Why do people put those 'My Family' stickers on their cars? by Alecia Simmonds - 01/04/15, 1:37 PM

"The reality is that Dad is far more likely to be at work than engaging in leisure activities with the family, Mum will be exhausted trying to juggle work and family, and the kids will be chubby, Cheezel-smeared tykes gaping vacant-eyed at their iPads." Photo: The Sticker Family

You know those stick people. I'm sure you've seen them: Hot Mum, Fit Dad, and Happy White Children engaged in aspirational extra-curricular activities. They arrived in Australia in 2009 and their presence has provoked deep, anguished, sometimes angry questioning ever since. WHY? Why is this nuclear family unit so nauseatingly happy? Why does the driver of this SUV feel the need to tell everyone how infinitely normal she is? Do her and her husband make a habit of advertising their fertility? Why not just put up a sticker on your car saying: I BREED THEREFORE I AM. And when did driving make you skinny?

Psychologist Carolyn Manning says some would say the stickers are symptomatic of a narcissistic, self-absorbed society. The people who put them on their cars, it could be argued, think strangers actually care about the terrible ordinariness of their lives. Academic Karen Brooks argues that it's about Facebook culture: "We're really in your face about ourselves, our lives and our families, and we think that everything we do is important." Ergo, everyone needs to know that Dad likes fishing, Mum has a computer, and the violin-playing kid has a pet dog that died (cf. halo over dog's head). On the other side, people have simply argued that it's a way of celebrating the family that you love – nothing more and nothing less.

But a new study, in fact the first comprehensive treatment of the matter, suggests something else. Academics Kylie Doyle and Kieran Tranter have written a cracker of an article in the Journal of Media and Cultural Studies arguing that an anxious claim to belonging lies at the heart of the issue. It's a desire, they say, to belong to a vision of feminine success and to a mythical white middle Australia populated by happy, heterosexual nuclear families.


Middle-aged women, in Tranter and Doyle's study, were the group most likely to sport the stickers and it's argued that they use them as "an advertisement banner for a competitive 'supermum'". The most popular stickers are husbands barbequeing, mums at work with their computers or shopping, and children being active. The stickers say to passing cars: "Look! I can hang on to my husband, take my kids to soccer, and here I am working! And not just that: behold how happy and together we all are!"

The reality is that Dad is far more likely to be at work than engaging in leisure activities with the family, Mum will be exhausted trying to juggle work and family, and the kids will be chubby, Cheezel-smeared tykes gaping vacant-eyed at their iPads.

The point is that the stickers are a fantasy of togetherness in a context of family fragmentation caused by work pressures and men's refusal to take on the labour of child-rearing. And they're a fantasy of health in a world of rising obesity rates caused partly by that fat SUV you're driving.

There's also a very obvious nostalgia for a 1950s world of fixed gender roles and white heteronormative families. There's no way of showing ethnicities other than Anglo-Saxon on the stickers, say Tranter and Doyle. The world that they invoke is relentlessly white. It's also a world where the kinds of activities that you can engage in are determined by your gender. For instance, unlike women, men don't do yoga, they don't drink wine, and they don't go shopping. Sadly, they appear to have no outlet for creative expression beyond photography. Women, on the other hand, don't fix things because they're not allowed to use the hammer, they don't barbecue, and they don't play cricket. Boys get to use big weights, but the girls can be happy running with little ones. No girl wants unsightly big muscles, after all.

To date, people have tended to use stickers on their cars to advertise their allegiance to either a religion (like the Christian fish symbol) or a political cause (like the Wilderness Society stickers). The My Family stickers are instead advertising your commitment to cultural conformity, say Tranter and Doyle. They are declarations of your allegiance to The Normal. And as such, they come from a place of anxiety, a context where people see The Normal as being challenged by non-Anglo Saxons, queers, or inner-city liberals who prefer to eat on breadboards rather than plates. Under threat from enemy forces, My Family shelters within the air-conditioned fortress of an SUV as it glides silent, paranoid and twitchy through suburbia.



But it's not all so bad. Although it tends to be traditional nuclear families who buy the stickers, it is possible to queer them – two dads, two mums etc. And the stickers also work to challenge the masculinism of road culture - that Mad Max image of our roads as aggressive domains where men are in control. The stickers, in a very visible way, bring the private and the intimate into the public. They domesticate the vast anonymity of our highways. And this, the researchers say, explains why the response to them has been so patriarchal. Parodies like the 'F--k Your Family' stickers show "beer-guzzling daddy and his ho", monster trucks, and girl stick figures in subordinate sexual positions: "making a family".

But to my mind, no matter how worthy these stickers are in domesticating our roads, the model of domesticity that they show is a kind of stomach-churning, white-bread conservatism. Surely there are better markers of success than your reproductive capacity? Surely our families are more diverse than that!

And it's not just about the tedium of 1950s nuclear families. It's about the stupidity of car-culture. It's about the lumbering idiocy of even owning an SUV in the first place. In fact, there may never be a better argument for more public transport in suburbia than an SUV bearing a stick-figure drawing of Your Family.