Abstract
This article draws on popular culture, ethnographic materials and mainstream commercials to discuss contemporary understandings of the relationship between fertility, pregnancy and parenthood among lesbians and other queer persons with uteruses. It argues that, on the one hand, same-sex lesbian motherhood is increasingly celebrated as evidence of Swedish gender and sexual exceptionalism and, on the other, queers who wish to challenge heteronormative gender disavow both the relationship between fertility and femininity, and that of pregnancy and parenthood. The author argues that in studying queer family formation, we must move beyond addressing heteronormativity and begin studying how gender, sexuality, race and class get reproduced in queer kinship stories.
Introduction
This article is concerned with the relationship between fertility, femininity and motherhood within contemporary discussions of LGBTQ reproduction and family making. Even if lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and trans* people have always had families and children in various more or less recognized ways, a decade into the 21st century, legal and repro-technological routes to queer (as in non-heterosexual and non-heteronormative) reproduction and family-making are becoming increasingly diverse. 1 A growing number of (Western) states now recognize same-sex marriage/partnership and include other parental relations than those resulting from heterosexual intercourse and marriage in family law. Along with greater access to state health care in some states, growing international and on-line fertility biomedicine markets now provide a range of reproductive choices, some even with LGBTQ people as target consumers (Mamo, 2013). To a significant part of a privileged LGBTQ population of a certain (fertile) age then, having children is central both to a sense of personal self-fulfilment and to social and political recognition by society more broadly. As Laura Mamo has noted, the degree to which having children is itself becoming a queer subcultural expectation has yet to be investigated, and despite a growing scholarship on same-sex families, much remains to be said about which new social forms of gendered parenthood are emerging (p. 230).
Scratching the surface of what is often cast as a success story, routes to making family through reproduction are far from equal. Rather, reproduction remains deeply stratified and differentiated for LGBTQ people across geopolitical, economic, racial and gendered lines. In Sweden, the ethnographic setting of this article, the 2000s have brought gender neutral marriage and adoption laws, and couples and single women with at least one functioning womb can access insemination and IVF via both state healthcare and private clinics (Malmqvist, 2015). Those seeking assistance must be under 40, deemed psychologically and physically fit, and the number of inseminations offered through the state is based on heterosexual definitions of infertility. 2 Egg donation is heavily regulated, sperm donor ‘choice’ is determined by physicians in state health care and the donated sperm available is whiter than the demographics of the nation (Ekerhovd and Faurskov, 2008). Costs and queues to treatments vary in length and how LGBTQ people seeking them are treated differs significantly across the country. 3 Furthermore, while those with resources or other reproductive wishes may travel abroad, routes to parenthood are more limited for gay men who cannot, for various reasons, make arrangements with a person with a womb. International adoption is difficult for men to access and, while growing in frequency, surrogacy is expensive, controversial and complexly regulated, making the majority of adoptions those of children planned with and born to a legal partner. Even though many lesbians and other queers certainly still choose known donors or parental constellations which include ‘fathers’, many now choose anonymous donor insemination and other fertility treatments via the welfare state (Malmqvist, 2015) and thus avoid some complicated and unequal parental scenarios as legal parenthood is limited to two people. In other words, while unsettling heteronormative ideas of conception and family, there are gendered, socio-economic and racialized limits to how reproduction is queered by these legal and medical changes. As a recent Swedish national survey demonstrates, it is highly educated and middle-class fertile women in same-sex relationships and other queers with wombs who are at the centre of new narratives of LGBTQ family making. 4 The question is: how are ideas of fertility, femininity and motherhood queered there?
In this article, I focus on this segment of the (Swedish) LGBTQ population and discuss a process I call ‘becoming fertile’ and what this means for lesbian and other non-normative or queer forms of femaleness. In a matter of a few decades, non-heterosexual females have gone from being cast as barren, sexual deviants, even monsters who were destined to dwell outside kinship logics and reproductive time (Halberstam, 2005), to becoming (potential) mothers bestowed with the trust of raising future generations. Given the history of how feminine sexual deviances, such as sleeping with women, engaging in commercial sex, or being unmarried were grounds for losing maternal rights, jobs, and for overall stigmatization, this is quite extraordinary. Becoming fertile, a process that involves a desire to reproduce through pregnancy, is a rather queer phenomenon; it is profoundly shaped by effects of and access to fertility medicine itself (van Balen and Inhorn, 2002). As sociologist Michelle Walks (2013: 60) puts it, the association of ‘femininity with reproduction, including (but not limited to) pregnancy, breastfeeding, mothering, and fertility’ is a cultural fetish, and the question is, how do lesbian and other queer forms of engagement with reproduction challenge and reproduce such a notion? Aiming to make a contribution to rethinking femininity through the lens of fertility and (queer) motherhood, I am interested here in if or how femininity is queered, or rendered non-normative.
I draw on data from an ongoing queer feminist ethnographic project about differently situated LGBTQ people in urban Sweden who are making families with other queers/non-heterosexuals, or planning to do so. While the field of critical kinship studies is growing, relatively few scientific studies have thus far been conducted on this topic in Sweden and the majority have focused on an unmarked white population (Malmqvist, 2015; Nordqvist 2006, 2009; Ryan-Flood, 2005, 2009; Zetterqvist-Nelson, 2006). As an ethnographic qualitative study that hones in on particular topics, mine does not aim represent the entire LGBTQ ‘population’. 5 Methodologically, I am inspired by Halberstam’s (1998: 13) ‘scavenger’ approach ‘to combine methods that are often cast as being at odds with each other’ in a queer spirit of challenging ‘the academic compulsion toward disciplinary coherence’. Ongoing ethnographic research and many years of belonging in the urban LGBTQ community settings of concern, both public and private, form the foundation for the cultural analysis. I also build on formal collaboration with the Swedish federation for LGBTQ rights (RFSL) and participant observation with a project catering for LGBTQ parents (to be) in Stockholm and draw on results from a national survey on LGBTQ parenthood conducted by them. 6 In addition, I conducted semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with about 40 people between the ages of 20 and 50 from a range of backgrounds and family arrangements. Interviewees were found via RFSL’s networks, advertisements in social media and snowball methods building from long-term community involvement. In order to capture the broader both mainstream and (sub)cultural imaginaries (Bryld, 2001; Dahl, 2014; Dawson, 1994) in and against which new forms of (queer) reproductive dreams take shape, I also follow discussions on social network sites such as open Facebook groups (see Andreassen, 2017) and analyse popular cultural and media representations of queer families produced and consumed in Swedish queer subcultural settings. My project’s aim is not primarily to study the exceptional or challenging nature of LGBTQ reproduction (as the majority of scholarship tends to do). Rather, the overall question is: what broader cultural ideas of gender, race, belonging and futurity get reproduced and reworked through queer reproduction? To that end, my approach to cultural analysis builds both on queer ethnographic traditions and a decade of work concerning queer femininities within my own community (Dahl, 2011).
The article is divided into four parts that may appear somewhat disparate but which all concern the theme of fertility and pregnancy as they relate to femininity and parenthood. In order to examine the relationship between femininity and lesbian reproduction not just as a matter of gender and sexuality, but also reflecting broader ideas of race, class and nation in Sweden, I first analyse a mainstream commercial (Herthoni, 2015) which tells a homonationalist story of gender and sexual exceptionalism (Puar, 2007). Next I turn to a discussion about how equality ideals shape non-heterosexual women’s understandings of parenthood and how access to reproductive technologies both normalizes and queers femininity and its ties to motherhood. Next I turn to a different cultural artefact drawn from contemporary queer feminist culture; an illustrated novel/comic (Elgeholm, 2015) that presents a different understanding of what it means to queer reproduction and pregnancy. While differing in their presentations of queering reproduction, I contend that the commercial and the comic book share the reproduction of certain (white, middle-class) ideas of fertility and femininity. I then conclude by discussing what is lost and gained through the queering of femininity as fertility and the role that pregnancy plays in (queer) understandings of gender and parenthood. Throughout the article, there is an interweaving of ethnographic stories, survey results, cultural representations and previous research. By linking these diverse materials, I seek to illuminate how what I am calling ‘becoming fertile’ (having children through pregnancy), is a story in which normative values of Swedishness, in general, and gendered understandings of motherhood, in particular, are both reproduced and challenged and what this tells us about understandings of femininity.
Sweden: The land of organic milk
In 2015, Swedish downhill skiing star Anja Pärsson, her wife Filippa and their infant starred in a highly publicized 1.09-minute commercial produced by an award-winning feminist director (Herthoni, 2015) 7 promoting organic milk from Arla, the largest dairy producer in Sweden. This highly circulated and debated commercial, I will argue here, tells us something about a broader national cultural imaginary in which LGBTQ reproduction takes place and, as such, it captures and extends a story of Swedish gendered and sexual exceptionalism in which same-sex motherhood becomes central to both reproductive futurity and to homonationalist (Puar, 2007) Swedish identity.
Set against an archetypically scenic ‘Swedish’ landscape of forests, fields and lakes, the high-cost production commercial features happy, mostly young and white people dancing, playing, swimming and sitting by camp fires, while a female narrator tells a story around the repeated statement ‘there was a Sweden before organic milk.’ In this progress story, narrated in the ‘wholesomeness’ of a distinct northern Swedish dialect that is tied to rurality and tradition rather than to cosmopolitan trends, we learn that this was a time when there were only two genders, a time ‘before the prime minister was a feminist’, and ‘before there were mothers in high positions and fathers who stay home’. Next, we are told that this was a time when ‘where people came from was more important than where food came from’, accompanied by the few images of people of colour in the commercial. Moving to an image of Pärsson and her family, the story of ‘before’ culminates with declaring that then, ‘it was not a given that two people who love each other could have children together.’ Shifting from the intimate image of two cisgendered, blonde, white feminine women and their child to one of a field full of cows and a smiling female farmer, the narrator says: ‘Welcome to the land of organic milk. The future is looking bright.’ 8
Playing with the cultural significance of milk and motherhood for both the past and the future of the nation, with the double meaning of the Swedish word ‘ljus’ as both ‘light’ (a word that also connotes skin tone) and ‘bright’ (as in optimistic), I argue that on a symbolic level the commercial strongly ties white Swedish lesbian family-making to a range of contemporary political concerns, including (gender) equality and environmental consciousness. Using dramatic and distinctly Swedish images and music that are strongly reminiscent of those frequently used by the growing nationalist right-wing party Sverigedemokraterna, the commercial paradoxically suggests that sexism, racism and homophobia are all in the past, thus producing a good feeling about being Swedish. Lesbian motherhood and organic milk, wholesomeness, this commercial tells us, is the (national) future.
The story of progress told in this commercial is well known and deeply affective; it builds on an idea of the Swedish nation as modern, democratic and progressive in terms of gender and sexual rights (Ryan-Flood 2005; Rydström, 2008), which is combined with a narrative about ‘not caring where people come from’ that rests on an idea about the absence of a colonialist past and about Sweden as a society without racism (Ahlstedt, 2016). In a press release prior to the launch of the commercial, Arla describes Pärson and her wife as ‘a great example of a family that is a part of the new, modern Sweden’, one where ‘people have become more aware’ not only of food but of ‘what kind of society we want to have’. White middle-class lesbians are the emblem of a larger cultural imaginary in which equality and quality of life are linked to specific ideas of gender and labour but also of kinship and race.
Linking a white, healthy, athletic femininity to the reproduction of Swedish nationhood is a tradition that goes back to the 1940s (Mattsson and Pettersson, 2007), but here it is given a new twist: in the form of a double Moder Svea, the mother of the Swedish nation. Casting Pärson, who ‘came out’ after her skiing career was over and who like many ‘aging’ athletes, has since then engaged in self-branding, works well for a commercial targeting a nation where ‘progressive’ LGBTQ politics, like winter sports, is central to nation-branding and identity (even if Arla is no longer a Swedish-owned dairy producer).
I argue that by linking lesbian motherhood and the double pun on milk to the future of a nation whose identity is built on modernity, equality and progress, fertile white lesbian femininity has become central to a Swedish form of reproductive homonationalism (Sörberg, 2017). As Jasbir Puar (2007: 5) argues, homonationalism is built around ‘narratives of excellence’ and linked to ‘a process whereby a national population comes to believe in its own superiority and its own singularity’. I argue that it is precisely by passing as white, cis-feminine and motherly in a way that heteronormative and white-dominated society can recognize that Pärson and her wife, and many other lesbians, can become the symbols of a new form of double motherhood and thus be bestowed with the power of reproducing futurity.
Lesbians and queers of colour in my research do not recognize the idea of Sweden as ‘the land of organic milk’ that does not care about ‘where people come from’. In contrast, they repeatedly report that imagining family and having children, that is ‘becoming fertile’, has not made them feel more included in a nation that views all non-whites as not belonging. One lesbian couple of colour explained in an interview that they were less concerned with finding community with other LGBTQ parents than they were with finding supportive, safe settings in which to raise their children in an increasingly racist society. The sperm on offer via the state, many have told me, is almost always white, which means that for non-white couples, the idea of ‘matching’ co-parents that doctors conduct is less likely to happen and also that it is down-played as important. For some, this is a loss and a feeling of ‘white-washing’ of their futurity, but some also express relief that their children will be less likely to be racialized and subjected to racism. While a growing number of clinics have now undergone ‘LGBTQ awareness training’ and many now report that they are ‘treated very nicely’ and do not encounter homophobia, 9 percent of the respondents of the recent national survey reported experiencing racism, including in contact with various institutions, and my interview data supports this as well. In other words, queer people with wombs are racialized subjects and not all ‘becoming fertile’ in the same ways or in the same ‘land of organic milk’. Thus, as (Swedish) lesbians are becoming fertile, the gendered and racial dimensions of queer family making and motherhood remain central.
While a commercial may seem like a rather trivial cultural artefact with which to think about lesbian fertility and futurity in Sweden, the degree to which it registers nationalist sentiments, its vast circulation and the degree to which it has been celebrated, is indicative of larger structural patterns. The commercial also reflects what RFSL’s national survey suggests, namely that coupled white middle-class lesbians have been the main beneficiaries of the major legal changes around reproduction in the past decade. 9
In an increasingly neoliberal time when nationalism and racism are growing and when healthcare access is more stratified, it matters who gets to symbolize milk and brightness in the land of organic milk. As David Eng (2010: 101) argues, ‘the possession of a child, whether biological or adopted, has today become the sign of guarantee not only for family but also for full and robust citizenship’ and some are well on their way. At the same time, not all forms of parenthood and motherhood are equal. Furthermore, while it incorporates lesbian motherhood into the nation, a commercial featuring a celebrity white lesbian family, by linking same-sex motherhood to (homo)nationalist sentiments and environmental consciousness, does not queer fertility, reproduction or motherhood; rather, it extends it to a position that can be occupied by more than one of the same: white, cis-gendered, feminine.
Queering lesbian motherhood? Sameness and equality
Judging by the results of a recent survey, it seems that an overwhelming majority of LGBTQ parents in Sweden identify as lesbian, are highly educated and above the national average in income, and report that having children brings love, fulfilment and meaning to their lives. 10 A central dimension of ‘becoming fertile’ is the downplaying of the effects of that fertility, namely pregnancy, for the sake of stressing other, shared legal and social dimensions of (albeit gendered) parenthood. Indeed, among both interviewees, activists and scholars, the argument that love makes a family is strong and thus ‘biology’ tends to be de-emphasized (see also Weston, 1991). Love is the key symbol that makes parents/partners ‘equal’ in the eyes of the law, via marriage and adoption (Rydström, 2008).
It is clear that the (heteronormative) national ideal of (gender) equality revolves around the ‘problem’ that pregnancy and motherhood pose to equality between men and women in the labour market as well as the home, which has long rested on an argument about the importance of fathers as co-parents (Dahl, 2005) also shapes understandings of equality in same-sex families. The overarching argument for equality is that biology both does and does not matter; it might be important in the forming of kinship but not in the forming of care. Both heteronormative gender equality and lesbian mother/parenthood, I contend, thus require the downplaying of the ‘difference’ that pregnancy poses. However, the idea that a lesbian family consists of two mothers, that is, two women who potentially fill and thus compete for the same position of motherhood, is not as rosy as the Arla commercial shows, it can raise a particular set of affective charges and dilemmas.
Ryan-Flood’s (2005: 201) research conducted over a decade ago showed how the idea of (gender) equality had particular consequences for lesbian/shared motherhood in Sweden. Her interviewees had what she describes as distinctly Swedish understandings of the role of fathers/donors that also shaped their relationships both with each other and their children, which among other things leads to the distinction between biological and co-mother. Lesbians had to work to show that they could provide ‘male role models’ and frequently encountered heteronormative assumptions about motherhood. Ryan-Flood (2009: 182) does note that the degree to which national ideologies of gender equality shape and are reproduced in lesbian motherhood in her work might be related to their status as white citizens, and I would add, most likely middle class, but we learn less from this research about the (gendered) relations between mothers beyond how division of labour is conceptualized in heterornormative terms.
Anna Malmqvist’s (2015: 6–7) study of lesbian families conducted a decade later, when reproductive and legal options had widened, shows less significance placed on the donor or father but equal significance on equality between lesbian parents. She identifies three ‘equality scenarios’ among her informants and all revolve around biology and its specific ties to pregnancy. Equality, Malmqvist shows, is most successfully achieved between lesbian parents if no biogenetic distinction is made between mothers and at least is successful when the person who carried the child takes on the duties of a woman in a heterosexual relationship. Malmqvist’s study is framed around how biological relatedness and gestational motherhood relate to degrees of equality of parental responsibility. She concludes that … having the view that biology is important seems to correspond to a nurturing practice that, in turn, strengthens the birth mother’s relationship with the child, so that one could argue that the ideology is self-fulfilling for those who draw on a biologistic repertoire. (p. 9)
Susanne Pelka’s (2009) research is instructive here. She contends that ‘when motherhood, a status generally defined by its singularity, is shared, it can be challenging to one’s internalized sense of one’s own full maternal status, particularly if one is not the birth/biological mother’ (p. 197). She further argues that ‘because both partners in a lesbian couple have the potential to bear children, and because lesbian couples tend to highly value equality in their partnerships, jealousy of one another’s mother–child relationship is possible’ (p. 215, added emphases). Pelka’s study, like many others, consists mainly of white, middle-class lesbians raised in nuclear heterosexual families and she contends that many had traditional understandings of what motherhood would be and few existing models of lesbian motherhood. Interestingly, in Pelka’s study, not unlike that of Malmqvist (2015), those lesbians who aspired to occupy a primary ‘maternal’ role did not expect the difference that gestation means nor that it would matter.
I would argue that a distinctly Swedish ideology of gender equality that departs from an unmarked white, middle-class nuclear family logic inevitably leads to an idea of (parental) equality that requires sameness, or the absence of difference. Among lesbians I have interviewed, as in the studies discussed here, the difference that fertility–pregnancy–gestational motherhood makes is understood as problematic primarily when it risks undermining the status of the other parent, or when it results in a division of labour that can mimic that of heteronormativity and women’s subordination in a heterosexist world.
When lesbian motherhood is understood solely through a discourse of gendered sameness, fertility, pregnancy, femininity and motherhood are lined up and conflated in ways that erase other complexities. Among my research subjects, the affective dimensions related to the difference of giving birth that surface through ‘becoming fertile’ are complex and often involve jealousy and ownership, which in turn cause shame and dispute. For instance Ylva, a woman of colour in her early 30s, who became pregnant with a son in a constellation of several parents, explained that in the spirit of parental equality of importance, who carried their son is downplayed, along with any story of genetic origin, and the labour she went through with pregnancy and birth. Instead the other (white) parents repeatedly emphasize how much their son resembles them. For Ylva, this is difficult as she feels that her and her son’s experiences of racism and of racial difference are downplayed and ‘whitewashed’ in the spirit of making a queer family of equality.
Affective contestations around the significance of pregnancy surface in many stories, especially and not surprisingly in those of divorce and separation, and it is now estimated that half of all same-sex relations result in divorce (Malmqvist, 2015). When Karin, an upper middle-class professional lesbian in her 30s, left her less resourced wife and co-parent of their daughter, her wife suddenly felt differently about their equal legally recognized shared parenthood. As Karin insisted on the shared custody that the law grants her, the other parent felt that Karin, who like most married lesbian co-parents in Sweden had become an equal parent through adoption, ‘was taking the child from her’. As the birth-giver, Karin’s ex felt that she was their daughter’s rightful mother, which shocked Karin as to her, it had ‘never made any difference’. Later, Karin said, her ex apologized and said ‘she felt ashamed that she was pulling the biology card.’ As these brief examples suggest, when lesbian reproduction is predicated on motherhood (or parenthood) as a shared but singular position, that is, one without (gender) difference, the question of biological relatedness becomes heightened in affective ways.
In Sweden, activist efforts have enabled state access to fertility treatments for both partners with wombs and, in my study, many speak of the importance of sharing the experience of pregnancy precisely in order to have equal motherhood. Feelings of biological relatedness are also cast as a threat to sameness. As Cori Hayden (1995: 54) argued long ago, lesbian kinship does not render biological ties obsolete; rather, ‘the creative lengths to which many lesbian mothers go to inscribe their families with genetic continuity speak eloquently to the tremendous, continued salience of biological relatedness.’ Debates around the (un)importance of pregnancy extend these concerns and reproductive technologies, and new family forms reconfigure, rather than disavow genetically based kinship.
In Sweden, where a discourse of equality and love is often stressed over difference and biology, biogenetic ties continue to carry affective significance (Dahl, 2014). The ongoing use of prefixes such as ‘bio’, ‘birth-’, ‘social’ and ‘co-’ among both researchers and interviewees also suggest that distinctions between the experience of pregnancy and childbirth, and everyday practices raising children matter for understandings of relatedness and intimacy. The question is, can lesbian and queer parenthood, including motherhood, move beyond the options of either a shared position of fertile, pregnant and feminine motherhood and disavow all connection between them? It seems to me that as lesbians are ‘becoming fertile’ they engage with an ideology of shared motherhood that extends beyond a white middle-class liberal idea of equality wherein biological difference, including pregnancy, poses an obstacle. On the one hand, it is the ideal motherhood, the cultural fetish that ties lesbians to womanhood. On the other, it produces affective hierarchies that must be disavowed in the name of lesbian maternal equality. Next I turn to a queer feminist countercultural artefact in order to examine how it engages questions of femininity, fertility and (lesbian) motherhood. As we shall see, this utopian imaginary also shares features with both the Arla commercial and other imaginaries of ‘becoming fertile’.
Last night I dreamed I was pregnant: Queer reproduction in comic culture
Among members of queer feminist communities in Sweden, the idea that fertility and pregnancy are inherently linked to and a condition for motherhood and family is frequently challenged. This occurs both through political debate and through an everyday practice of non-normative gender politics and family-making. A recent autobiographical illustrated novel and outcome of Sweden’s booming queer feminist comic culture called Jag drömde jag var gravid i natt or Last night I dreamed I was pregnant (Elgeholm, 2015) offers another form of queer imaginary of fertility, gender and family in Swedish subcultural settings that are echoed among queer-identified research participants and families, that is, non-binary gendered people whose relationships and families are not recognized by the state. Yet, in its attempts to challenge a range of gendered and sexual ‘norms’, this story reproduces others and in its queering of fertility and parenthood, it disavows femininity and motherhood.
Last night I dreamed I was pregnant is set in the southern town of Malmö, nationally known for its significant-sized immigrant population and for its antiracist queer feminist activism. It tells the story of Sera, a white gender-queer character who approaches the dreaded age of 35 (when fertility allegedly drops, they have learned) and decides to realize their life-long dreams of pregnancy together with a group of other white, androgynous gender queer characters. As we are taken through Sera’s various strategies for achieving pregnancy, the book doubles as an educational pamphlet for family-seeking contemporary queers. This, we learn is a generation to whom ‘becoming fertile’ is taken for granted, thoroughly technologized and, to some, it has become a question of experimentation and decision-making in a land of choices.
After some agony, Sera decides to go with the controversial option of home insemination and a ‘private’ but unknown donor is found via the web. As a low-cost and unregulated technology, it is strongly advised against by the Swedish medical establishment for a range of reasons, which the book also comments on, thus doubling as a political pamphlet. The donor who answers Sera’s ad claims to have ‘incredibly good sperm’ (evidenced by his two existing children). Much to Sera’s surprise and increasing agony, given that they are of ‘fertile age’ and have the know-how, it takes eight attempts, increasing assistance and many book pages for them to become pregnant. While the ending is happy and the baby arrives, the book is a detailed account of sorrows over failed conceptions and miscarriages, increasingly entangled with frustrations over healthcare providers’ schedules and holidays, struggles with stimulants (caffeine, nicotine) and managing multiple sex partners and relationships in negotiations to craft the perfect combination of multiple parents, along with the bodily effects of hormones.
Throughout the book, however, Sera’s main worry seems to be the dimensions of fertility, insemination and pregnancy that will turn them more into a ‘woman’ (Elgeholm, 2015: 44). While in the land of eco milk, a discourse of ‘becoming fertile’ is transformed into cis-gendered feminine lesbian motherhood and tied to nationalist ideals and gender equality politics, in Last night I dreamed I was pregnant, pregnancy is narrated as a radical queer act where refusing to perform heterosexual femininity is central. In this particular, subculturally circulated and celebrated queer vision of family and futurity, all characters are also ‘gender queer’; they have short hair, flat/bound chests and boyish clothing and often ‘gender neutral’ names. The novel thus seems to propose that in ‘becoming fertile’ future imaginaries of gendered parenthood have altered, but also that what is queered is above all the relationship between pregnancy and femininity. Indeed, and as Michelle Walks (2013: ii) has contended, it is above all masculine-presenting people who ‘explicitly challenge the cultural fetish associating femininity with reproduction (including pregnancy, breastfeeding, mothering, and fertility)’ (see also Ryan, 2013). In becoming parents, some dimensions of female morphology can be included in this novel, at times perhaps even being ‘women’, but pregnancy does not seem possible as a queerly feminine gender expression.
The queer utopian family presented in this book, while challenging gendered norms of family and reproduction also reflects a deeper set of (family) values. Here too, reproduction is queered largely by creating kinship with low or no involvement by cis-gendered males; sperm is the substance that does not matter. At the same time, the queer life of defiance presented by the lives and values of the novel’s characters does not differ so much from the representation of the good life offered by the Arla commercial discussed above. Aside from being gender queer, all the main characters are white, have creative professions and university degrees, live according to (leftist) political values, yet they travel the world, have access to countryside summer houses and can choose from a range of daily social and health-related activities and vegan foods.
Despite few instances of actually encountering much heteronormativity or homophobia, the characters are equipped with strong anticipatory critiques of the society that oppresses them and they strategically use state and legal frameworks when it suits them. A family of friends/choice is easily favoured over their families of origin whose conservative values and uninformed ideas clash with their own. A strong distinction is repeatedly set up between ‘the norm’, namely cis-gendered, heterosexual, nuclear coupled parenthood/family and the ‘radical alternative’ of gender-queer, communal and democratic decision-making processes of the ideal family of multiple parents and engaged adults. Curiously, the book’s characters do not imagine that their own future children will reproduce queerly and choose friends (see Weston, 1991) over kin as they have; they believe that their own alternative parenting and family-making practices will produce a different futurity and kinship even if it is a reproduction of their version of same.
While politically utopian, this queer family-making is also privileged; it requires not only good negotiation and communication skills but flexibility, time, financial, social and emotional resources. It suggests a queer subject who is conscious and autonomous and who can transcend structures of domination on an individual level by stepping out of role and transgressing boundaries (see Hequembourg, 2007: 156). This version of ‘becoming fertile’, I would argue, is not so different from that discussed above. Rather, both present rational, autonomous and, indeed, neoliberal subjects (see also Mamo, 2007) capable of making enlightened choices and engaging in equality. As David Eng (2010: 101) contends, ‘for white middle class subjects in the era of late capitalism, the position of parent has become increasingly a measure of value, self-worth, and “completion”’ and this now includes queers who resist gender norms. At the centre of both these storied artefacts are the relationship between fertility, pregnancy and motherhood and (normative) femininity and its futurity.
Conclusion: (In)fertility and (queer) femininity or, from monsters to mothers
This article has been concerned with ideas of (feminine) motherhood when people with wombs become parents through pregnancy without cis-men. As Michelle Walks (2013: 128) contends, pregnant bodies/women conjure up significant value, both as icons, commodities and through reproductive power; all of which relates to feminine pregnancy – something that is thus both fragile and powerful. The desire to become mothers but also the dream to do so without heterosexual marriage, challenges the cultural fetish that connects femininity and its idealized form and value to fertility, pregnancy and motherhood. Obviously it has been and remains an important (queer) feminist struggle to challenge the idea of fertility as expectation and inevitable futurity. Globally speaking, ‘infertility’ remains culturally understood as ‘a woman’s burden’ and it also has social consequences for women. According to leading scholars on the topic, such as Inhorn and Patrizio (2015: 8), infertility can be a cause for divorce and infertile women are more likely to be subjected to physical, emotional and verbal violence, and divorce may in turn push women out of family folds and even into prostitution. Cross-culturally and historically, the failure to become pregnant – almost always cast as a feminine problem – has also been tied to feminine and sexual shame, infertility understood as an effect of promiscuity or prostitution (not unlike how adultery has been a cause for unfit motherhood); all of which are arguably non-normative forms of femininity. Similarly, the idea of being barren, with its overdetermined links to a tree or womb that doesn’t bear fruit, we might argue, in/voluntarily queers femininity and places it outside the future of the nation. But does femininity have to be infertile and detatched from motherhood altogether to be queer?
We could argue that becoming fertile any other way than by pregnancy as a result of heterosexual intercourse potentially produces all kinds of ‘abnormal’ and queer types of women/femininities; single people cast as ‘incomprehensibly ugly’, people past ‘fertile age’ cast as ‘selfish’ or ‘without the right maternal instincts’ and so on (Lykke, 2000). In fact, debates about reproductive technologies in the last decades have centrally concerned fertility, pregnancy and normative femininity and they have not only opened up new possibilities, but have produced new deviant subjects. As Mette Bryld (2001) observes, in Denmark it was debates about reproductive technologies that lead to the ‘official birth’ of the lesbian – a subject who in the Danish context had rendered little prior attention (as the ‘homosexual’ as problem tended to be male). Bryld contends that the issue was not the lesbian ‘as a sexual subject’ as such but rather her position as an ‘unnatural mother’ (p. 301). Indeed, it seems that in Denmark, lesbians were becoming perceptible as monstrous precisely as they began to reproduce and make kinship ties with the use of technologies. Nina Lykke (2000) argues that the debate conceived two kinds of lesbians: the ‘responsible’ ones who do not seek medical assistance or have any medical problems and who ‘attempt to have something like a father present’ and those who ‘refuse to have a present father at all’. This observation clearly reflects the heteronormative equality discourse of the Nordic region; motherhood can be conditionally extended to lesbians if they don’t steer too far from a normative idea of kinship.
As this article has argued, a growing range of queer bodies are represented as both fertile and pregnant in Sweden today. In a way, this might mean that the cultural connection between fertility, heterosexual femininity, pregnancy and motherhood is increasingly challenged in ways that might radically challenge the gendering of parenthood. We can now imagine double motherhood among those who are gender congruent as ‘same sex’ and we can imagine pregnant men and genderqueers. Given the heteronormative status of the cultural fetish of pregnancy, there are all kinds of queer and feminist reasons to challenge the links between fertility, femininity and motherhood, and clearly, parenting far exceeds biogenetic connection and gestation. Yet both approaches, it seems to me, point to an age-old question of misogyny and to ambivalences around the very idea of femininity and motherhood.
In this article, I have argued that in ‘LGBTQ friendly’ contexts such as Sweden, as lesbians have gone from being monstrous to maternal via a deeply technologized discourse I am calling ‘becoming fertile’, a particular kind of ‘same-sex’ motherhood figure has emerged that is both celebrated in its universality and internally fraught by the potentially irreducible difference of pregnancy. Cast in white cis-gendered femininity, this figure is entangled in homonationalist ideas about gender equality and sexual exceptionalism that extend rather than challenge heteronormative white middle-class kinship ideals. At the same time, an investment in sameness as the ground for equality and a lack of attention to (gendered) differences between parents risks reproducing a mono-maternalist ideal where the difference of pregnancy, along with other parameters of (gendered and racial) difference must be disavowed. Combining a discourse of reproductive rights with a growing range of consumer choices with regard to parenthood certainly queers motherhood in some respects. At the same time, by either aspiring for universal motherhood or for no significance on motherhood-through pregnancy, reflects a broader contempt for (queer) femininity and for the possibility of difference. Neither expanding the category mother nor dislodging fertility and pregnancy from femininity solves the fem(me)inist dilemma of the continued subordination and disavowal of all things feminine that are tied to the difference that pregnancy makes in the cultural imaginary of reproduction, even as it includes same-sex motherhood in the futurity of the nation.
In closing, this to me suggests that queer femininity in the plural constitutes a fertile ground for rethinking some of the fundamental conceptual problems that (normative) femininity bring to feminist and queer femininity. While the tradition of ‘maternal thinking’ in feminist theory has stressed the value of femininity as pregnancy and motherhood, the queer approach has largely focused on dislodging those from femininity. If the former tends to ‘essentialize’ femininity as difference through fertility/pregnancy, and presume a theory of gender rather incongruent with queer gender and reproduction, the latter tends to see femininity as such as the problem (of gender). Here I would argue that it is the particular cultural connotations of white, middle-class (heteronormative) femininity that remain the sore point. With a cue from the narrator in Maggie Nelson’s praised novel The Argonauts (2015: 13) we might instead ask: ‘How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity?’ Nelson’s narrator is referring to the dissonance between her embodied experience of the queer nature of pregnancy and how she as a pregnant queer-identified feminine person in a relationship with a man repeatedly gets told that she is a traitor to queer struggle by reproducing the most conventional of feminine roles, motherhood through pregnancy, and with a transgendered husband at that. Inspired by Biddy Martin’s (1994: 105) crucial critique of certain tendencies within queer theory and activism to valorize cross-gender identification as exemplary of mobility and differentiation in ways that make femininity a problem and which makes the (lesbian or queer) femme, for instance, ‘less queer’, I think Nelson’s protagonist points us in other directions for thinking about the queerness of pregnancy itself.
As a last point, it’s important to note that at a time when some lesbians and other queer women are increasingly becoming fertile, only certain routes and positions are open and these continue to regulate and (re)produce femininity in particular ways. Clearly, not all persons with wombs wish to ‘become fertile’ or pregnant and not all wish to become mothers. And, of course, there are plenty of forms of femininity that from the point of view of the (white) state remain problematic in their fertility and get cast as in need of regulation and management around its abundance and deviance, including but not limited to teenage girls, racialized/migrant women and sex workers. The degree to which surrogates whose fertilities and pregnancies do not lead to motherhood can be understood to queer femininity is yet another question that begs to be asked. What is clear is that a focus on the ‘sameness’ of white, middle-class cis-gendered femininity and its relations to fertility and pregnancy erases the existence of multiple and often contradictory femininities, fertilities and parenthoods.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the special issue editors and anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on previous versions. Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at (In)fertile Citizens, University of the Aegean 2015 and Queer Kinship and Relationships in Poland 2015. For excellent comments I also particularly thank Aspa Chalkidou, Jenny Gunnarsson Payne, Doris Leibetseder, Antu Sorainen and Ann Werner. Research for this article is funded by the Baltic Sea Foundation.