Susan Smith is deemed incapable and silenced when she lets her child choose the male or female clothes that they wanted to wear. Sue Ruddick explains:
“The fetus- mother relationship defines a terrain in which the mother is exclusively responsible. This view of the mother’s body as contested terrain is forcefully advanced by the American Center of Law and Justice- a right-wing religious organization founded in 1990 to defend and advance ‘religious liberty, the sanctity of human life, and the two parent, marriage bound family” (518).
In reference to the conceptualization of the mother as “contested,” she is deemed only capable of child rearing, and nothing else. Assumed as “only the child rearer,” she is separated from the outside “real” world, namely the legal world. The father takes over when she “fails” at parenting. In letting her child dress in female clothes opposed to their biological male sex, the mother has failed at child rearing. The father steps in to save the failures of the mother’s parenting, by instigating a custody battle to silence the mother’s support of the child’s human rights. The father has facilitated the silencing of both the gender expression of the child, and the support and advocacy of gender expression by deeming the mother’s parenting inadequate. How can advocacy and allyship work exist when people perpetuate discriminatory practices to the law? Let us dismantle this.
References
Ruddick, Sue. “At the Horizons of the Subject: Neo-liberalism, Neo-conservatism and the Rights of the Child Part One: From ‘knowing’ Fetus to ‘confused’ Child.” Gender, Place & Culture 14.5 (2007): 513-27. Web.