One Where the Kid Actually is “All Right”: The Queering of Iva in Marilyn Hacker's Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons

Abstract

This article explores Marilyn Hacker's 1986 sonnet sequence, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, for its depiction of lesbian parenting. Hacker moves beyond the simply erotic to focus on a truly subversive act present within the queer community, namely that of child-rearing. Lesbian parenting is a private world, one not subject to the male gaze in the ways that other seemingly private worlds (like sex) are still commodified. The daughter character of Iva exemplifies the construction of self in a queer environment. Children of queer parents have the unique subject position of being “queered” themselves regardless of their ultimate sexual orientation. While this queering would seem to primarily affect their understandings of gender and sexuality, this article argues that such early “othering” serves to deconstruct one's understanding of binaries and social conformity on a large scale, thereby encouraging qualities of acceptance and compassion and increasing the intimate family bond.

KEYWORDS:

• Marilyn Hacker
• lesbian parenting
• children
• queering
• Love
• Death
• and the Changing of the Seasons
• LGBT politics
• The Kids Are All Right

Notes

1. See Jack Halberstam, “The Kids Aren't All Right,” Bully Bloggers, July 15, 2010.

2. Lynn Keller, “Measured Feet ‘in Gender-Bender Shoes’: The Politics of Poetic Form in Marilyn Hacker's Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons,” in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 273.

3. Patricia Falk, “Lesbian Mothers: Psychosocial Assumptions in Family Law.” American Psychologist 44.6 (1989): 944.

4. Marilyn Hacker, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986), 139.

5. Marilyn Farwell, Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 128.

6. Paul Recer, “Studies Say Kids Raised by Lesbians do OK,” The Columbian, 4 April 1997, A10.

7. Patterson, “Children,” 242.

8. Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 32.

9. Ibid., 30.

10. Mary Biggs, “‘Present, Infinitesimal, Infinite’: The Political Vision and ‘Femin’ Poetics of Marilyn Hacker.” Frontiers 27.1 (2006): 3.

11. Hacker, Love, 33.

12. Ibid., 110.

13. Ibid., 20.

14. Ibid., 61.

15. Biggs, “Present,” 15.

16. Recer, “Studies,” A10.

17. Hacker, Love, 188.

18. Ibid., 62.

19. Keller, “Measured Feet,” 275.

20. Hacker, Love, 109.

21. Ibid., 43.

22. Keller, “Measured Feet,” 276.

23. Hacker, Love, 109.

24. Ibid., 106.

25. Ibid.

26. Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkley: University of California Press, 2008), 68.

27. Hacker, Love, 101.

28. Ibid., 147.

29. Ibid., 36.

30. Ibid., 29.

31. Ibid., 56.

32. See: Nanette Gartrell and Henny Bos, “US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Psychological Adjustment of 17-Year Old Adolescents.” Pediatrics 126.1 (2010): 1–9. Web. 17 February 2011. Also, Nanette Gartrell, Henry Bos, and Naomi Goldberg, “Adolescents of the US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Sexual Orientation, Sexual Behavior, and Sexual Risk Exposure.” Archives of Sexual Behavior (2010): 1–11. Web. 17 February 2011.

33. Biggs, “Present,” 13.

34. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present, ed. Miriam Schneir (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 319.

35. Hacker, Love, 37.

36. Ibid., 141.

37. Biggs, “Present,” 12.

38. Hacker, Love, 53.

39. Biggs, “Present,” 6.