Motherhood Phoenixing: Radical Conversations with the LGBTQ Community in Miami, FL and House|Ballroom Community in NYC, NY around Mother/Motherhood/Mothering as Social Practice

Abstract

Historically, in the United States motherhood has been represented as a status afforded to an idealized privileged body: white, middle-class, heterosexual, abled, cisgender female, that births. Inspired in Latinx worldviews and modes of being, particularly Gloria Anzaldúa’s Coyolxāuhqui imperative, coresearchers involved in this project investigate mother/motherhood/mothering as a social practice through lived experiences centered within the LGBTQ community in Miami, Florida and the House|Ballroom community in New York City, New York. Through the contestation of language around narratives of mother/mothering, we highlight some of the conflicts and struggles that marginalized populations face when embarking upon motherhood. We disrupt dominant canons, primarily situated in the United States, rooted in a white, middle-class nuclear family structure within capitalist modes of re/production which include the re/production of particular kinds of social relations. Methodologies such as Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, Dixit cards, and the Tarot are used to collect, restitute and weave conversations around mother/mothering giving way to autoethnographic “prose-play script,” poetry, and “interview as testimoniando transcriptions” that contest hegemonic representations of motherhood. In turn, we spotlight the myriad of ways that motherhood is experienced and expressed outside of the mainstream ideal and hold space for creative exchanges between members of the LGBTQ community to personally and collectively reflect and expand upon new notions of the mother-figure and manifestations of mothering.