Hetereonormalizing Gay Relationships

 I have (as is usual) been consuming a lot of media recently.  What is interesting is the amount of that media that works to heteronormalize gay relationships.  I've been catching up on Modern Family (a show I have really grown to enjoy and am teetering on the brink of calling myself a fan) and well, the gay relationship between and Cam and Mitchell is not so modern.  And it has nothing to do with the idea that they have not kissed, although there is a Facebook group of more than 13,000 people who want that to happen.  No, it has more to do with the way in which the producers of Modern Family have constructed this couple along "traditional" tropes of the family.  


Cam is clearly constructed as the "woman" who stays at home, nurtures their daughter and is prone to flying into fits of hysteria while Mitchell is the breadwinner who has no "inherent" instincts about how to care for a child.  In an episode late in the first season, Cam even refers to himself as a "trophy wife."  


I also ran across a story about The Today Show running a contest to host a wedding for a lucky couple.  The contest doesn't explicitly disallow gay couples from participating, but from the way the form is designed, it forces couples applying to designate a bride and a groom -- implying that having two brides or two grooms is not an option (or at least not a winning one) or that gay couples must conform to the erroneous idea that in gay relationships one person is the man and the other is the woman.

Perhaps the better way to look at gay relationships, rather than as a heteronormative dichotomy, is to look at the idea that in relationships, couples tend to divide labor based on strengths.  In my own relationship (which is a gay one), I clean and sometimes cook, but I also can repair minor electronics.  My partner cooks, but he also pulls the weeds in the yard and uproots and moves trees and bushes.  In other words, there is no woman/ man dichotomy in our relationship.  

Try as we might, we have been socialized to understand relationships in this way. Even when we are presented with relationships that do not conform to the way we have socially constructed relationships, we try to fit them into that construction so that we don't create cognitive dissonance for ourselves.

And Modern Family, for all its alleged modernity, helps to leave these social constructions unchecked.  Even in the opening credits, Modern Family shows its bias toward "traditional" constructions of family.

The family with a husband and wife (both around the same age) with three biological children is positioned in the center while the May/September marriage with the overweight child and the gay relationship with the adopted Vietnamese baby are positioned "off center."