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Scientists disagree about exactly what constitutes a “self,” how we acquire and create our identity and how this changes over time.Our sense of self is an artifact, something that we construct,but that doesn’t stop us from feeling it is something that we discover gradually as we mature.

Children grow up and are different from their parents due to accidents of genetics and changing times. In order to become individuals, children can go through a period of rebellion. Much has been written about the mother-daughter bond or “the mother-daughter friction heritage” as Megan Lindholm calls it. Daughters sometimes must define themselves by their differences from their mothers. Sometimes it’s a phase they grow out of; sometimes it’s not. The theme is embodied often in literature by women from either the point of view of the mother or that of the daughter.

“La Guera" by Cherrie Moraga

In “La Guera,” both a personal essay and the introduction to her anthologyThis Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherrie Moraga tells how she came to embrace the heritage represented by her mother, and why it was so difficult for her to do so. Her mother wanted to forget her origins in poverty and knew that “being Chicana meant being less.” She wanted her children to have an easier life than hers. Denied the opportunity to learn Spanish, Moraga grew up “anglicized.” Half Anglo, Moraga was light skinned – something she knew intuitively was valued by her family.Her discovery of her love for women reawakened her connection to her mother’s oppression since she knew that while she would not be harassed for being Latina, she could be beaten up on the street for “being a dyke.”In other words, her own sense of oppression taught her sensitivity to the oppression of others:“If my sister’s being beaten up for being black, it’s pretty much the same principle.”

Her essay is a pain-filled meditation on the necessity for empathy and compassion in human life. She ably describes the dangers of being part of this culture: if you can “pass” as part of the American mainstream and “rise” above your origins, it is easy to overlook those who cannot. She argues for new language with which to address our sense that we are subject to someone else’s power, since terms like “oppression” have been used so often that they have lost meaning for many or become easily mouthed slogans for others. She speaks eloquently of the internalization of the negative stereotypes that can cause self-hatred and defines the sources of bigotry – the fear of the oppressor that he is in some way the same as those he oppresses and the fear that he in turn will be turned on by those he has vilified. She concludes that the tendency of white women’s groups to ignore their non-white sisters holds all women back from unity, and that not until each of us looks within and confronts our worst nightmare, the “dark other,” will women be able to reach their dream of unity.

“Everyday Use” by Alice Walker

From the beginning we see the narrator’s longing for her daughter’s acceptance: in her daydream her daughter has become famous and they are united on a talk show. "I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake. My hair glistens in the hot bright lights. Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with my quick and witty tongue.” In her fantasy the daughter is pleased with her and she is lighter skinned than in reality. She is sophisticated and clever, though she knows “that is a mistake. I know even before I wake up. Who ever knew a Johnson with a quick tongue?”

Her description of herself tells us a lot: “In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall.”

This is a strong woman, a survivor, who has worked hard all her life for her small family. She has been able to send one child, Dee, off to college but the other Maggie, “homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs,” was maimed in a fire that destroyed their first house and is still with her, though planning soon to be married.

Her other daughter Dee is ”lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure.” Now she is returning for a visit, for the first time bringing a friend. Her mother had thought in the past the Dee was ashamed of her origins and reluctant to bring friends, but now she is not. Why? Has Dee accepted who she is? Not quite – it’s simpy that the times have changed. Dee’s origins in the poverty of the deep south are no longer something to be ashamed of. They are a source of pride. As was fashionable then among educated African-Americans, Dee has discovered her African roots and adopted the name Leewanika Kemanjo Wangero. She brings with her a companion who greets her mother with the muslim greeting, asalamalakim, which is how Dee’s mother sarcastically refers to him from then on.

We see here a comic and ironic culture clash. Dee adopted another name because "I couldn't bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me."

But her mother believes in family traditions:

"You know as well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie," I said. Dicie is my sister. She named Dee. We called her "Big Dee" after Dee was born.

"But who was she named after?" asked Wangero.

"I guess after Grandma Dee," I said.

"And who was she named after?" asked Wangero.

"Her mother," I said, and saw Wangero was getting tired. "That's about as far back as I can trace it," I said. Though, in fact, I probably could have carried it back beyond the Civil War through the branches.

"Well," said Asalamalakim, "there you are."

"Uhnnnh," I heard Maggie say.

"There I was not," I said, "before 'Dicie' cropped up in our family, so why should I try to trace it that far back?"

In other words, to Dee’s mother the name ”Dee” is not the name of the clichéd oppressor but a family name passed down through generations. Its origins no longer matter – the narrator wasn’t there then. The name is now part of the family.

Pretentious, condescending, and unknowingly cruel in her desire to return to her African roots, Dee, who wouldn’t accept a hand-sewed quilt from her mother when she left for college, now covets all the “quaint” artifacts in her mother’s home, not because they mean anything to her personally, but because they are trendy in the acquisitive culture to which she now belongs: "’I can use the chute top as a centerpiece for the alcove table,’ she said, sliding a plate over the chute, ‘and I'll think of something artistic to do with the dasher.’"

But Dee cannot cover up the reality symbolized by Maggie – darker, burned, scarred for life, but genuine, the ugly reminder of a past that cannot be prettified by the chic adoption of African names and churn tops as centerpieces for an alcove table. It is Maggie who is the touchstone of honesty and generosity throughout the story– reacting without pretense to the visiting couple with her heartfelt "Uhnnnh " and ceding the ownership of the quilt to her acquisitive sister.

Things come to a head over the handmade quilts Dee fancies. "’Maggie can't appreciate these quilts![…] She'd probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.’" In this she reveals her true valuation of her family – no matter how quaint the handmade items, her mother and sister are “backward” for not understanding the real value of their few possessions.

But it isn’t true that the quilts and the other objects have no value for Dee’s mother and sister. They know the personal history of each item: “’ 'Aunt Dee's first husband whittled the dash,’ said Maggie so low you almost couldn't hear her. ‘His name was Henry, but they called him Stash.’” And Dee’s mother looking at the churn before she gives it up to Dee reflects: “You didn't even have to look close to see where hands pushing the dasher up and down to make butter had left a kind of sink in the wood. In fact, there were a lot of small sinks; you could see where thumbs and fingers had sunk into the wood. It was beautiful light yellow wood, from a tree that grew in the yard where Big Dee and Stash had lived.”

We can smile at Dee if we ever came home from college full of our new selves and our new knowledge (whether gained from our peers or the cultural movements of the times) and tried to show our parents how different we were from them, how aware we were of things we felt they did not know and ought to. But she is selfish in wanting to deprive her sister of the quilts promised to her for her upcoming marriage, and her mother is true to values beyond fashion when she retrieves the quilts and gives them to Maggie.

This is not to say Dee is totally wrong. She must differentiate herself from her past and go forward into the new world she lives in, one which her mother and sister do not share, but she is making the mistake Moraga warned against, rising above her origins and looking down on those who have not.

"Cut" by  Megan Lindholm (2005)

This story also deals with a generation gap. Like many stories set in a fictitious future, the world we are introduced to is the result of trends in our own culture today. The youthful fads that drive current parents wild, body piercings for instance; the ongoing debate over who has rights, where do the parents’ rights end and the child’s begin. In the culture of this future, we see some unanticipated results of children’s rights advocacy. The laws have changed: a child reaches the age of consent at fourteen. Patsy’s mother Katie reminds her mother: "Legally, her body is her own. Once a child is over fourteen, a parent cannot interfere in [….] any decision the child makes about her sexuality. Birth control, abortions, adopting-out of children, gender reassignment, confidential medical treatment for venereal disease, plastic surgery—it’s all covered in that Freedom of Choice act."

In a regrettable but perhaps understandable backlash another law allows almost total ownership of the child until that age.Lindholm skewers our legal processes, the wheelings and dealings that underlie the passage of laws in Congress today. “It’s the flip side of the Freedom of Choice act” Katie tells her mother. “The compromise Congress made to get it passed. Under the age of fourteen, a parent can make any choice for the child.”Thus it is that Patsy’s circumcision is legal, and it is also legal for her friend Mary to circumcise her own baby daughter.

Much like Dee, Patsy desires to differentiate herself from older generations. It’s as if she has thought up the most outrageous and retrogressive action possible to shock her shock-proof mother and grandmother. While they fought for women’s rights, she now argues for the right to deprive herself of sexual pleasure through circumcision,a custom practiced by many Islamic cultures today with or without the daughter’s consent.

We can argue that Patsy is too young to make this decision especially as we look at her motives, a hodgepodge of media-hyped trendy slogans, not one of which appears to have been thought through. It raises questions: should Patsy be constrained from doing this? Locked up? What do you do if your child wants to do something you feel will be grotesquely harmful to herself in the future? Is one ever old enough to make a decision like this?

Like Dee, Patsy both rejects her past in the concrete and romanticizes it in the abstract. Her grandmother’s advice is rejected: "Don’t gross me out with old-people sex stories. Ew!" Her mother’s feminist past isinvoked: “She threatened to kill our midwife. Can you believe that? I asked her if she ever bombed abortion clinics when she was younger. She said it wasn’t the same thing at all. Sure it is, I told her. It’s all about choice, isn’t it? Women making their own sexual choices." As Patsy’s mother believes a woman has a right to her own sexual choice regarding pregnancy, her threat to kill the midwife performing the circumcision istantamount to bombing an abortion clinic.

Further, Patsy calls upon ancient traditions to explain her actions. She sees circumcision as similar to other body-altering customs: “People have been doing it for thousands of years.” She and her friendswill “be like a circumcision group, like some African tribes had. We’ve grown up together. The ceremony will be a bond between us the rest of our lives."Anesthetic “would go against the traditions of female circumcision throughout the world. Ticia and Mary and Sam and I will be there for each other. It will be just women sharing their courage with other women."

She has picked up the appropriate slogans, grown almost meaningless over time as Moraga has warned, and reapplied them to her own quest for individuation.

In this future world the Internet is omnipresent and thesole source of information for the characters. The grandmother has a wall screen on which are views of the rain forest brought to her by a “rainforest cam”. She watches “net news.” Patsy wears a “net link” on her collar and by pointing it at her grandmother’s wall screen is able to instantly link to a picture of a circumcised female “net star.” And she tries to show her grandmother a site showing a re-constituted vagina. “Here’s a link to the midwife’s website. Go look at it. She has all the historical stuff posted there. You like anthropology. You should be fascinated."

Further, Patsy’s mother is an archeologist. But she does a different kind ofarcheology than the kind done today. It’s virtual archeology, done via computer. When her mother asks her if she misses the actual physical contact with the artifacts, she replies:

"Oh. Well, yes, I do. But this is still good. And the native peoples have been much more receptive to our work now that they know all the grave goods will remain in situ [at the archeological site] and relatively undisturbed. The cameras and the chem scanners can do most of the data gathering for us. But it still takes a human mind to put it all together and figure out what it means. And this way of doing it is better, both for archaeology and anthropology. Sometimes we’re too trapped in our own time to see what it all means. Sometimes we’re too close, temporally, to understand the culture we’re investigating. By leaving all the artifacts and bones in situ, we make it possible for later anthropologists to take a fresh look at it, with unprejudiced eyes."

Katie thus is removed from contact with the physical reality she works with.

Perhaps Patsy’s circumcision is just once more instance of this separation from physical reality. But more importantly, Katie’s job gives us perspective on the situation. It’s all a matter of cultural values.The grandmother once decided that Katie would have braces on her teeth so that she would be like other children. Going along with the customs of her day, she had her male child circumcised, also without anesthetic, when he was a baby. ”I had not hesitated, had not questioned it, all those years ago. I had charged ahead and done what others told me was wise, done what everyone else was doing.”

When Patsy’s grandmother tells Katie, "Stop her. Any way you can,"  Katie asks, “Like you stopped Mike from dropping out of school?"

Patsy replies: "I did everything I could. I’d drop your brother off at the front door, I’d watch him go into the school, and he’d go right out the back door. Battling him was not doing anything for our relationship. I had to let him make that mistake."Her daughter replies “Exactly,” and with that underscores how little control we have legally or otherwise over those we love.

So at the end of the story when Patsy’s grandmother takes out her little gun and goes to shoot the midwife, she says: “This is my  freedom of choice, I tell myself fiercely. My turn to choose. Then I know I am too close to any of it to understand. Maybe we should just leave the midwife’s body where it falls. In situ [at the site]. Perhaps in a hundred years or two, someone else will know what to make of it all. ”She knows she is “too close to any of it to understand” but she has to do what she does to protect Patsy.

We are repelled by the idea of female circumcision, but as Patsy’s grandmother says,  “Patsy argues well and is not stupid. She is merely young and in the throes of her time.”  The story makes us wonder what other decisions we make for ourselves or those we love without realizing the barbarity of what we are doing.