Raising Sam: Mothering as a Secular Feminist Scholar of Religion

Let us be kinder to each other, loving to each other, as we theorize about families.

—Joanna Radbord

It's two weeks before the birth of our daughter. We're in a technician's office verifying by sound and sight that all is well within the belly of my partner and I'm nattering on about the frilly dresses and pink sweaters we've received from family since finding out we're having a girl. The air and our lives are permeated with nervous and exhilarating anticipation. The technician moves the probe across Katrina and asks if we've kept the tags and receipts. I continue to muse about ways that the murky black and white form slipping in and out on the screen will change our lives forever. Then I pause and inquire about her comment. "The receipts on those dresses," she repeats. "You see this?" she asks, tapping the monitor. "That's a scrotum."

When we share this story with others, they're generally amused until we indicate we're keeping the dresses. It is, after all, his choice what he wants to wear, we explain. Then our company becomes uncomfortable with the humor and uncertain whether and how to participate further in the discussion.

Of course, none of our personal amusement about this occurrence curbs the sudden and reluctant sadness I feel as the little girl I'd been anticipating and connecting with in my mind for the past several months slips away, out of our lives and future. It leaves me wondering how the anticipated sex of a child could have possibly played such a significant role for this proud postmodern queer theorist.

Suddenly I'm thrust into a world of new worries where my academic training offers little guidance or solace. I'm about to be a first-time mother, in a same-sex relationship, in a small western city where such things are still rare. My mind races with trepidation. Can I raise a son? How will he be potty-trained? Will he be bullied because of me or even possibly because of our interracial family? What, dear god, do I think of circumcision? And where the heck are all those articles I read about feminists raising sons?

Stephanie May's essay "Mothers and Sons: Feminist Parenting and the Conundrums of Raising Males" provides an invaluable opportunity to reflect on where we find ourselves, as feminists with boys, four decades after the 1970s feminist movement. For feminist scholars of religion, this reflection is additionally informed by all we've come to theorize and know about the impacts of patriarchal religion and mythology on our concepts and experience of power and social categories relating to gender, sexuality, race, and class. May's reflections on historical discourse and theorizing about mothering encourage a reconsideration of traditional concepts of family and parenting as ultimately untenable categories with multiple opportunities for interpretation and performance.

Recent scholarship illustrates the inherent complexity and breadth of theories regarding kinship, motherhood, and gender in Western culture. While Stephanie Coontz persuasively demonstrates the ironic impossibility of locating a single, coherent, and stable "traditional" family to serve as a referent in North American history,¹ Patrice DiQuinzio illuminates how feminism in the United States has "never been characterized by a monolithic position on mothering."² Kath Weston's work exposes how queer culture has generally problematized notions of kinship through "chosen families" that ultimately "represent something more than a second-best imitation of blood ties"³ and Rachel Epstein reminds us that there is nothing common about dyke or queer experiences of motherhood and family.⁴

If it is true that "mother" is a contested category (as I believe it is), then it is also the case that certain forms of "mothering" are more likely to be contested than others. As one of two mothers to our son, and as one deeply impacted by the genius of founding writers in women and religion like Mary Daly and Naomi Goldenberg,⁵ I am keenly aware of the level to which Western religious and heteronormative myths and images impact social...