Context Essay

  In the personal essay "Context"(2014), Dorothy Allison explains that context matter and can influence a person's reception of your family. Allison supports her thesis by giving examples of her personal experiences with her lover as well as her family. Allison also uses contexts of her life in order to express her fear of  what others thought of her sexual preference. Her intended audience was for anyone in fear of introducing their bisexual relationship to their families.
  It is indeed a crazy world that we live in and fear plays a major part in. Since the time she wrote this essay that the nation has had several opinions about the legalization of same sex marriage and I personally feel that it is wrong but my opinion is supported by the was I was raised and taught from the bible. I still however respect everyone and their choice and make no difference to them as being a person just like me.
 Allison uses flashbacks of her life as a child to show context to the dialect of her family's living conditions. "We had never owned an air conditioner, never stayed in a motel, never eaten in a restaurant where my mother did not work".(116) She then goes on to add an incident when her family had gone on a vacation and her stepfather made a racial statement reflecting as the man in the store being a Jew and said that the "Jew bastard will charge me if you break anything."(116) She didn't want to be profiled as being like her stepfather so she said "I gritted my teeth and kept my head up, looked that man in the face and mouthed, I'm sorry."(117). Overall Allison considers "Context is so little to share, and so vital."(117) However, her greatest fear was that no matter how others judge the people she was with, it would still have an effect on what people thought she would be like as well.