Meta: The Constitutive Outside of Found Family (Community s1)-- DFvQ

[xandromedovna]

The found family trope is a well-loved staple in queer circles and especially in fanfic. Because historically queer people were (and still are) often excluded from our families of origin, stories that uplift and value non-blood family attract large queer followings, as evidenced by their overrepresentation in my sample. Though many of these series show found families, I’m starting my discussion of Community with it because not only is it so central thematically but also because of how Community explores the limitations of the found family framework. After all, found families are still families, and family drama is also a perennial storytelling trope because, well, family is complicated.

I use the term ‘found family’ in recognition of Samuel Chambers’ thoughts on the oxymoron ‘family of choice’. He argues that family cannot be chosen: “Rather, [members] recognize and articulate that they are already family in a way that far exceeds the individual agency of either of them.” (Chambers 150, emphasis in original). Not only does family imply a level of unconditional connection but also a sense of obligation despite any desire not to feel obligated to that person. The other issue with chosen family is that ‘family’ carries with it connotations of hierarchy and firmly established relations of power and connection. We have dedicated words for parents, siblings, aunt/uncles, grandparents, cousins, etc. With found family, the precise nature of those relationships is ill-defined and thus more fragile.

Then again, families disown members all the time—that’s how most of these characters ended up with found families in the first place. As with all language, the designation of ‘family’ has performative force—you are family because I say you’re family or you are not family because I say you’re not (Chambers 149). While the initial relation can be severed and forgotten, it cannot be fully erased once established. Thus deciding who is and is not family is simultaneously an act of inclusion and exclusion. When someone says “these people are my family”, the corollary is that all these other people are not my family.

I should pause to acknowledge that this is probably a very Western framework of family. My education living in Amiskwacîwâskahikan has always emphasized the teaching “we are all Treaty people”, referencing in this instance Amiskwacîwâskahikan’s location within Treaty 6 territory. According to most nêhiyaw understandings of Treaty 6, the signing of that Treaty recognized Indigenous and settler signatories alike as family to each other in perpetuity, with all the responsibilities and tensions that word occasions (see Bhatia). This teaching is an extension of the observation that “we are all related”—not only are all humans related to each other however distantly in the family tree, we are also related to all other living (and non-living) beings both genealogically and materially, which carries ethical obligations (that settlers continually fail to uphold). However, most of the shows I’m studying conceptualize family as something carefully guarded to prioritize over all others, which are left out of the definition of family and therefore not as worth protecting.

We see this very clearly in Community. At the end of his ‘Winger speech’ in the Pilot (1x1), former lawyer Jeff says to his until-this-point-fake Spanish study group, “you’ve just stopped being a study group, you have become something unstoppable. I hereby pronounce you a community.” Not only does this emphasize relationality as being performatively declared, but for the rest of the series the seven original members refer to each other as family and do everything within their power to help each other to the exclusion of nearly everyone else at Greendale: they—and only they—are a community.

This family unit is defined in such a way that makes them antagonistic to all others. The group is toxically codependent on each other to the point that most of their other relationships languish (“who the hell are you always texting,” Annie quips to Jeff in 3x3, “everyone you know is here”). Most of the rest of the school actively hates them because of how often they cause havoc at the school through their self-centeredness. We are shown several times that while we are absolutely encouraged to care about the group and its members, we are also seeing a skewed vision of the world through their eyes. Background characters have lampshaded the focus on the study group several times, such as when Shirley has her baby during the Anthropology final and Vicki says “we came so close to having one class that wasn’t all about them” (2x22). “Alternative History of the German Invasion” (4x4, one of my least favourite eps) hinges on the study group realizing they’re the villains when a pattern of selfish and rude behaviour with regards to how they hog Study Room F leads to the other students getting fed up and revolting.

Most importantly, they leverage their power to declare people inside or outside the group to manipulate and bully people. When they first start out, they seem fairly open to others, such as when they let Buddy hang out with them when they return from winter break their first year; however he is eventually forcibly removed by Jeff for being obnoxious (1x13). When Abed briefly takes over the school as head of the chicken finger mafia (1x21), the study group leverages their control over school lunches to make everyone at Greendale do their bidding. At the start of their Biology class, Kane tries to pair them off with lab partners outside the group, but they convince him to let them work together and end up having to solve “The Todd Problem” because there’s an odd number of them. Todd, who until this point in the ep (his first) was perfectly nice, ends up being mercilessly bullied by them. When he finally gets fed up with the group, he rants at them, saying “your love is weird, and toxic, and it destroys everything it touches” (3x3). The Dean consistently shows favoritism to the group in his (until s6 unsuccessful) efforts to be recognized as one of them.

This aspect is most evident with Chang in s2, whose repeated applications to become part of the group are denied with little regard for him as a person, setting up his villain arc in s3. To be fair, Chang was awful to them as their Spanish teacher: he was petty, vindictive, verbally abusive, capricious, and openly played favourites. But when his teaching credentials are revealed to be fake and he’s fired (1x24), he ends up broke and homeless, taking classes at Greendale with the rest of them and eventually living in the vents, where he contracts experimental monkey fever from AB. He begins appealing to join the group when they take Anthropology together, but Jeff rejects him, though saying to the group “oh, we’ll let him in eventually” (2x1). His villain origin story moment comes in the next episode, when he singlehandedly carries the Heather Pop-n-Locklears at Pop-n-Locktoberfest only to be pointedly refused membership. The group had agreed that if their crew wins the contest Chang could join the group, but the group inadvertently sabotages their win when they storm the floor to hug Jeff. When Chang calls them out, Annie says “the contest doesn’t matter. What’s important is we have each other.” That ‘we’ is explicitly exclusive though, because when Chang asks “then can I be in your study group?” Troy counters, “well, that wasn’t the deal, we lost, so…” His potential inclusion is always a tool of control instead of a genuine gesture of recognition as family.

Even among themselves, there is always the threat of being excluded, such as when Jeff is dosed with monkey gas and subsequently kicked out of the group for being racist (3x1), or when Jeff keeps not inviting Shirley to dinner because of a standing conflict he knows about and doesn’t schedule around (5x8). A large aspect of Pierce’s characterization and subsequent turn to being a villain is his tenuous status in the group. Yet he’s probably the biggest indicator that found family isn’t chosen, because despite the fact that most of the group hates him, they continue to include him. In “The Art of Discourse” (1x22, also one of my least favourites), they kick Pierce out of the group for sexually harassing Shirley, only to find that he serves a vital function in the group: “Pierce’s universally recognized social flaws made him the scapegoat, a lightning rod. Now he’s gone, so there’s lightning everywhere. […] It’s only a matter of time before one of us becomes the new Pierce.”  When they’re debating kicking him out of the group again at the end of s2, Annie’s the only holdout. She and Jeff discuss her reasoning:

Annie: “The study group is my family, you know? And if we start picking and choosing—”

Jeff: “Where do we stop?” (2x23)

To return to Chambers, “we defend family despite what they have done. Thus, we could only say that we ‘choose’ family if we then go on to admit that these are choices we make based on very little information. That is, if they were choices, they would be bad choices.”

On the other hand, family is chosen in the sense that even when we disagree or dislike each other or have every right to disengage, we choose to continue fostering or recognizing that relationship because it is important to us. Family is “a complex temporal product of agency on both our part and on that of others. Family always proves to be partially chosen and partially unchosen” (Chambers 156). The initial relation and its affective weight may be involuntary and indelible, but its maintenance and the continued recognition of the other person as family must constantly be enacted/reperformed. Despite Pierce’s multiple exclusions and antagonisms, at his death he is still a mourned member of the family. (Troy also gets a send-off episode; Shirley does not.) Ultimately, Chang becomes a recognized part of the group because of their shared history, their begrudging care for him, and their decisions to forgive and/or accommodate him. However much they may not want to consider him family, denying their affective ties to him is unsuccessful and they consciously allow him fully into the fold, because “family is not something you choose, but something you cannot deny” (Chambers 157). Or in Jeff’s words, “caring about a person can be scary. Caring about six people can be a horrifying, embarrassing nightmare.” (2x15)

 

Work Cited

Bhatia, Amar. “We Are All Here to Stay?: Indigeneity, Migration, and ‘Decolonizing’ the Treaty Right to Be Here.” Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice, vol. 31, no. 2, 2013, pp. 39-64.

Chambers, Samuel. The Queer Politics of Television. I.B. Tauris, 2009.