Queering maternal desires through dialogical relations of experience

Queering Maternal Desires Through Dialogical Relations of Experience challenges culturally pervasive erasures and dichotomizations of maternal sexuality configured through gendered, racialized, heteronormative and class relations of power. Countering dominant ideologies that reproduce polarizations between independent active erotic subjects and selfless passive sacrificial mothers, I am interested in overlapping dimensions of sexuality and maternity as complex embodied experiences. I argue that an inclusive and open-ended process of representing maternal desires calls for a method of working within and across contemporary feminist and queer theories pushing up against and exceeding their limitations through specific and heterogeneous forms of life-writing.

Chapter one focuses on a close analysis of feminist psychoanalytic theories of mothering. I explore the work of Jessica Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, Kaja Silverman and Hortense Spillers for ways of reading maternal desires as changing intersubjective relations. I argue that psychoanalytic approaches are ambivalent insofar as they both elicit dynamic maternal subjectivities and foreclose sexual differences. This problem leads me toward queer theoretical strategies in chapter two where I critically follow the writings of Judith Butler, Evelynn Hammonds and Teresa de Lauretis for possibilities of articulating a queerly desiring maternal self. I come up against limitations of abstracting desire as a signifying process from the everyday social worlds of mothers which compels me in the direction of qualitative social research on mothering in chapter three. It is in the field of studies on lesbian mothering that complex questions of desire have emerged to challenge heteronormative methods and assumptions. I show how ethnopoetic relations of representation open up spaces to recognize and question the status of desire as a social semiotic process of experience and knowledge.

Carrying forth attempts to challenge and exceed rational and prescriptive maternal ideals through sensual and interactive languages of experience, chapters four and five turn to life-writings by daughters and mothers attempting to speak their bodies and pleasures in specific contexts of oppression. These texts display permeable and detailed examples of maternal desires through a continual process of telling and retelling, reading and writing, that neither erases nor reduces their meanings and outcomes. It is as an ethically questioning, desiring and invested interpreter of these texts that I work toward a reflexive analysis that allows for a queering of maternity as a dialogical practice.