Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood: Resisting Monomaternalism in Adoptive, Lesbian, Blended, and Polygamous Families

Chapter 5: Queer Assemblages: The Domestic Geography of Postmodern Families

153 5 Queer Assemblages The Domestic Geography of Postmodern Families [P]art of what has made queerness compelling as a form of selfdescription . . . has to do with the way it has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space. —Judith (Jack) Halberstam (2005) To this point, I have focused largely on the triangulated mother–child– mother relationship within adoptive and other nonbiocentric families and the queer affective geographies to which it gives rise. The domestic geographies of postmodern families—whether created through open adoption or through separation and repartnerings of parents or by some other means of chosen kinship—require equal attention, however. Except for the homonormative lesbian family and the heteronormative adoptive family that attempts to pass as a nuclear genealogical unit, polymaternal families typically reside outside of what Kathleen Franke (2004) calls “domestinormativity.” In polymaternal families, the boundaries of “home” blur the distinction between the private and the public. In A Queer Time and Place, Halberstam (2005) suggests that queer perspectives on and uses of time and space are negatively linked to the normative ways in which families inhabit time and space as a naturalized, heterosexual unit “upheld by a middle-class logic of reproductive temporality” (4). Thus notions of queer time and space develop, 154 Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood in part, “in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (1). Here I use the notion of queer time and space, as developed by Halberstam, to interrogate how queer uses of time and space may develop within the institution of family itself. This may seem an odd (even perverse) project, given that Halberstam’s work is aimed at examining how queer subcultures develop as alternatives to kinship-based notions of community (154). “At a moment when so many middle-class gays and lesbians are choosing to raise children in conventional family settings,” she notes, “it is important to study queer life modes that offer alternatives to family time and family life” (153). I agree this is an important project, but believe it also is important to examine how children may be raised within nonconventional familial settings—settings that may, at least sometimes and in some ways, depart from the temporal and spatial structures of domestinormative life. Halberstam acknowledges that “not all people who have children keep or even are able to keep reproductive time,” but contends that “many and possibly most people believe that the scheduling of reprotime is natural and desirable” (5). Indeed, the (Western) norms of good families suggest that we should all live in the same place (a nuclear family household) and follow the same schedule (one premised on the alleged needs of children). Yet the “conventional family setting” to which Halberstam alludes is a relatively recent (post-World War II) invention that is rapidly becoming extinct—even among the middleclass families for whom it was invented. For this reason, I argue here that the alternative “logics of location, movement and identification” to which Halberstam alludes may breach the divide between queer forms of life, on the one hand, and familial forms of life, on the other. My focus here, like Halberstam’s own, is on the queer time and placemaking practices that emerge within postmodernism (6). If we think about queerness, as Halberstam does, as an “outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices,” we “detach queerness from sexual identity” (1). For Halberstam (and other queer theorists), the unmooring of queerness from issues of sexual identity better enables us to understand Foucault ’s (1996) claim that “homosexuality threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather than as a way of having sex” (310). The ways in which queer friendships and alliances inhabit space and time, Halberstam argues, “mark out . . . the perceived menace of homosexual life” (1). In contrast —but also using a distinctly Foucauldian form of argument— 155 Queer Assemblages Cheshire Calhoun (2000) suggests that “gay men and lesbians have become family outlaws not because their relationships and families were distinctively queer, but because heterosexuals’ relationships and families queered the gender, sexual, and family composition norms” (159). In Feminism, the Family and the Politics of the Closet, Calhoun argues that a combination of technological, social, and economic factors combined during the late twentieth century “to produce an explosion of new family and household forms that undermine the nuclear, biology-based family’s claim to be the natural, normative social unit...