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ABSTRACT
This essay is an open-ended, poetic reflection connecting findings from my ethnographic research on same-sex desiring women in southern Ghana with my own journey of becoming a queer mother in Switzerland. It suggests that desires for motherhood cannot be reduced to the wish for procreating or tapping into the power of extending our heteronormative lineages, but reflect feminist desires for loving, growing and connecting across generational divides. It asks to what extent mothering a child and sugar-mothering a younger woman lover can be thought (and lived) alongside each other while connecting us to our own mothers. By documenting the challenges of finding ways into queer motherhood, it hopes to encourage collective ways of “doing” families beyond marriage and childbirth.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Fragments from my diary, unpublished, 2012.
2 All personal names in this text are anonymised.
3 I am referring to Teley as a woman, and so did she, although she did not mind being mistaken for a feminine man. Sadly, I cannot ask her about her gender identifications again. Lacking adequate medical care in the aftermath of an accident she suffered on the highway dividing her neighbourhood, Teley died a premature death.
4 For a more detailed account of Janet Asante’s journey into motherhood, see Dankwa (Citation2021, 138–143).
5 By the author, unpublished, 2022. This poem was inspired by Warsan Shire’s poem “Bless the House” (Citation2022, 66–67), which compares a woman’s body to a house with many rooms.
6 The three quotes in this paragraph are taken from an interview with Lydia Sackey, Accra, 26 June 2007. For a more detailed account of her life story, see Dankwa (Citation2021, 189–201).
7 For a more complete analysis of Dina Yiborku’s life story, see Dankwa (Citation2021, 208–216).
8 By the author, unpublished, 2023.
9 Although this child identifies as a girl, I hesitate to speak of her as “my daughter”. I would prefer naming our transgenerational bond without gendering her and adding the emotional baggage associated with mother–daughter bonds. The “my” in “my daughter” feels equally ambivalent. “Children are not individual property” nor are they “objects through which we seek to achieve our political goals”, Lauretta Ross cautions (Citation2016, xviii).