Mother Is a Gendered Verb

Embodied Acts of Care in Memoirs of Queer Family

Abstract

This article rethinks the particularity of the term “mother” within the converging contexts of the recent push towards trans-inclusive language, such as “birthing person,” as well as the crisis of caregiving that came to the fore within the coronavirus pandemic. To do so, this article analyzes Krys Malcolm Belc’s recent book The Natural Mother of the Child (2021), which was published amid discussion in mainstream media of inclusive terminology for birth and nursing. Belc’s book uses his own experience of gestational parenthood to offer a corrective and counternarrative to essentialist notions of motherhood that operate both in cultural discussions of pregnancy and in legal documents, including birth certificates. Juxtaposed with this analysis of Belc, this article considers the equally problematic ungendering of the term “mother,” a move that fails to consider the specific embodied and intersectional contexts in which carework occurs. Ultimately, it is within mother memoirs by queer writers that we can understand ways that individual parents understand and narrate their experiences of essential labour; telling stories of queer families, in all their book-length complexity, helps write new family stories, ones that will hopefully lead to real and lasting social change.