Mothering
Mothering not motherhood
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
I was born in 1982 in the middle of the first term of a president who won by demonizing “welfare queens,” in the global context of “population control” a story that says poor women and women of color should not give birth. A story with a happy ending for capitalism: we do not exist. The queer thing is that we were born; our young and/or deviant and/or brown and/or broke and/or single mamas did the wrong thing. Therefore we exist: a population out of control, a story interrupted. We are the guerrilla poems written on walls, purveyors of a billion dangerous meanings of life.
And how unlikely that I would love you.
In 1983, Audre Lorde, Black, lesbian, poet, warrior, mother, interrupted the story of a heterosexist, capitalist, fashion and beauty magazine called Essence with a queer proposition. In an essay on the impact of internalized oppression between Black women, she offered: WE CAN LEARN TO MOTHER OURSELVES. I have designed multiple workshops with this title and I still don’t know what it means.[1] Except that love is possible even in a world that teaches us to hate ourselves, and the selves we see waiting in each other. Except that in a world that says that we should not be born, and that says ‘no’ to our very beings everyday, I still wake up wanting you with a ‘yes’ on my heart. Except that I believe in how we grow our bodies into place to live at the very sight of each other. We can learn to mother ourselves. I think it means you and me.
Another generative site for the queer potential of mothering is June Jordan's 1992 essay "A New Politics of Sexuality" in which she uses bisexuality as an intervention against predictive sexuality in order to create a space for freedom. This critical use of bisexuality prefigures the use of the word "queer" to describe a politics of sexuality that is not based on a specific sexual practice, but rather a critical relationship to existing sexual and social norms. Jordan uses a proclamation of her own bisexuality as a hinge to articulate her own contradictory multiplicity: "I am Black and I am female and I am a mother and I am bisexual and I am a nationalist and I am an antinationalist."
We say that mothering, especially the mothering of children in oppressed groups, and especially mothering to end war, to end capitalism, to end homophobia and to end patriarchy is a queer thing. And that is a good thing. That is a necessary thing. That is a crucial and dangerous thing to do. Those of us who nurture the lives of those children who are not supposed to exist, who are not supposed to grow up, who are revolutionary in their very beings are doing some of the most subversive work in the world. If we don’t know it, the establishment does.
In 2005 former U.S. Secretary of Education and officer of Drug Policy William Bennett publicly stated that aborting every Black baby would decrease crime.[2] This neo-eugenicist statement about US race relations corresponds with globalized "family planning" agendas that have historically forced women in the Caribbean, Latin America, South Asia and Africa to undergo sterilization in order to work for multinational corporations. In 1977 World Bank official Richard Rosenthal went so far as to suggest that three fourths of the women in developing nations should be sterilized to prevent economically disruptive revolutions. [3]
In the face of this genocidal attack, Black feminists from the 1970s to the 1990s appropriated motherhood as a challenge and a refusal to the violence that these discourses of stabilization and welfare would naturalize. While the U.S. state enacted domestic and foreign policies that required, allowed and endorsed violence against the bodies of Black woman and early death for Black children, Black feminists audaciously centered an entire literary movement around the invocation of this criminal act of Black maternity, demanding not only the rights of Black women to reproductive autonomy in the biological sense, but also the imperative to create narratives, theories, contexts, collectives, publications, political ideology and more. I read the Black feminist literary production that occurred between 1970 and 1990 as the experimental creation of a rival economy and temporality in which Black women and children would be generators of an alternative destiny. A Black feminist position became articulable and necessary not only because of the lived experiences of Black mothers but also because of the successes and failures of the Black cultural nationalist movement and the white radical lesbian/feminist movement.
To answer death with utopian futurity, to rival the social reproduction of capital on a global scale with a forward-dreaming diasporic accountability is a queer thing to do. A strange thing to do. A thing that changes ‘the family’ and ‘the future’ forever. To name oneself ‘mother’ in a moment where representatives of the state conscripted ‘Black’ and ‘mother’ into vile epithets is a queer thing. To insist on Black motherhood despite Black cultural nationalist claims to own Black women's wombs and white feminist attempts to use the maternal labor of Black women as domestic servants to buy their own freedom (and to implicitly support the use of Black women as guinea pigs in their fight to perfect the privilege of sterilization) is an almost illegible thing, an outlawed practice, a queer thing.
You are something else.
The radical potential of the word mother comes after the ‘m.’ It is the space that “other” takes in our mouths when we say it. We are something else. We know it from how fearfully institutions wield social norms and try to shut us down. We know it from how we are transforming the planet with our every messy step towards making life possible. Mamas who unlearn domination by refusing to dominate their children, extended family and friends, community care-givers, radical childcare collectives, all of us breaking cycles of abuse by deciding what we want to replicate from the past and what we need urgently to transform, are m/othering ourselves.
Audre Lorde’s essay had an older sister. In 1973, Toni Morrison wrote a novel about a dangerous, undomesticated, woman, an “artist without an art form” who spurned her own mother’s advice to settle down insisting “I don’t want to make someone else. I want to make myself.” Sula, the novel that inspired Black feminist literary critics like Barbara Smith and Mae Gwendolyn Henderson to invent Black feminist literary criticism, is a sacred text about two girls who “having long ago realized they were neither white nor male…went about creating something else to be.” Sula herself is not a mother-type, except for how she creates herself, except for how she creates a context for other people to grow past the norms they knew, except how in her name contemporary Black feminist literary theory was born and how she is how I know how to write these words.
Your mama is queer as hell.
What if mothering is about the how of it? In 1987 Hortense Spillers wrote “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: A New American Grammar Book,” reminding her peers that motherHOOD is a status granted by patriarchy to white middle class women, those women whose legal rights to their children are never questioned, regardless of who does the labor (the how) of keeping them alive. MotherING is another matter, a possible action, the name for that nurturing work, that survival dance, worked by enslaved women who were forced to breastfeed the children of the status mothers while having no control over whether their birth or chosen children were sold away. Mothering is a form of labor worked by immigrant nannies like my grandmother who mothered wealthy white kids in order to send money to Jamaica for my mother and her brothers who could not afford the privilege of her presence. Mothering is worked by chosen and accidental mentors who agree to support some growing unpredictable thing called future. Mothering is worked by house mothers in ball culture who provide spaces of self-love and expression from/as queer youth of color in the street. What would it mean for us to take the word “mother” less as a gendered identity and more as a possible action, a technology of transformation that those people who do the most mothering labor are teaching us right now?
The queer thing is that we are still here.
We can remember how to mother ourselves if we can remember the proto-queer of color movement that radicalized the meaning of mothering. In 1979 at the National 3rd World Lesbian and Gay Conference, where Audre Lorde gave the keynote speech, a caucus of lesbians agreed on the statement: “All children of lesbians are ours,” a socialist context for mothering, where children are not individual property but rather reminders of the context through which community exists.[4] This means that “mothering” is a queer thing. Not just when people who do not identify as heterosexual give birth to or adopt children and parent them, but all day long and everywhere when we acknowledge the creative power of transforming ourselves, and the ways we relate to each other. Because we were never meant to survive and here we are creating a world full of love.
Excerpted and reprinted from Revolutionary Mothering: Love on The Front Lines. Edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams. (PM Press, 2016).
[1] Also it’s the title of my dissertation “We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves: The Queer Survival of Black Feminism”.
[2] September 28 broadcast of Salem Radio Network's Bill Bennett's Morning in America.
[3]Luz Rodriguez, "Population Control in Puerto Rico", Conference Presentation at Let's Talk About Sex the SisterSong 10th Anniversary Conference, May 2006.
[4] Doc in “1st National Third World Lesbian and Gay Conference” in Off our Backs, November 1979, 14.