Lesbian, bisexual and queer motherhood: crafting radical narratives and representing social change through cultural representations

Abstract

This article examines how lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer (LGBQ) women negotiate mother-identity narratives through critical engagement with diverse media representations. The author draws on the reported experiences of LGBQ mothers living in Great Britain, collected in semi-structured, in-depth qualitative interviews during 2013 and 2014. The interview data is used to examine how queer and social-radical positions are articulated through, and to explore LGBQ women’s relationship to, the identity of mother and its attendant traditional gender role. The LGBQ women the author spoke with identified a range of representations drawn from sources including graphic novels, children’s books and television as significant in their negotiation of mother identities. The author argues that LGBQ women’s selection and usage of representations illustrates their deliberate, conscious and ideologically driven negotiations of cultural images, and indicates the way in which media is central in articulating mother identities. The author concludes by suggesting that traditional images of motherhood, and the existing vocabulary of mothering, are radically redeployed by women whose identities fall outside of the heteronorm. Further, it is demonstrated that the use of existing representations of motherhood to describe different non-heterosexual mother identities is a key way in which LGBQ women model social change and seek to circulate alternative, validated narratives of motherhood.

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ORCID for Elizabeth Reed: orcid.org/0000-0002-0885-2908

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