“Not in Front of my Friends”: Navigating Lesbian Motherhood in the Borderlands

Abstract

This article examines how two lesbian mothers from a bigger empirical study navigate conflicting demands emanating from social expectations to be “good mothers” and the imperative to be “out”. Drawing on in-depth narrative interviews based on their subjective cityscapes of Cape Town and their sexual life stories, the article examines how the participants construct and perform their mothering and sexual identities, while negotiating their relationships with their children. This negotiation is analyzed through the lens of the counter narrative – “private resistance/public complicity with good mother ideologies. The discussion explores the participants” thinking behind their mothering practices as they negotiate their, at times, conflicting interests between mothering and enacting their lesbian sexuality. These negotiations reveal the dynamic, complex understanding required of coming out processes and performing motherhood which form part of their queer world-making practices. Their productions of queer world-making reveal their lesbian motherhood as sites which undermine the binaries of being in/out of the closet, a lesbian/mother, good/bad mother. Rather their navigations of the identities of lesbian and mother should be considered as enactments of living in “borderlands”.

Keywords:

• lesbian motherhood
• counter narratives
• queer world-making
• borderlands
• good mother discourse
• coming out

Acknowledgments

This is a substantial revision of an earlier article published as Holland-Muter (2018b), “‘But at the end of the day it’s about me as well’: Navigating the “good lesbian” and “good mother” discourses, CSSR Working Paper 417 (Cape Town: Centre for Social Science Research, University of Cape Town). The author is grateful to the anonymous referees whose valuable comments and insights on subsequent versions of this manuscript have greatly improved the ideas reflected here.

Disclosure statement

The author declares that she has no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 Conception by egg and sperm donation is governed by two laws in South Africa - the Human Tissue Act (1983) and the Children’s Act (2005). The Human Tissue Act extended legal access to assisted insemination in registered ART clinics to all women, regardless of sexual orientation or relationship status (Isaack, 2007). The Children’s Act (2005) fully protects all South African children, including donor conceived and surrogate children. It also covers parenting rights and responsibilities. It outlines how any single person may adopt and same sex couples may jointly adopt children (www.justice.gov.za). In 2003, a Constitutional Court ruling granted full parental rights to both members of same sex couples of a child(ren) conceived through assisted insemination (Isaack, 2007). Same sex civil unions were legally recognised as marriages in 2006.

2 The call to take part in the study invited the participation of women (which I would now write as womxn) who were involved in sexual/emotional relationships with other women. It did not specify that one had to self-identify or call oneself a lesbian. Some trans and cisgender women did not self-identify as lesbian, but rather as queer. Others preferred to call themselves gay women. Some did call themselves lesbian. For this reason, I have used all the self-proclaimed labels used by the participants.

3 The interview guide included the following sections - home/neighbourhood/community; work/study; leisure/recreation; religion and religious community; health; access to justice; experiences of community activism; and mobility.

4 Pertinent to this article, some of the generic questions listed included ‘Where do you live? How long you lived there? Why do you live there? Who do you live with – your relatives/friends/partner/lover/tenant/alone? What are the relationships like in the house? What are the relationships like with the neighbours, the community?

5 The Cape Flats are constituted by the areas East of the Northern and Southern suburbs of Cape Town and are made up of townships and shantytowns (some are Nyanga, Langa, Khayelitcha, Gugulethu) historically created and designated for the black African population, and ghettoes for the coloured population (some are Mitchell’s Plain, Bishop Lavis, Lavender Hill). Lying on the outskirts of Cape Town, ranging from 15 to 30 kilometers from the city centre, it is a flat, sandy, treeless stretch of land. From the 1950s, most black and coloured people were forcibly removed from the inner city and southern/northern suburbs after they were declared ‘white only’. It is also the area in which most of migrant labour was housed (http://www.sahistory.org.za/places/cape-flats). People live in small, overcrowded houses or shacks in the townships, and large blocks of apartment buildings in the formerly designated coloured ghettoes. The Cape Flats are overcrowded, under-resourced and under-serviced by the state. They are high density areas, with high levels of crime, gangs, and violence.

6 The ‘southern suburbs’ extend southward from the city centre and along the eastern side of the mountains towards Muizenberg: neighbourhoods include Woodstock, Salt Rock, Observatory, Rondebosch, Newlands, and Claremont. During Apartheid, these were designated white residential areas. Woodstock, Salt River, and Observatory are more racially mixed suburbs. Observatory houses students and a relatively large artistic, bohemian, alternative crowd. Rondebosch also houses many students, and is the site of the University of Cape Town, a previously designated white institution of higher learning. The southern suburbs are served by a railway line which runs from the city centre to Simon’s Town, south of Muizenberg. These are predominantly English-speaking neighbourhoods. North of the Flats are the northern (and historically white designated) suburbs – Bellville, Goodwood, Durbanville. These were predominantly Afrikaans speaking communities. These areas have changed their racial and class composition over time, and are no longer whites only (Leap, 2005: 239 - 240).

7 It is important to elucidate on the use of the category lesbian as an identifier when discussing the project of queer world-making. My use of the term queer refers to a theoretical perspective as non-normative (Halperin, 1995), as well as an analytical approach (Epprecht, 2008). It has not been used in the sense of queer as an identity label. The use of lesbian or gay woman, however, does refer to the specific positionality of a lesbian identity within such a non-normative project. Highlighting the category ‘lesbian’ in this sense, draws one’s attention to a lesbian participant’s particular imbrication in networks of power, and to reflect on the specificities of that identity label. In this sense, my employment of lesbian is as both a category of knowledge and a social positionality from which to explore embodied subjectivities. Having said this, I do recognise that lesbians are not a homogenous category. Noting the intersectional perspective with which I will be exploring the project of queer world making, a lesbian positionality needs to be explored in relation to how it is interwoven with the social relations of gender, race and class (Bennett & Reddy, 2007; Browne & Ferreira, 2015; Gqola, 2005). In this way, I am cognisant that one’s experiences of being a lesbian will depend on one’s age, including at what point in one’s life cycle one began to enact and embody a lesbian identity; one’s race and class; one’s lesbian gender identity and/or gender performance; physical and mental abilities; health status; geographical location; religious affiliation, and so on. All these other social markers will contribute to one’s life experiences as a lesbian. Specifically, they will mark a lesbian’s relationship to power, and the opportunities, privileges and exclusions, discrimination, and violence one may experience depending on one’s intersectional location(s) within the matrix of sociality in Cape Town at any given time. In this way, I am cognisant that a lesbian identity or performing a lesbian sexuality is constructed within particular social relations, in particular moments in time and in particular contexts i.e., the category is fluid, spatial and temporal (Browne & Ferreira, 2015).

Additional information

Funding

The study was partially supported by the National Research Foundation South Africa.