[“The affect of straight culture is marked not only by repressed anger and sadness but by a kind of emotional flatness, an antiflamboyance. Here, straight culture and WASP culture overlap, highlighting the ways that straight people of color, Jews, Muslims, people with disabilities, sluts, fat people, and white queers—to name a few—depart from the norms associated with straightness and/or whiteness. For example, a common straight critique of gay affect in the mid- and late twentieth century was that it was too flamboyant—too spectacular, too loud, too sexual, too confident, too animated, too exposed, and overall just too much. If we reverse the gaze, focusing on queer people’s assessment of the look and feel of straight life, we can see how straight people—especially straight white people—might seem to queers too passive, boring, unimaginative, and generally uninspired. If queerness is too much, then straightness is too little, the relational manifestation of lack.”]
Reagan-era “stranger danger” panic has done so much harm to americans’ sense of community. It cemented the idea that only the nuclear family could be trusted with the care of the child, deterred people from cooperative living with an extended community, and continues to place abuse victims in danger by perpetuating the misconception that most child abuse is done by strangers rather than someone they know. It is in our best interest to become more interdependent than we were raised to be.
