Queer Mother Memoir

Through a focus on North American memoirs by and about queer mothers, from 1997 to the present, Queer Mother Memoir: Experiments in Life/Narrative excavates the tensions and relationships among reproduction, sex, gender, and narrative. If dominant narrative paradigms often tell the story of presumed cis-gender, fertile heterosexual couples reproducing, what happens when one or more of these terms is called into question? In building an archive of personal narrative, this book seeks to contribute to conversations within motherhood studies, feminist and queer theory, narrative theory, and memoir/autobiography studies. Queer Mother Memoir testifies to the belief in the power of personal narrative and life writing as political and social representation. Memoir is particularly significant as an area in which to understand the lives of marginalized individuals, and as the authors considered here —as both queer and as mothers—have been doubly marginalized, their perspectives are critical for empathic understanding of their lives, as well as the broader norms of the social world in which they operate. Focused on a range of texts that seek to define and complicate “queer mother memoir” as emergent literary genre, this project uses these radical texts as a challenge to scholarship that has yet to critically examine, much less embrace, queer motherhood.