Territories of lesbian motherhood: Meanings in flux

In this project, I propose the application of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's analytical tools to 40 lesbian mothers' narrative accounts of their parenting experiences in order to better understand how these women situate themselves in relation to various ideological formations around them and how they also simultaneously re-write the intensity of movements that constitute those molar structures. I locate the respondents' narrative accounts of their everyday experiences as parents within existing legal and academic depictions of family, motherhood, sexuality and lesbian motherhood. I show that their narrative accounts of parenting and coming-out contribute to ideologies of normalization, which are deployed in and through these academic and legal accounts of lesbigay families. Specifically, I explore the ideological formations that constitute popular and legal understandings of mothers, in general, and how this is translated to lesbian mothers. I then provide detailed examinations of the ways that the respondents manage their own sense of identity in the midst of these discursive accounts of their experiences. While focusing on the contradictions that emerge in their narratives, I explore their narrative accounts of their mothering: their desire to disconnect their lesbianism from their mothering, their critique of other mothers and their desire to normalize their own experiences, and some of the different strategies employed by women pursuing different trajectories to motherhood. Because the respondents' stories of their parenting are always-already interwoven with their own sense of their sexual identity, I also address the literature pertaining to sexual identity formation to show how the respondents' narratives simultaneously reaffirm the ideology of stable sexual identities while also disrupting and subverting it through stories that fail to fit neatly into the analytical categories proposed by sexual identity theorists. The focus in this analysis is on the ways that micro and macropolitical lines and flows come together to constitute the respondents' subjectivities in interesting ways. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of such an approach for feminist politics.