No abstract

At a time when lesbian families are experiencing more acceptance, gaining membership into mainstream society often depends on diluting any kind of queer sensibility that might challenge the centrality of white, neoliberal, middle-class values. Although many queer scholars have traced the link between "normativity" and gay and lesbian representations, few have noted how whiteness operates in these depictions. Building on the analyses forwarded by scholarship on white normativity and homonormativity, this article explores how the representation of a lesbian family in the movie The Kids Are All Right promotes white homonormativity to appeal to a mainstream audience. Interrogating Kids… at the intersection of same-sex families and white homonormativity reveals how the film's appeal to universality invokes hegemonic racial hierarchies that mask the ways "normal" conceals power and liberatory progress.

No abstract

As a figure of appropriation, recovery, and reinterpretation, Mary Magdalene illuminates the need to examine how rhetorical practices inscribe and misrepresent historical women in public memory. Analyzing sites of public memory, such as mass media, helps feminist scholars account for not only women who have been forgotten, but also for the ways that women have been misremembered. Using Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Ron Howard's film adaptation of the novel as sites of public memory, the article demonstrates how historical women like Magdalene are constructed and sustained as "facts" that support ideological paradigms and subvert alternative interpretations, or what Michel Foucault describes as "counter-memory." Despite Brown's intention to remember Magdalene in a new way, his contribution to public memory re-inscribes a gendered view that truncates her agency as a woman and leader in early Christianity.