Price: $29.95
Page Count: 252
Publication Date: June 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77258-222-2
Mothers, Sex, and Sexuality talks about things not normally dared spoken out loud—the interconnectedness and conflict between our parental and sexual selves, the taboo of the sexual mother, and why it matters so much to shatter it. What is it about the sexual mother that is incompatible, and at times even disturbing? Why are we threatened by maternal sexuality? And what does this tell us about the structures of gender and power that govern our bodies?
Mothers, Sex, and Sexuality presents a rigorous academic analysis of the myriad ways in which the sexual/maternal divide affects women, birthing people, and those of us who assume or are ascribed the title “mother”. We examine the way we as mothers talk to our daughters about sex, the way we talk about sex in a cultural context, and the deafening silence around sex in a medical system that overlooks maternal sexuality. We return repeatedly to the impact of both Christianity and Hinduism on the mother as someone to be revered but tightly controlled. We embrace the lost eroticism of mothering and hail breastfeeding as a sexual maternal practice, arguing for a new, broader, feminist understanding of sexuality. We discuss the way fat mothers destabalise the heteronormative maternal model, the way kinky queers are reconfiguring the sexual/maternal divide through erotic role-play, and we explore the strange, intense, and romantic domestic relationship that springs up between mothers and nannies—two heterosexual women trapped together in a homoerotic triangulation of need and desire. In a titillating climax we revel in the sexual maternal as embodied through performance art, poetry, installations, and comedy, disrupting queer readings of bodies as we are invited to both fuck, and fuck with, the maternal. This book boldly provides both a challenge to the patriarchal constraints of motherhood and a racy road-map escape route out of the sexual-maternal dichotomy.An insightful and expository collection at the junction of sexuality and motherhood. The collection explores the structural landscape, socio-cultural contexts, taboos, and sites of agency framing this point of convergence. Crucially, we are shown that it is not necessarily sexuality itself that often positions sexual mothers in contradiction to gendered conventions of motherhood, but the unapologetic application of agency in the expression of that sexuality. This is an important and informative departure from conventional (even seemingly supportive) representations of the sexual expression of mothers, and of great use in providing a nuanced understanding of mothers and sexuality in a contemporary context still dominated by the caricatures of the porn industry, and the commodifying oversimplifications of late capitalism.
-- J. Maki Motapanyane, Ph.D.
Women's & Gender Studies, Dept. of Humanities
Mount Royal University
Chair, Alberta Historical Resources Foundation
Mothers, Sex and Sexuality is the most inspiring book to come down the book-birth-canal in ages; delicious food for thought, diverse, multifaceted perspectives, titillating taboo topics, and deep sexual intelligence. If you are like me--not a birth mother and not that interested in motherhood-- this book is still for you.
-- Annie Sprinkle—Artist/Sexecologist/Educator
Section 1: Some Mothers Do ‘Ave It!
Sexual Mothers; Mothers and Sex
The Myth of Asexual Motherhood
Vivienne Cass
The Sexuality of Mothers in Hindu Life: Myths of Empowerment within Enslavement
Zairunisha
Sex Talks: Negotiating Taboo Topics and the ‘Blips’ of Feminist Mothering
Lysa Salsbury & Erin Chapman
Iskwewiwin: An Autoethnographic Study of Motherhood, Sex & Sexuality
Angelina Weenie
Section 2: Babes and Bawdy Breasts
The Erotics of Mothering
Maternal Eroticism and Sexuality in Sue Miller’s The Good Mother
Amanda Rooks
The Scandalous Breast: Confronting the Sexual-Maternal Dichotomy in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon & Susan Choi’s My Educator
Christa Baida
Hot Mama: The Taboo of the Sexual Maternal
Holly Zwalf
Section 3: Out of Line
Mothers who Mess with the (hetero)Maternal Model
Poem: Identity Shifts
Joani Mortenson
Love Bi the Book: A Chodorwian Examination of the Heterosexual Mother’s Love for Nannies in Contemporary Fiction
Katie Garner
Excessive Maternal Embodiment: The Queer Danger of Desirous Mothers
Natasha Pinterics
Engorged: Fucking (With) the Maternal (An Analysis of Anti-Normativity, Cultural Legitimacy, and Queer Authenticity)
Sam Sperring and Zahra Stardust
Contributors’ Biographies
Dr Holly Zwalf is a queer solo parent by choice who lives in the Australian bush. She has a PhD in feminist kink, is the coordinator of Rainbow Families Qld, and is a filmmaker, poet, and freelance journalist.
Michelle Walks is a queer femme Momma who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. Dr. Walks has a PhD in Anthropology and Gender & Women's Studies, and teaches Anthropology, Sociology, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at various post-secondary institutions.
Joani Mortenson is a queer mama, mover and yoga instructor living in the glorious Pacific Northwest. She has become a reclusive writer in her third age, embedded deeply in nature.
