Thinking About the Feminist Family

I’ve often thought that American feminism, at least American feminism of the variety that traces its intellectual origins to Gloria Steinem, doesn’t wear well on the rest of the world. The thorny independence of its projects and its unwillingness to make concessions have enabled a lot of advances in the American cultural scheme of glorifying the strong individual, but created some pretty rigid (and often polarizing) boundaries for those of us trying to picture a version of ourselves from within its midst. And in cultures not built on overt celebration of the individual, inventing oneself from a location of American feminist isolationism is all but impossible.

This week’s Private Practice, “Past Tense,” which aired on October 29, uses Sharbat (Rome Shadanloo) as a focalizer for confronting this impasse. Sharbat arrives at the practice with her parents, claiming to have been raped. The family is Afghani, and Sharbat’s father has arranged a marriage for her to a rich man that will take the entire family back to Afghanistan. One problem: Sharbat’s sexual violation means that her hymen has already been broken, and she won’t bleed on their wedding night. The family wants Addison (Kate Walsh) to perform a surgery that would repair the damage to her hymen, allowing the marriage to go forward.

The women of the practice are appalled and a lively discussion follows about medical ethics: is the “beneficent” component of the medical ethics standard defined as what is medically beneficial, or what the patient believes is beneficial? Lab results come in during the conversation that complicate things even further: sperm is still present. Addison confronts her about the possibility of the abuse still taking place and Sharbat admits she was never raped—it was a lie to cover her relationship with her boyfriend. She explains that she still wants to go through with the surgery because her love of her parents, who are miserable in America, is the love that gives her the most happiness.

From here, the show settles into one of its “the patients take care of the doctors” moments. Addison extrapolates from Sharbat’s radical repositioning of herself to preserve the love she finds in her family a solution to the on-going background conflict of Private Practice: the power struggle between Sam (Taye Diggs) and Naomi (Audra McDonald). In its pursuit of this story line, the writing has been a little reminiscent of the hackneyed clichés from the first season. Naomi, the woman, is the care-giver concerned with patients and Sam, the man, is the relentless breadwinner concerned with the bottom line. Thankfully this old dance seems to be in intermission for the time being. Addison takes her teachable moment from Sharbat and confronts the entire practice about the need to move on from past wrongs and focus on functioning as a family again. Her speech does nothing for Sam and Naomi, but when it comes time to vote for who will run the practice, Violet (Amy Brenneman), Dell (Chris Lowell), Cooper (Paul Adelstein), and Pete (Tim Daly) block vote to put Addison in charge.