The New Queer Motherhood
The New Queer Motherhood
On Lesbian YouTube Moms and Instagram Babies
This is the Sunday Edition of Paging Dr. Lesbian. Plus this week’s dispatch from the lesbian internet. If you like it, subscribe!
For many like myself – queer, in my mid-20s, someone who spent many of my teen years online – parenthood can often seem like an abstract, inaccessible concept. Though gay marriage has become more common, having nationally been legal for five years now, gay parenting is not quite as visible. While I have known a couple of married lesbians before – namely two wonderful college professors – I have never to my knowledge known or spoken to any queer parents. This means that I have had very few role models for queer parenting or even queer relationships in my life. All queer people know how important these role models can be – I will never forget the sole lesbian couple at my high school because of how their very existence both inspired and comforted me in a way no one else could at the time.
More recently, I’ve been thinking about how we’ve begun to see a shift in how motherhood is depicted in digital spaces, among both queer and straight women. As I see it, this shift seems to have been precipitated both by the increased visibility of queer parents and queer mothers online as well as a general shift in how we understand the various lifestyles of mothers in the 21st century.
For queer families, particularly “two-mom” families, much of this content exists on YouTube. In recent years a number of two-mom families have gained followings on YouTube as a result of their honest presentations of what queer parenting looks like. Channels such as Living Rosa, Team2Moms, and The Next Family have become a source of information and inspiration for those looking for examples of queer and lesbian parenting, from the process of getting pregnant (or adopting) to the daily lives of such families. Tara and Mandi of Living Rosa often comment that the reason they started their channel was because they had very little information about what the processing of becoming moms would look like for them when they started their own journey and wanted to serve as that source of information for others. Rosie and Rosie, two of the most popular queer women on YouTube, started a podcast last year about their journey to motherhood as well for similar reasons. They also just recently announced their own pregnancy after an upsetting miscarriage last year. Another popular YouTuber, Jessica Kellgren-Fozard, has also just surprised her viewers by announcing her wife’s pregnancy and documenting their tumultuous journey to that stage.
For young adults like myself, these videos can provide a sense of comfort, even for those of us who are still undecided about the prospect of parenthood. Regardless of one’s own relationship to motherhood, this content provides visibility for an experience that remains relatively uncommon, or at least rather under the radar. One LGBT adoption agency estimates that there are currently only 115,000 “same-sex” couple households in the United States with children, compared to about 25.2 million households with children overall. This means that, like me, there are a great number of Americans who don’t know any queer parents personally. While there are LGBTQ parent groups created specifically for this reason, the accessibility of this content on YouTube is significant, especially during COVID.
It is true that oftentimes we put too much trust in visibility or representation as a means to bring about change – particularly when this superficial progress doesn’t have the power to transform entire social and political system or enact legislative changes – but in this case such representation does have the power to expand our hopes for what the future might hold. While a “nuclear” family might not fall under the definition of “queer” that scholars first theorized in the 1980s and 1990s, there is nothing that says that queer and same-gender parents have to follow the same blueprint that heterosexual families have been following for decades.
In addition to having endless amounts of time to think about modern conceptions of parenthood while in quarantine, I’ve also had plenty of time to read fanfiction, where I’ve found some similar themes have emerged. In the past year I’ve read numerous femslash – meaning sapphic or lesbian – fanfics that depict women becoming mothers in unexpected ways, often through adoption or fostering or as a result of circumstances out of their control. Lesbian fanfic often explores a particular type of queer utopia in which beloved characters finding their own happy endings, often the culmination of epic love stories that involve overcoming cultural or familial trauma. That these stories frequently invoke the creation of a found queer family – and indeed that most of these stories are “AUs,” meaning they take place in an alternate universe – indicates that these are the type of stories that are not frequently told elsewhere, but that queer women and queer people crave nonetheless.
In reality, becoming a parent when you are in a queer relationship is not something that happens unexpectedly, or as a result of simple luck. As Katie Heaney writes for Buzzfeed, “Because I am a gay woman, I will not be able to have a baby without wanting one desperately and consistently. And maybe not even then. I can’t afford ambivalence, or believe in chance.” That these two examples of queer motherhood – the hopeful reality of YouTube and the utopia of fanfic – exist simultaneously indicates that they both in some sense fulfill queer women’s desires for the future, which perhaps exist somewhere between fantasy and reality.
A shift in how motherhood is depicted has also occurred in a different fashion on Instagram. Pop-culture savvy millennial moms like Cardi B, Kehlani and Jia Tolentino (to name only a few) have created, through their Instagram content, a new image of what modern motherhood can look like. While not all of these women are queer, the unique and intimate presentations of motherhood in a sense upend, or queer if you will, traditional notions of motherhood.
For example, Cardi B continued going out to strip clubs and making it rain after her daughter was born, while also giving her followers daily updates on motherhood, including how she feeds her daughter with three-inch-long rhinestone-encrusted nails. While this is not necessarily a style of motherhood that is accessible to many (or most) women, the underlying message of such content – that you can be a mother and continue to unapologetically be who you are and do what you love – is powerful nonetheless.
Kehlani, who is queer and seems to have a literal village of family and friends around her to help raise her daughter, inspires similar sentiments. In addition to her seemingly community-oriented and very queer style of parenting, Kehlani also proves that it is in no way a contradiction to make an excellent music video about cam girls by day and go home to her young daughter at night. She is young, cool, talented, queer, and a mother, and those qualities seamlessly come together on her Instagram page.
New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino also became a mother last year and posts semi-frequently about her daughter Paloma, giving her followers important updates such as which Frank Ocean songs she has been playing for her that day and how square her head is. This is likely the result of derivative and stereotypical depictions of mothers in the past, but such a simple image has a huge effect on the re-imagining of motherhood as something that can be cool and done on your own terms, rather than something that strips you of your entire personality. It’s not that I don’t think my parents have personalities or lives outside of being parents, because I know they do, but it can be difficult to connect with the concept of parenthood on a personal level when your primary examples of it are a generation removed from you.
I’m sure some of this is in fact just generational – my peers and I are getting older and seeing adulthood in a new light. But I also think there’s something to be said for how these mothers, intentionally or unintentionally, are contributing to a shift in how we imagine motherhood. For the lesbian and queer moms on YouTube, this representation is very intentional and YouTube remains one of the only places to see such images on a large scale. These videos can act both as a source of comfort for younger viewers and a source of information for prospective parents. On Instagram, where content is often less structured (though not necessarily less intentional) millennial moms are – forgive me for the wording – “queering” motherhood in a different way, illustrating that ambition, humor, and individualism are not in conflict with the practice of motherhood. To me, this all feels very exciting and hopeful and makes me wonder what the future of parenting might look like. For as we all know, young people are only getting smarter and queerer from here on out.
This week’s dispatch from the lesbian internet
A lot has happened in the last week on the sapphic internet, specifically on Thursday, January 14th. Several things occurred on that day that this tweet lays all out.
Let me explain.
First, Brie Larson, who while in quarantine has started her own YouTube channel, released a video on Thursday in which she took internet quizzes about her own characters. In one of the quizzes, the question asked “you’re ten years old. how do you spend an hour of recess?” and for reasons unknown but highly speculated about, she chose the answer “searching wikihow on the library computer for “how do you know if you’re gay””. Now, at this point we all know that if you are searching the internet for an article about “how do you know if you’re gay,” you are in fact, gay. So understandably, this sent Brie Larson sapphics into a tailspin, the likes of which some have not yet recovered from. She was even trending on Twitter for a while there. Fans have long speculated about Brie’s sexuality (though she is currently in a relationship with a man), and this 3-second clip has really thrown everyone for a loop. If Brie ever dares to return to Twitter she’s bound to be in for a surprise.
Second, it was Holland Taylor’s birthday on Thursday, which led to Sarah Paulson wishing her a happy birthday on Instagram by posting numerous pictures of them together (one of which is pictured above). Now I can’t get into Sarah Paulson lesbians right now, but suffice it to say they are a very powerful force online and are not to be trifled with. Many fans are also deeply invested in the Sarah Paulson/Holland Taylor relationship, which despite the significant age gap (30+ years), is still seen as #couplegoals for many young sapphics. I don’t have much else to say about this event besides this:
Third, the trailer for a new Netflix movie called I Care a Lot was released. This is important mainly because it is another edition in the unhinged Rosamund Pike universe (originating with Gone Girl), a genre that is beloved by many but particularly by sapphics. (Look for my piece about evil sapphics coming soon). Also, it’s apparently gay? Either way, sign me up.
Lastly, the trailer for The World to Come was released on Thursday, which is yet another lesbian period piece, this time starring Vanessa Kirby and Waterston (and apparently also some men). Obviously, I am fascinated by the preponderance of lesbian period pieces in mainstream Hollywood, and obviously, I will be watching immediately. I do however hope these women have better personal hygiene than they did in Ammonite.
That’s all! If you liked this news roundup, let me know and perhaps I will continue to do them more regularly in the future.