Queer Mothering in Academia as Pandemic Preparation: A Dialogue Between QueerMotherScholarFriends

• In Event: Fabulating Futures With Academic Mothers: Provocations for Higher Education

Abstract

Purpose: This paper is a dialogic exploration of the overlaps of queerness, academia, and mothering during our experience(s) of COVID in order to imagine a professional future that reflects and values the ways (queer) mothers in academia have created community with and for each other.

Theoretical Framework: Theoretically, we draw on Mattias (2011) and her work on motherscholars. We add to this a focus on queerness built from queer theory (e.g., Butler, 1990; Munoz, 2009), especially queer family theories (Allen & Mendez, 2018; Weston, 1991). This queer lens helps us problematize and recognize new possibilities for a wide range of heteronormative expectations, especially in relation to time, life trajectories, definitions of family, and relationships in and out of academic settings.

Methods: This work is autoethnographic (e.g., Ellis and Bochner, 2000), an approach particularly suited to explorations of queerness (Jones and Adams, 2016) and supporting the deconstruction of traditional academic approaches to research and writing.

Data Sources: Interviews of one another and personal reflections, gathered over time, recorded, rearranged, and coded together form the corpus of data we drew from.

Conclusions: As queer, cis, white women who are mothers as well as long-term academic co-authors, research partners, and close friends, COVID has led us to reflect on the ways we’ve grappled with our individual and shared twists, turns, and coping strategies as (queer)motherscholars (Mattias, 2011). We noticed that, with a few notable exceptions, queer academic parenting and living through a global pandemic had an awful lot in common. In other words, we realized we’ve always been focused on keeping our queer selves, our queer families, and, through our work, our queer community healthy and safe in an often-unsafe world.We realized the work we’d done over the years--not all of it smooth and seamless--to become collaborative (queer)motherscholars prepared us to face a pandemic surrounded by a sense of community that helped us survive. Our reflection tracing the development of our particular (queer)motherscholar connection over time shows how the long-distance network of support we built within our working relationship, the community building and attention to the common good we’ve focused on, and the relative comfort with vulnerability and constant unknown-ness of the future required from queer mothers doing queer work in academia are all resources we’ve needed to handle this most recent pandemic too.
Significance: It has helped that what we’ve needed in this present moment are the very things we have been building together over the course of our (often shared) careers. We share our exploration in the hopes that making visible the ways we’ve constructed our lives as (queer)motherscholars can serve as a way forward into the (hopefully changed) “post pandemic” world of academia, both as ongoing reminders for us and as a guide for others wanting to build queerer, more expansive, and more inclusive communities.

Authors

• Caitlin Law Ryan, University of North Carolina - Wilmington
  Presenting Author

• Jill M. Hermann-Wilmarth, Western Michigan University
  Presenting Author