Working Towards a Feminist Future | The LA Times & The Chicago Tribune

After all those months of tedious debate, I am loathe to bring up the phrase “family values” yet again. We are all more than a little tired of that phrase’s being bandied about for political expedience and thinly veiled bigotry. When all is said and done, the term comes up as either empty (what are “family values?” Are they different than values individuals hold?) or as very full with the implication that if you aren’t a middle-class, white heterosexual in a nuclear family with a gendered division of labor you aren’t a family and you don’t have values.

So can this all be put to rest? After the debacle of the Republican Party convention where the language of hate and bigotry was given full rein, we are set to embark on a new path, a path made more exciting to many of us by the presence of Hillary Clinton. Now, she is surely just a woman, as her husband is just a man. But in a society that makes instant cultural icons out of fictional television characters, Ms. Clinton cannot avoid the voracious image machine that makes of her a transcendent signifier for new times, new attitudes, new women…. Read the full op-ed on The Chicago Tribune.