Narrating Mother, Narrating Twenty-First Century America: On Choice, Refusal, and Relation

Author

Destry Sibley, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Date of Degree

6-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

English

Advisor

Kandice Chuh

Committee Members

Mary McGlynn

Amber J Musser

Subject Categories

American Literature | American Popular Culture | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies

Keywords

Life Writing, Narratology, Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, Neoliberalism, Cultural Studies

Abstract

“Narrating Mother, Narrating Twenty-First Century America: On Choice, Refusal, and Relation” poses a deceptively simple question––What is a mother?––and troubles its assumed answers. Situated in literary studies, at the intersection of life writing, narratology, and feminist and queer theory, this study maps the circulation of the mother figure in cultural and literary discourses to reveal how the maternal is deployed to differentially legitimate, query, or resist the contemporary conditions that are often referred to as those of racial neoliberalism. Racial neoliberalism articulates the historical logics and practices that create the state of life for people in America; these include the conditions of vast racial and sexual inequality, as well as a nearly non-existent social safety net, which together render parenting an experience of precarity and material insecurity for most Americans. Neoliberal ideology has at once become enmeshed with the choice-based rhetoric of mainstream feminism, producing a neoliberal feminist logic that induces women to perfect and optimize their life decisions, including those that arise through parenting. Against this economic and discursive context, I read life writing in various genres–– including memoir, parenting guides, personal essays, autofiction, and oral history––to illustrate twenty-first-century literary experiments in content and form that challenge our received assumptions of who mothers are and what mothering is. The literary and narrative production of Black, avant garde, queer and trans authors points us toward a mode of being and relating that resists the hyper-individualized and meritocratic values of neoliberal family life. These texts generate a pedagogy that elucidates social forms that revalue care and kinship-making. Theirs is a genre of narration that teaches us how to desire collective forms of relationality, engendering an “after Mother,” following Sylvia Wynter’s “after Man.”

Each chapter successively illuminates the deployment of the mother figure in ways that engender dominant ideologies of the privatized family or, alternatively, challenge naturalized conceptions of the domestic as a means to multiply the forms by which we give and receive care. The first chapter, “Parēns Economicus,” critically reads “ex-pat” and data-driven parenting guides to demonstrate how hegemonic representations of the mother manufacture a belief in hyper-individualized entrepreneurship and meritocracy as moral goods. The second chapter, “The Not Not Mother,” illustrates how Sheila Heti’s autofictive novel Motherhood (2018) creates a pathway through the affective burdens of choice by expanding the horizon of possibility for women’s lives through, within, and against motherhood. “What If,” the third chapter, surveys the temporal and affective constraints placed on Black American maternal figures and contends that Soil (2023), Camille Dungy’s memoir of Black motherhood, writes towards a more expansive relationship to time, the family, and the natural world through the inextricably intertwined affects of grief and love. The last chapter, “Glorious and Abundant Somethings,” reads narratives of trans and ‘kidless’ care, including testimonies from the NYC Trans Oral History Project; Krys Malcolm Belc’s genre-bending memoir of transmasculine gestational parenthood The Natural Mother of the Child (2021); and Ross Gay’s prose poem “Throwing Children” (2023) to illustrate how these accounts embrace a relationality of opaque interpersonal recognition in which the boundaries of the family are porous, mothers need not have children, children need not have “mothers,” and all find that their need for care is met. Such texts model kinship-making in the direction of family abolitionist forms, modes that exceed the constraints of biology or property, and thus materialize life-affirming, relational ways of caretaking precious kin.

Recommended Citation

Sibley, Destry, "Narrating Mother, Narrating Twenty-First Century America: On Choice, Refusal, and Relation" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6285