(Pro)creating queer futures: queer mothers challenge the anti-social turn in queer theory

This article addresses the lack of critical considerations of mothering in the field of queer studies. The anti-social turn in queer theory advocates a turn away from procreation and frames the mother as the transmitter of a heteronormative legacy. In this way, queer theory naturalizes the association between the assigned female at birth body, womanhood, motherhood, and heterosexuality and precludes considerations of queer and feminist mothering. Autobiographical writing by queer mothers challenges this depiction of motherhood as inherently normative. In her poetry collection Crime Against Nature, the late Minnie Bruce Pratt describes losing custody of her children under a North Carolina sodomy law after coming out as a lesbian in 1975. Pratt’s insistence on claiming her queer sexuality despite severe social sanctions refuses the characterization of the mother as heteronormative. I place Pratt in conversation with two later memoirs of queer motherhood, Cherríe Moraga’s Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts to consider Pratt’s legacy to queer discourse. I read these narratives of queer feminist maternal subjectivities through the lens of the “sodomitical mother” to challenge the framing of the maternal body as always white, heterosexual, cisgender, sexually modest, and in service to the hegemonic social order. These accounts of queer feminist maternal subjectivities challenge current right-wing attacks on 2SLGBTQ+ rights that seek to “protect” children from access to education on race, gender, and sexuality in the name of a presumably white, heterosexual, and cisgender parent.