“Not in Front of my Friends”: Navigating Lesbian Motherhood in the Borderlands

Abstract

This article examines how two lesbian mothers from a bigger empirical study navigate conflicting demands emanating from social expectations to be “good mothers” and the imperative to be “out”. Drawing on in-depth narrative interviews based on their subjective cityscapes of Cape Town and their sexual life stories, the article examines how the participants construct and perform their mothering and sexual identities, while negotiating their relationships with their children. This negotiation is analyzed through the lens of the counter narrative – “private resistance/public complicity with good mother ideologies. The discussion explores the participants” thinking behind their mothering practices as they negotiate their, at times, conflicting interests between mothering and enacting their lesbian sexuality. These negotiations reveal the dynamic, complex understanding required of coming out processes and performing motherhood which form part of their queer world-making practices. Their productions of queer world-making reveal their lesbian motherhood as sites which undermine the binaries of being in/out of the closet, a lesbian/mother, good/bad mother. Rather their navigations of the identities of lesbian and mother should be considered as enactments of living in “borderlands”.