I remember this: I was teaching an advanced creative non-fiction class to undergraduate business students. Students who take to majoring in business are generally whip-smart, but they also tend to possess pretty deterministic world views.
As a representative of the non-business mode of thinking, I had felt burdened with the task of attempting to "break" such views, or at least instill some sort of uncertainty and doubt into them.
From day 1 we ran into problems of definition. Can one define what a "family" is?
Everybody said in unison, "yes".
It's easy--a family comprises a father, a mother and children. I had winced at the patness of the answer; but by then I had got used to such patness in every answer that a typical business undergraduate was capable of giving.
"A family could be any unit of emotional intimacy," I had suggested. "A woman with a cat could be a family." I hadn't spoken of the gay and lesbian family because the frame of reference simply wasn't available back then.
This was in 2000; the young corporate-acolytes in my class thought I was joking.
At that time corporations didn't seek to normalize the non-traditional/non-heterosexual family. (Now even Budweiser has an ad showing a soldier coming home to the embrace of a male "special" other).
Thus the J.C. Penny catalog celebrating Father's and Mother's days with images of alternative families--the one I had poster-childed with the "woman with a cat" theme--would only elicit nods of assent were I to teach that class today. To do otherwise would be unsophisticated and unmodern.
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