (I mean, for example, the one lesbian sex scene was entirely PG and played for laughs, while the multiple heterosexual sex scenes were very raunchy and explicit). This film could have benefited from more radicalism, but instead, it confirmed more queer conservatism in a way that only further upheld overtired and even harmful stereotypes.

Focus Features 

Alongside the homonormativity, working hand in hand to uphold the “normal” message of this film, is whiteness. The entire main cast is white, and three of the supporting roles are BIPOC - Luis (Joaquín Garrido), Tanya (YaYa Decosta), and Jai (Kunal Sharma) - and all of them fit into racial caricatures. Luis (Joaquín Garrido) is the low-wage Mexican gardener, whose accent is actually made fun of in the film by Jules and Paul. He’s the butt of the joke, and the movie doesn’t give him much more purpose of character beyond that. Jai (Kunal Sharma) is the boy Joni has a crush on, who is depicted as the shy, awkward guy who’s bad with women – a common stereotype for Desi characters in Hollywood. Not to say that those personalities don’t exist for Desi people, but in this film, where the other BIPOC characters are all stereotypes, it’s fair to point out the common trope that Jai fits into. Tanya (Yaya Decosta) is the sole black character in the film and is nothing more than a plot device to juxtapose Paul’s lifestyle with Jules and Nic’s. “In fact, the black and Latino characters almost do all the work of getting “the gays” a place in straight reality,” writes contributors from The Black Youth Project. “The black woman, who buys interesting afro-centric gear from Brooklyn provides the sperm donor/father the cred necessary to come off as a cool, free, funky kinda guy. While the motorcycle certainly gives him some swag, there is nothing like a good old black woman to add some true virility.” There is, of course, nothing wrong with a white man having sex with a black woman, or a black woman being sexually active – in fact, those are totally normal things. However, in this context, it feels almost as if they were using Tanya to show just how “alternative” his lifestyle is to further paint him as the antagonist in the story – which is problematic.

Focus Features 

All of these racial characters essentially function to uphold the idea that upper-middle-class white nuclear families are the norm. Kids are trying so hard to assimilate into a heterosexual culture that it basically throws other minorities under the bus (ignoring the intersectionality of gender, race, sexuality, and class in doing so) to obtain that goal. In his essay, “The Matter of Whiteness” Richd Dyer, has this to say: “This then is why it is important to come to see whiteness. For those in power in the West, as long as whiteness is felt to be the human condition, then it alone both defines normality and fully inhabits it. . .White power nonetheless reproduces itself regardless of intention, power differences, and goodwill, and overwhelmingly because it is not seen as whiteness, but as normal. White people need to learn to see themselves as white, to see their particularity. In other words, whiteness needs to be made strange” (12). Whether it was done consciously, or as a result of implicit biases, this film maintains the “superiority” of white life in a way that is, for lack of a better word, icky.

 

Works Cited

The Kids Are All Right. Directed by Lisa Cholodenko’s, Focus Features, 2010.

Kennedy, Tammie M. “Sustaining White Homonormativity: The Kids Are All Right as Public Pedagogy.” Journal of Lesbian Studies, edited by Ella Ben Hagai, Routledge, 2014, pp. 118-132.

“The Kids Are All Right (spoiler alert).” The Black Youth Project, 22 July 2010, https://blackyouthproject.com/the-kids-are-all-right-spoiler-alert/. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.