Narrating Maternity

ABSTRACT

Storytelling exerts an extraordinarily high degree of agency in establishing and maintaining lesbian-headed families with children, in part because these families do not have access to the social forms that organize and legitimize non-gay families. This article and, to a greater degree, the book project from which it is drawn examine the relationship of storytelling to lesbian mothers' subject constitution and community formation practices and the strategies that they employ to negotiate their marginalized social status. Stories told by members of lesbian families vary widely in content and form but clear patterns emerge in terms of their function-how they participate in shaping lesbian family cultures and lesbian mothers' sense of identity. One of the most widely circulated story types is the confirmation narrative. In general, confirmation narratives verify and announce family membership. They define the place and roles of individual members in relation to others in the family. An important sub-category of the confirmation narrative addresses the position of the so-called other mother, the lesbian co-parent whose relationship with her children is not considered legitimate by heterosexual standards because she lacks legal custody of them and/or because she is not their biological mother. This variant of the confirmation narrative legitimizes the maternal identity, agency, and authority of the “other” mother. The following provides an in-depth, interdisciplinary analysis of one such confirmation narrative which recounts the birth of the storytellers' adopted daughter.

Key Words:

• Lesbian mothers
• lesbian co-parenting
• storytelling
• stories
• rhetoric