Lesbian Solo Motherhood: Emma Brockes’s An Excellent Choice

Abstract

The 1978 delivery of the world’s first IVF baby, Louise Brown, created what anthropologist Sarah Franklin termed a ‘bridge to new kinds of life’ – and, indeed, IVF and other forms of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) have facilitated a wide range of family formations, such as lesbians choosing to have children with the help of sperm donors. Much could be expected, then, of one particular memoir – Emma Brockes’s An Excellent Choice (2018) – which details Brockes, an English lesbian journalist living in the USA, becoming a solo mother by choice via sperm donation and Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART). However, my paper combines close reading with queer and feminist criticism in order to suggest that Brockes’s attitudes regarding motherhood reveal a disengagement with queer politics in favour of an espousal of homonormativity – which is defined as a privatised, depoliticised gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them (Weiss, 2018). Such a positioning is a highly privileged stance that potentially ‘blots from view’ (Weiss, 2018: 111) the much more numerous and socially vulnerable members of the North American LGBT+ community.