Shaking + Quaking + Breaking the Boughs: Deconstructing Family with Digital Visual Culture Media

Mindi Rhoades

Mindi Rhoades The Ohio State University

Abstract

Master narratives of family tangle inseparably with dominant sociocultural discourses of sexual identity, gender, race, class, and others to organize and enforce cultural norms (Gee, 1992; Geertz, 1973; Gergen, 1995). In todayâ€™s â€œtechnomediated cultureâ€ (Carpenter & Taylor, 2003, p. 48), digital media can perpetuate oppressive dominant discourses or promote social justice. Hypertext, as a digital process and product, can be used to deconstruct dominant oppressive identity discourses, creating potential for increasing sociocultural equity. Glenn Ligonâ€™s online work, Annotations, a digital family album, demonstrates hypertextâ€™s deconstructive potential to envision alternatives to patriarchy, encourage an awareness of multiple narratives and knowledges, and provide options that envision multiple, divergent discourses and subjectivities outside culturally-defined norms. I deconstruct family relationships and interactions from my own family photo albums, and provide examples of how artists have used hypermedia as subjective platforms to reflectively re-negotiate their concepts of self, and, in turn, re-imagine concepts of family.

Author Biography

Mindi Rhoades, The Ohio State University

Mindi Rhoades is a visiting professor at The Ohio State University in the College of Education and Human Ecologyâ€™s School of Teaching and Learning in their Middle and Early Childhood Education programs. She is the current copresident of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Interest Caucus of the National Art Education Association. Her research investigates ways that visual culture and arts education intersect with and can impact educational equity issues, critical theories, active learning, increased awareness, and socially beneficial change. Mindi currently works as a weekly volunteer atelierista in a Reggio Emilia model school with infants, toddlers, and preschool students. Other volunteer work includes over a decade in LGBTQ youth centers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Columbus, Ohio.

Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to the author at rhoades.89@osu.edu