Finding yourself by finding community: Reflections on growing up far from the tree with Dr. Joseph Stramondo and Leah Smith

About the event

Presentation Description

This talk will lay out and help the audience interpret some of the key conceptual themes of the documentary film Far From the Tree and the book of the same name by Andrew Solomon.  Solomon wrote the book and made the film to reconcile the tensions that existed in his own family between his gay identity and his parents’ very different values and experiences.  The fundamental question he set out to explore was: how do the members of a family create durable, loving relationships across vastly different social identities and correspondingly divergent experiences of the world? The speakers, Joseph Stramondo and Leah Smith, feature heavily in the film as Little People that have both average size parents and average size kids of their own. In his book, Solomon uses the conceptual distinction between vertical and horizontal identity as the framework for his examination of family bonds in the face of difference.  Vertical identities are typically passed down between generations and are usually shared between parents and children, like ethnicity, religion, race, or socio-economic class. In contrast, horizontal identities are not shared between generations, so the norms and ways of life they entail are learned from peer groups rather than parents. These identities include being gay and being disabled, but also being a prodigy, being trans, being incarcerated for a crime, and several others.  This talk will argue that, in these cases of horizontal identity formation, it is critical for children and their parents to both have access to a community of peers.  That is, both children and parents benefit from disabled role models, disabled mentors, and the disability pride movement.  Fundamentally, it is community that can bridge this gap between parent and child.