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

Chapter 7: Queering Familial Solidarity: Polymaternalism and Polygamy

219 7 Queering Familial Solidarity Polymaternalism and Polygamy May 2010: It is Mother’s Day. I am having lunch with my partner and visiting friends from Switzerland. My own daughters are not with me (I will be driving to their father’s house after lunch to meet them for a movie date). Our lunch companions have a preschool-aged child with them, however, and our conversation turns toward parenting. When they inquire what life with teenagers is like, my partner responds, “like boot camp.” Although this is a view I’ve been known to espouse before, in hindsight I regret this view of life with my daughters and suggest that I have begun to think about it as more closely aligned to the difficult work of coalition building. What does it mean to think of a family as a site of coalition? In speaking of coalitional families, I attribute to them three primary characteristics . First, such familial assemblages are characterized by multiplicity (or what Honig calls “ineradicable difference”). This is an ontological characteristic of coalitional families—a fact about the nature of their reality. The reality of multiplicity is most pronounced in complicated families that require the ongoing coordination of multiple households and diverse groups of people. However, as I also have suggested, multiplicity may be a characteristic—manifested to a greater or lesser degree—of all families. Yet, in some families—and perhaps in most families at least some of the time—this ontological fact of real difference is ignored or overshadowed by an emphasis on commonalities (which may, in reality, also exist; difference and commonality are not mutually exclusive). 220 Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood Thus, the second characteristic of coalitional families pertains to their epistemology: Coalitional families understand that their family is characterized by multiple and ineradicable differences. As I have suggested at various junctures throughout this book, non-normative families such as those created through open adoption, divorce and repartnerings and practices of queer kinship are more likely to understand (or come, over time, to understand) multiplicity as a deep and abiding characteristic of family composition. Although non-normativity in family formations is not a guarantee of such understanding (some adoptive, blended, same-sex, and other polymaternal families may try to mimic “as-if” biological, procreative families), the perspective of nonnormativity may offer an epistemic advantage. It is for this reason, among others, that non-normative family configurations may be a useful starting place for (re)theorizing mothering. Acknowledging such differences is not, however, sufficient for familial coalition. Crucial to coalition in familial as well as other contexts is a normative (or ethico-political) dimension: coalitional families do not merely acknowledge difference; they also value engagement with difference . As such, coalitional families do not seek to eradicate difference through tactics of colonization, nor do they merely tolerate difference . Instead, families characterized by coalitional sensibilities place value on the different contributions made to a family by members with different talents, capacities, and dispositions as well as different needs and vulnerabilities. Familial contributions to the group must be understood here as going beyond caring for and about other family members and domestic spaces. In the case of very young, very old, very ill, or cognitively or physically disabled members of a family, for example, contributions may include demonstrations of human vulnerability and interdependency, as well as resistance to and critiques of forms of caretaking that diminish, devalue, or misunderstand the needs of the one cared for. In transracially adoptive families or other families of mixed race or mixed ethnicity, the contributions of some members may include exposing and disrupting assumptions of white privilege. Teenagers’ contributions, including the contributions of queer youth, may include efforts such as troubling or unsettling familial norms (including norms of sexual propriety). Moreover, because the subjectivities of family members emerge from different positionings within the family (e.g., as mother or daughter or son; as birth mother, adoptive mother or stepmother; as father or grandfather or uncle; as oldest child, youngest child, or middle child; etc.), each will contribute different 221 Queering Familial Solidarity perspectives in constructing or reconstructing family histories, stories, and memories and thus, to familial self-definition. And because the subjectivities of family members are also forged by the inhabitation of different extrafamilial contexts (prefamilial histories, work, school, hobbies , friendships, etc.), contributions to one’s family also will include bringing home what one has learned during one’s travels to...