Reimagining the Family: Lesbian Mothering in Contemporary French Literature. By Robert Payne

Abstract

This volume makes a fine addition to the series ‘Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing’, edited by Gill Rye. As Robert Payne argues, his book ‘deepens our understanding of the multiple ways in which non-normative modes of mothering are being represented in contemporary French literature’ (p. 13). It is the first volume, to my knowledge, about literary representations of lesbian mothering, and opens debate very thoughtfully about its area of enquiry. Payne offers an informative account of the political and historical context of same-sex parenting in France in the decades in which the books treated appeared (1970 to 2020), arguing that his authors not only reflect social change but actively contribute to debates on same-sex families. He situates his study in relation to studies of lesbianism in French literature — offering an occasion to look back with admiration at Lucille Cairns’s Lesbian Desire in Post-1968 French Literature (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002) — and in relation to the rich range of studies of discourses of mothering, including lesbian mothering, and of the family in the work of French women writers, from Rye’s own Narratives of Mothering: Women’s Writing in Contemporary France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009) to Shirley Jordan’s essay ‘­Figuring Out the Family: Family as Everyday Practice in Contemporary French Women’s Writing’ (in Affaires de famille: The Family in Contemporary French Culture and Theory, ed. by Marie-Claire Barnet and Edward Welch (Brill: Leiden, 2007), pp. 39–58). Payne writes about texts in which motherhood is usually presented as a desired state, where the impetus is to deconstruct the relation between mothering and heterosexuality, and allow an open-minded, non-idealized refiguring of the family and of parenting. He draws on works by more established lesbian writers, Jocelyne François and Hélène de Monferrand — the latter, author of the wonderful Les Amies d’Héloïse, which caused such a stir when it appeared in 1990 — and also on a range of autobiographical or more popular texts published since 2000 by Axelle Mallet, Paula Dumont, Éliane Girard, Laurence ­Cinq-Fraix, Brigitte Célier, Myriam Blanc, and Claire Bénard, none of which I knew before reading Payne. His corpus includes novels which show lesbian mothers who have had children in a heterosexual relationship and others which show planned same-sex families. He has done considerable work in surveying the area and sourcing his material, as well as engaging in debate about the very range of circumstances represented, and the differing optics on lesbian mothering offered in the texts. The book ends by envisaging that more research in this area will be needed as debates and context change, and Payne wonders specifically about the absence to date of the voices of lesbian-parented children. Beyond the scope of his book, but of note, is new-found resistance to the force of reproductive futurism as it has extended to queer relations, discussed in forthcoming research by Jasmine Cooper, or evidenced in Constance Debré’s accomplished novels with Stock, Play Boy (2018), Love Me Tender (2020), and Nom (2022). Payne, looking back on recent decades, foregrounds the stories of two generations of lesbians who identify strongly as mothers, and he does so with grace and care, in line with the important, liberal, ­non-didactic, feminist retrieval and championing of the work of women writers in anglophone French studies.