On Queerness, Motherhood and the Gift of Belonging

This piece reflects on my experience as an intern for the journal Studies in the Maternal. I wish to suggest that this internship was something more than just an accumulation of professional skills. Starting from the discomfort of belonging as a queer woman, to a community structured around motherhood, I suggest that it is the disembodied image of the mother—psychoanalytically, and sociologically sustained—that did not allow me to explore links between queerness and the maternal in the first place. I then draw on a personal vignette about maternal friendships to consider homosociality as an often-forgotten structure of support alongside heteronormative family structures. Finally, I show that the capacity to psychically hold together queerness and the maternal (queer as maternal, and motherhood as queer), can be engendered only after the question of how one belongs—peculiarly, queerly, uncomfortably, embarrassingly, socially—has been raised.