Elvira greets her mother and goes out through the neighborhood to look for her dog. Along the way, she meets friends: Manu plays on the sidewalk while her father holds a baby and her mother fixes the car; Marce –who is the captain of the soccer team– is with her grandfather who is raising her; and then Julio appears with his two moms. in two minutes, this animation from the Elvira series, from the Buenos Aires Ministry of Women, Gender Policies and Sexual Diversity, foregrounds and recognizes a reality that still needs to be made visible: there are many types of familiesa great diversity that contrasts with the social and cultural construction that configured and continues to validate a single “ideal” hegemonic model.
The conjugal and heterosexual family prevails: a mother and a father with daughters and sons, and with clearly delimited gender roles, traversed by stereotypes. The man as a provider of economic income through work outside the home, and the woman as a guarantee of ensuring domestic tasks, upbringing and care.
However, in recent years, a series of laws have helped to make it easier for thousands of people who deviated from “the norm” to start a family. Equal marriage, the gender identity law, the expansion of the coverage of assisted reproductive techniques and the modification of the Civil and Commercial Code that, among other advances, expanded the adoption of children and adolescents to any person over 25 years.
Thus, it was possible to start speak more and more of families “in the plural”. For example, single or separated mothers, single or separated fathers, older people living and raising their granddaughters or grandchildren, LGBTIQ+ families who decide to adopt or use fertilization techniques; single-parent, polyamorous, homoparental families and many other possible forms of family experience.
However, even though they have all rights by law, Diverse families still do not enjoy real equality. Many systematically experience situations of discrimination and face social and cultural barriers.
Whenever we talk about diverse families, we do so in opposition to an established parameter, that is to say: a nuclear, conjugal and heterosexual family, which is not a given of “nature”, but rather It has been a social, cultural and historical construction. This is the reason why it is so difficult to talk about families in the plural and to be able to understand that there are other possible configurations, which in reality have always existed but were invisible.
The social mandate of what a family should be still persists and this is problematic, because there is also a sexual division of labor: male provider and female housewife. In this assumption of a unique and “normal” family, everything that runs from that notion is judged as “abnormal”. Consider, for example, the way single mothers are stigmatized or the discrimination suffered by many LGBTIQ+ families, such as comaternals or those with a trans member. Sentencing and judging the rest due to the mandate of the nuclear family It can harm many people and even violate their rights and liberties.
For international organizations that defend the rights of children and adolescents, the family is defined as the area where affection, care and protection are found. In this context, either genetic or blood are not determining variables to establish what a family isand thus the links, the relational, is what takes center stage.
In parallel, even in the educational system there is still great concealment of the new family models: from how to put together the registration forms going through the lack of specific bibliography and the scheme that is replicated in school acts. In many schools, families with heterosexual fathers and mothers continue to be seen as almost the only model, despite the contents of Comprehensive Sexual Education (ESI).
Regarding roles, women have always worked in the public sphere, but even so, they continue to be the ones who mostly deal with domestic work and unpaid care tasks. Undoubtedly, this is changing, but without a doubt it also needs to change more. Let’s ask ourselves this simple question: Are housework distributed equally in our homes? Who does the laundry? Who cooks? And who irons and puts away the clothes? Who does the shopping? Who makes the list of what you need to buy? Who organizes the house?
For all this we believe that it is so It is important that the training in Ley Micaela include the way we live as a familyto reflect on and make them places to promote gender equality, democratize domestic and care work from co-responsibility in parenting, and stimulate changes in socialization processes, fairly involving all genders and generations.
**Vera A. Reynoso is a territorial gender promoter and workshop coordinator for the Micaela García “La Negra” Foundation.
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Together with the Micaela García “La Negra” Foundation, Télam presents a series of articles that seek to raise awareness and sensitize about violence against women and diversity, and promote equality between genders.
