Motherhood as Contested Ideological Terrain: Essentialist and Queer Discourses of Motherhood at Play in Female–Female Co-mothers’ Talk

Authors

Elizabeth A. Suter, University of DenverFollow
Leah M. Seurer, University of Denver
Stephanie Webb, University of Denver
Brian Grewe Jr., University of Denver
Jody Koenig Kellas, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

12-2015

Citation

Published in Communication Monographs vol. 82, no. 4, December 2015, pp. 458–483. doi 10.1080/03637751.2015.1024702

Comments

Copyright © 2015 National Communication Association; published by Routledge/ Taylor & Francis Group. Used by permission.

Abstract

Framed by relational dialectics theory (Baxter), this investigation considered the meaning(s) of motherhood in female–female co-motherhood. Analysis identified two competing discourses: (1) discourse of essential motherhood (DEM) and (2) discourse of queer motherhood (DQM). Speakers’ invocation of the DEM reinscribes the mainstream US cultural discourse that children can have only one authentic (i.e., biological) mother, whereas invocation of the DQM denaturalizes the DEM’s presumptions of authentic motherhood as biological, interrupts monomaternalism, destabilizes the patriarch, and troubles the equation of biological with moral motherhood. Whereas interpenetrations of the DEM and DQM were typically sites of adversarial discursive struggle, in a few instances, the DEM and DQM rose above their antagonistic relationship, combining to create new meanings of motherhood.