Ethnography

“Radical romance” is much harder to come by in a public place than I anticipated.  I went to Disneyland to observe, and catch a glimpse of “radical romance,” but instead was surprised that much romance stayed in the realm of the status quo. What I mean is I used a “traditional” sense of romance: heterosexual and of the same race to define “traditional.” This was my criterion for trying to find “non-traditional,” which would go into the realm of interracial couples and homosexual couples.

            I decided to do my observation at Disneyland. In a park that boasts 50,000 guests on an average day, I thought that in an hour’s time there would be plenty of both “traditional” and “non-traditional” romance to abound. This was not the case.

            In the entire hour of observing guests walk by whilst I waited for a parade to start, I saw only four interracial couples and only one homosexual couple. Strangely, all four interracial couples were a Caucasian male and an Asian female. The other “non-traditional” couple was a lesbian couple that had three children with them. One was in a stroller and the other two were approximately the same age (around four years old). I could not believe that in an hour of observing people going back and fourth, only five couples were “non-traditional.”

            Moving on to the “traditional” side of romance, I wrote down notes on who was in charge of the children. I focused my attention on families with kids, paying close attention to who was taking care of the children. Unsurprisingly, with four families sitting around me, it was the mother who was running around after the children in all four instances while the father either stayed sitting or was only talking to the oldest (in a show of coincidence, the oldest in all four families was a male but none of them older than the age of eight).

            In analyzing why there was such a shortage of interracial couples, I looked no further than everyone’s favorite baby-sitter, television. A couple in either television or movies is rarely portrayed as interracial, and when they are, most of the times it is met with reluctance from either one or both families of the people in the relationship. Many of the times this reluctance is caused by the fact that the families just don’t understand the others culture.

Recently I saw a romantic comedy called “Our Wedding” where a Mexican woman was going to marry a black man. All the plans are going to hell because both families want to have a “traditional” wedding. By traditional, I mean, by their cultural customs. In real life this is a real obstacle for some. The fact is getting in a relationship with a person of your own race eliminates having to accept customs from a completely different culture, religion or race. When I dated a Jewish girl, her immediate family was cautious of me and the rest of her family was extremely worried that I was a gentile. My family (which consists of just my Catholic mother and I) was much more accepting as my mom’s bosses are all Jewish and I have always known about the Jewish culture through them. The point is, race is seriously much ado about nothing, until it get involved with your son or daughter.

The second point of analysis that I wanted to bring to light was the role of the woman, the mother, in the “traditional” romances. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote the “woman is a womb.” I noticed that the older children were all bonding with their father while the mothers all took care of the younger ones (either toddlers or infants still). At one point in my observation I noticed that one mother went to the restroom without having her two boys noticing (one was about 4 and the other about 6). When the younger brother asked, “where’s mommy?” the dad never looked up at what the boy wanted (the dad was looking at the Disneyland map) and the boy ran off. The older brother had to run after the brother as the dad unenthusiastically yelled for his son.

This is completely a guess, but in that family I perceived that it wasn’t the man’s job to take care of the little boy. Even when the mother wasn’t present, it was up to the older brother to calm the younger brother down and assure him that mommy was coming back. As I wrote in my notes, “Eventually the older boy spotted the mother coming back off in the distance which made the younger brother start jumping for joy. The father remained as unenthusiastic as ever.”

Another thing de Beauvoir wrote was “in truth, to walk with one’s eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided in two classes of individuals whose… occupations are manifestly different.” In the case of the four families, the woman’s job was to care for the children and attend to them, somehow even when they are not present.

“Traditional vs. non-traditional” and man vs. woman in a relationship is adherent to our society now. Whether reinforced by the movies we watch or the ideals we pass down, changes are made, but they are simply superficial. There is still a clear divide between what is right and what is “right.” To view people and realize that the norm hasn’t changed much since the civil rights movement is still shocking, but I guess that is why when something is in fact out of the “ordinary,” it is regarded as a “radical romance.”