Birdcage How Do We Learn Essay

The job of therapy is in no small part to help individuals push back about over-simplification. Behind the comedy in this movie -- and it is a very funny movie -- is the recognition that much of what makes us miserable in our lives is the fact that we find ourselves limited in our sense of Self by the categories that other people bring to bear on us. And the more distant that we are from what our society considers to be "normal," the more our lives are likely to be constrained by other people's concept of the "Other."

The gay characters in this movie have far less latitude to define themselves in ways that serve themselves (rather than the straight individuals in the movie or a broader straight society in general) than is true of the straight characters. And the more closely the gay characters align themselves with what might be called a "normal gay identity" (for of course there are norms within the gay community as there are within any community), the more latitude that they have.

And the more minority identities that one has, as Robinson-Wood (2009) makes clear, the less latitude that one has to negotiate one's own identity. We may each think that we are the makers of our own selves, but this is in fact not the case. We exist, far more than we would like to admit, as fodder for other people's unconscious processes.

References

Adams, M.V. (1996). The multicultural imagination: "Race," color, and the unconscious. New York: Routledge.

Robinson-Wood, T. (2009). The convergence of race, ethnicity and gender: Multiple…