Mother Fucker -- The leather Mummy and the sexual, childless maternal body

Abstract

This thesis is comprised of two components: a novel titled “Lolly Poppins” and a scholarly dissertation titled “Mother Fucker”.

Despite a long history of feminist engagement with motherhood as an institution, an essentialist definition of the maternal prevails in popular social dialogues. These essentialist discourses are both scientifically invalid and theoretically untenable, yet they operate to circumscribe the social expectations of women, restricting not only mothers but also those who are excluded from this definition, such as trans* people, men, and childless women. Additionally, in keeping with the long-established and culturally imposed Madonna/whore dichotomy the maternal body continues to be subjected to intense public scrutiny and is heavily censored and regulated, particularly in relation to sexuality.

My dissertation explores this sexual/maternal dichotomy as well as the problem of essentialism through a study of queer, women and trans* leather Mummies. Leather Mummies are people who engage in dominant maternal role-play in a BDSM context, in effect eroticising the omnipotent, nurturing force of the mother. Using a queer feminist framework I engage Butler’s theory of performativity in conjunction with maternal theory and femme/butch politics in order to examine whether the leather Mummy is able to succeed in subverting dominant maternal discourses, or whether she too ends up simply reinforcing maternal essentialism. Through an ethnographic study of the San Francisco leather Mummy community I have observed the leather Mummy’s ability to (re)negotiate the interplay between maternal expression and sexuality, feminism, and queer politics. It is my contention that by transgressing the taboo of the sexual maternal the leather Mummy offers a fresh critique of essentialism by challenging the way we currently define and limit the maternal.

My novel “Lolly Poppins” expands on these questions by addressing the commodification of the mother through the sexualisation of childless maternal figures such as the nanny or the babysitter, and further complicating the relationship between motherhood and the sexually empowered female body. The main protagonist and narrator is Meg, a queer kinky nanny who moonlights as a sex worker and who is planning to have a child. Through a queer reproduction of the classic chick-lit trope of the single woman’s quest to net a husband and start a family, Meg’s unconventional journey into motherhood explores the intersections of queer identity, feminism, and the maternal, highlighting the at times uneasy relationship between the three and raising the question of how sexuality might be successfully integrated with motherhood.