From: Lyn Miller-Lachmann <lynml_at_me.com>
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:12:47 -0500

Charles, I didn't want your thorough and thoughtful posts to go uncommented on. Again, I think you make useful distinctions between the Individual social justice perspective on the one hand and the Political/Ideological on the other, but I see the Political/Policy and the Ideological as being more closely intertwined, inasmuch as ideology drives policy. I also see a lot more space, historically and in the present, for stories that may be characterized as Ideological, and a two-way interaction between ideological stories and ideological and cultural shifts.

Let me offer two examples. In November 2008 something happened that people even a decade earlier, not to mention 50 or 100 years earlier, would have considered impossible. The election of an African-American President of the United States was in large part the result of an ideological and cultural shift that began in earnest following the Second World War. The creation of more inclusive children's books resulted from civil rights activism, beginning with the publication of Nancy Larrick's groundbreaking article in 1965, "The All-White World of Children's Books". At the same time, the growing number of children's and young adult books written by African-American authors, depicting African-American protagonists, and highlighting the social justice movements of abolition and civil rights, published from the early 1970s to the present, prepared our young people to be the most enthusiastic supporters of Barack Obama's candidacy in 2008. Books addressing civil rights themes would seem to fall under the Ideological
 perspective, and in the 1950s those books would have been too controversial to publish. Now they are not. Far from it.

The second example is abortion. Following the Roe v. Wade decision and culminating in the 1990s, books for teens depicted characters getting abortions and suffering few consequences. Today, as Ellen Levine pointed out, this is not the case. In nearly all cases, the teen chooses to have the child out of personal revulsion to abortion (Jo Knowles's Jumping Off Swings being a well known example) or religious conviction (Melissa Walker's Small Town Sinners). When today's characters have had abortions, presented through flashback or part of backstory, those were traumatic and deeply regretted, and the characters use that experience to talk someone else out of having the procedure (Varian Johnson's My Life as a Rhombus, for instance). The trend in YA novels against abortion--the Juno effect, we can call it, though it predates the hit movie--is certainly political and to the extent that it is motivated by belonging to a religious group--if I understand your argument correctly, Charles--it is ideological as well. An d if my own 20-year-old daughter and her friends are any indication, it has had the effect of equating abortion with murder in their eyes. The fact that this ideological stance has become so strong that stories about characters getting abortions--acceptable in the 1990s--are considered controversial today points to the interaction between story and ideology that goes two ways.

Yes, stories are powerful. And despite our distrust of group identities, we humans are herd animals. So I wouldn't see the Social Justice Ideological lens as incongruent but rather as a constant source of conflict that has implications for politics and policy.

Lyn
Received on Thu 10 Nov 2011 02:12:47 PM CST