Mothers and Sons: Centering Mother Knowledge

By Brillian Besi Muhomja

Mothers and Sons: Centering Mother Knowledge makes a case for the need to de-gender the framing and study of parental legacy. The actualization of an entire collection on this dyad foregrounding motherhood without particularizing the absence of fatherhood is in itself revolutionary. This assemblage of analytical, narrative and creative renderings offers cross-disciplinary conceptualizations of maternal experiences across difference and mothering sons at intersections. The authors’ mother knowledge, or that of their subjects, delivers new insights into the appellations mother, son, motherhood and sonhood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781772580747

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Knowledge

Copyright © 2016 Demeter Press

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Mothers and sons : centering mother knowledge / edited by Besi Brillian Muhonja and Wanda Thomas Bernard.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-77258-018-1 (paperback)

1. Mothers and sons. 2. Motherhood. 3. Parenting. I. Brillian Muhonja, Besi, 1972–, author, editor II. Bernard, Wanda Thomas, author, editor

HQ755.85.M76 2016 306.874’3 C2016-903613-8

Mothers and Sons

Centering Mother Knowledge

EDITED BY

Besi Brillian Muhonja and Wanda Thomas Bernard

DEMETER PRESS

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Mothering at Intersections:

Towards Centering Mother Knowledge

Besi Brillian Muhonja

1.

In Black and White:

African American and Anglo American

Feminist Perspectives on Mothers and Sons

Andrea O’Reilly

2.

Accounting for Lost Sons:

The Black Mother before the South African

Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Nontsasa Nako

3.

It’s a … Penis!

Or the Epistemology of the Ultrasound

Alice Rutkowski

4.

But I Am a Feminist!

Masculinity, Privilege, and Mothering

Dara J. Silberstein

5.

Letters to My Son

Renata Ferdinand

Mother Tells Me Her Dream

Nils Peterson

6.

Sons Write Mothers in Contemporary Swedish Literature:

Mustafa Can’s Close to the Days

and Erik Wijk’s Only the Right Words

Helena Wahlström Henriksson

7.

Mamas’ Boy:

Queer Women Raising a Cohort of Men

Sara Graefe

8.

Our Sons

Besi Brillian Muhonja

9.

Mom’s School by Ben:

An Epistemology of Falling Objects

Summer R. Cunningham

10.

Four Decades in the Story of a Transracial

Mother-Son Relationship

Martha Satz

11.

Role-Play and Other Poems

Csilla Toldy

12.

Life Lessons from My Mother:

Reflections of an Adult Son

Wanda Thomas Bernard

13.

Queering Confucius:

Mothers and Transgender Sons in Contemporary China

Christian Potter

14.

Disability and the Price of Myths about Mothering

Pamela Courtenay

Guné ci téfess (Baby on Shore)

Oumar Sarr

15.

They Don’t Even Know They ARE My Sons:

A Black Female Professor Speaks of Teaching across Race

A Ritual of Reconciliation

Toni C. King

16.

Parenting Cross-Culturally:

Migritude and the Contradictions of Black Masculinity

Grace Adeniyi Ogunyankin

17.

Raising Men:

My Two Boys, Co-Parenting, and the Fight against Culture

Nicole L. Willey

The Fast

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee

18.

A Boy Named Finn

Quincie Melville

19.

Black Mother-Son Relationships in the Age of Ferguson

Dannielle Joy Davis, Kira Hudson Banks, Bryce Davis-Bohon, and Avery Washington Banks

20.

Special Needs

Laurie Kruk

Editor’s Reflection

On Mothers and Sons: Telling Stories Differently

Wanda Thomas Bernard

About the Contributors

Acknowledgements

Our appreciation goes first to the brilliant contributing authors whose work we share in this volume and every bold mother whose narrative they share. We extend our gratitude to the Demeter Press team for their support in every way. We especially acknowledge Andrea O’Reilly for her vision beyond this anthology and her critical role in furthering Motherhood Studies as a discipline.

Besi: I thank my family and friends who inspire and support me, especially my mother, Hellen Muhonja Alumasa, a true feminist visionary; my sisters, Joy, Maureen, Cynthia and Melody, and our babies; my academic mother, Nkiru Nzegwu; and my brother and interlocutor, Cheikh Thiam. To Mama Ojok and Ojok, thank you for so much, and for the cover image. Wanda, thank you for exploring this work with me. A final thanks goes to my very talented research assistant, Rebecca Klein.

Wanda: I am grateful to my spouse of over forty years, who supports every project I take on. I wish to thank all of the men whom I have worked with over the years. Understanding your life journeys and your roles as sons, fathers, brothers, uncles, friends and colleagues has helped me to appreciate your uniqueness as men of African descent and my role as an insider-outsider. My daughter Candace reminds me every day of the significance of mothers, especially black motherhood. I am indebted to all of my sister friends who continue to inspire me to use words as acts of resistance and to my mother who left me a legacy of what it truly means to be a mother in good times and in bad times. Finally, I want to thank you Besi for inviting me to join you in this very interesting project.

Introduction

Mothering at Intersections: Towards Centering Mother Knowledge

BESI BRILLIAN MUHONJA

THIS BOOK IS PRINCIPALLY ABOUT mother knowledge and not knowledge about mothers. Centring mother knowledge demands a focus on the conceptual, cognitive, and experiential processing of the mother and not that of the scholar. What mothers know subliminally and cognitively, and which they retrieve and apply actively or otherwise in different situations, speaks to a unique insight, which is learned, acquired and embodied. The application of this contextual and conditional knowledge influences and is influenced by practices, philosophies, traditions, and institutions that individual mothers are connected to. Mother knowledge, therefore, expands with compounding maternal experiences for each mother. Thus, one must speak of particular mother knowledge as well as collective mother knowledge imbued with sentience, know-hows, praxes, and affectivity.

Mother knowledge, even the conceptual, is mostly experiential knowledge; what seems conventional is fortified for mothers by interaction with and understanding of the connections between specific individual(s) and the mother cosmos. Different pairings of individuals and circumstances produce differently nuanced knowledges, which subsist in lifeworld(s) where the natural, spiritual, and social worlds interface. The mother and other(s) encounter this world in what Achola Pala refers to as different dimensions of motherhood—biological, spiritual, and social (8). To perform in any of these scopes demands a negotiation of familial, cultural, societal, political, and economic realities and structures. This is where the completeness of mother knowledge resides because here, the particular intersecting identities and actualities of each mother come into play.

Particularizing knowledge to specific mothers or mother groups allows us to transition into making generalizations as scholars and scholarship define mother knowledge and create credible frameworks around it for studying mother-related phenomena. This is because, at once, the particularization of experiences and knowledges allows us to maintain individuals’ mother-wit and voices and, also, affords insight into how far the universalization of mother experiences can be functional or not. Expanded individuation allows for critical generalization, distinguishing the mother beyond the person and allowing her to become representative of collective knowledge and memory. In this collection of academics writing motherhood, in centring mother knowledge, the autoethnographic eye is ever present. This book, by embracing the analysis of the self and the personal, with scholars theorizing while maintaining the voices of the mothers and sons, privileges mother knowledge. Such a focus invites the authors to be subjects writing themselves, or to centre the mothers when the authors are not personally located in the work. This academic production, therefore, endorses the personal narrative and personal political spaces as a requisite for analytical studies on motherhood, and this introduction, accordingly, foregrounds the contributors’ mother knowledge by primarily citing the chapters within the volume. Analysis that erases mother voices expunges the different complexities of motherhood and, worse still, reinforces partiality towards patriarchally constructed motherhood. Therefore, commitment to centring phenomenological mother knowledge, and not just knowledge about mothers, informed the selection of the contributions in this collection. The result was the birth (pun intended) of a book that presents diverse ways of knowing, being, and experiencing motherhood and sonhood.

What this book responds to, therefore, is the dearth of scholarship on motherhood in relation to sonhood, which has been occasioned by the fact that conceptual and empirical research as well as creative works tend to primarily contemplate parental interactions and influence in same-sex generational dyads: mother-daughter or father-son. The philosophy held by many that fathers raise sons and mothers raise daughters has compromised investment in research in this area. Although in many heterosexual and co-parenting circumstances both parents contribute to the raising of children from all genders, and many lone and lesbian mothers raise sons without male partners, society in general, consciously or not, still affiliates sons to fathers and stigmatizes particular closeness of sons to mothers, which spawns the pejorative label mama’s boy. Considerations of the mother-son relationship focus on subjects associated with the psychological effects of hyper-involved parenting by mothers of sons, attributing therein good and bad mothering of sons. These contemplations presume a uniform approach to the proper parenting of sons. Such a lens assumes gendered parental legacy and focalizes patriarchal estimations of motherhood.

Questions raised by Andrea O’Reilly over ten years ago in A Mom and Her Son: Thoughts on Feminist Mothering remain pertinent today. She asks: Have we in our negligence or disinterest, academic and otherwise, given our sons up to patriarchy, done to them what we have spent our lives fighting against for ourselves and for our daughters? (387-388). In this volume, she expands on this inquiry and offers in her chapter In Black and White: African American and Anglo American Feminist Perspectives on Mothers and Sons a historical overview and insights into the development and direction of research on mothers and sons. Historicizing the theorizing of politics of mothering sons, O’Reilly also directly challenges gendered conceptualizations of parenting by presenting an astute critique of the contradictions in feminist mothering, which sometimes inadvertently erode the capacities of mothering and motherhood as sites of revolutionary agency.

There is a clear need to de-gender the framing and study of parental legacy and to recognize that parental identities and praxes are not fixed. Fortunately, global shifts in legal, economic, social, and political realities in relation to certain demographic groups, including queer and lone-parenting populations, now unquestioningly demand inquiry into the mother-son dyad, which will inform contemporary fundamental conversations on gender, sexuality, femininity, and masculinity as well as on political and human rights. There is an increase in the number of non-traditional families, as more and more women choose lone parenting. At the same time, queer mothers are increasingly parenting alone or with partners. These developments challenge traditional conceptualizations not only of mother and son identities but of family as well. An increase in the numbers of queer and lone parents translates into more families with the only active parental relationship being that of mother(s) to son(s). Gendered parental legacy, therefore, becomes a non-factor. Thus, the topics of mothers parenting sons and sons of mothers compel a range of questions urgently seeking researchers.

In view of the foregoing, this delivery (pun intended) of an entire collection on this dyad centring motherhood without deliberately explaining the absence of fatherhood is in itself revolutionary. This book is an assemblage of analytical, narrative, and creative renderings, which has been produced through multidisciplinary lenses from various mothers, motherhoods, sons, and sonhoods, across difference, and at intersections. The collection features a diversity of mothers—queer, co-parenting, migrant, cross-racial, single or lone, adoptive, differently abled, and attached. Within the chapters, patterns of shared mother experiences and knowledge emerge as do experiences particularized to collectives or individuals. The authors examine the mother-son pairing as an occupational, relational, and emotional and/or spiritual concept. Firstly, they grapple with questions related to doing motherhood—the occupational or practical facet of motherhood to sonhood. Secondly, the being-ness of motherhood is explored, which is the relational conceptualization of motherhood and its biological and social components. Thirdly, the concept of emoting motherhood, the emotional and expressive conceptualization of motherhood and sonhood, is also studied.

THE OCCUPATIONAL: DOING MOTHERHOOD

Located within histories, geographies, cultures, polities, and economies, motherwork often presents differently in raising daughters and sons. The occupational or practical dimension of motherhood is informed and transformed by group and individual conditions. These settings act on not just the process of mothering but also on the development of the person who will become the mother, just as they act on the person who is the son. To appreciate these intricately layered stimuli, consider the idea of mothering a black son in Lagos, Nigeria, or as part of a liberal community or a more discriminatory one in U.S. The focus and amount of investment of these mothers parenting sons of the same age are altered in response to their location. More dynamics complicate the vista further, as exemplified in the chapters Four Decades in the Story of a Transracial Mother-Son Relationship by Martha Satz, and A Boy Named Finn by Quincie Melville on mothering adopted sons cross-racially. Doing motherhood, therefore, is not controlled entirely by mothers, and mother knowledge allows us access to the other not so obvious influences to their motherwork.

This book includes various chapters on mothering black sons, mothering cross-racially, and queer parenting, which are educative on the non-existence even within one identity group of a panacea to proper doing of motherhood. Further illustration is availed by the two chapters, Special Needs by Laurie Kruk, and Disability and the Price of Myths about Mothering, by Pamela Courtenay in relation to parenting differently abled sons or parenting while differently abled. Not just the type of challenge but also cultural, economic and social locations of the mother-son pair matter. Parenting a child with challenges yet with resources is different than parenting without means or support. Through an interlacing of analytical, heuristic, and experiential expositions within texts and among the texts, this volume presents the layers of complexity attached to different mothers parenting a diversity of sons, resulting in an interaction of thoughts, biases, subjectivities, and familiarities on motherwork that feeds the mother-son relationship.

THE RELATIONAL: BEING MOTHER, BEING SON

The practical aspect of mothering a son is preceded by the definition of a relationship to a son. Motherwork is responsibility defined by a relationship. This relationship may be assured biologically, legally or, in some societies, socially and spiritually. The identities mother of a son and son of a mother exist in relation to and are dependent on one another. This is the case whichever form of motherhood one considers, even with othermothering as in Toni King’s rumination on the relationship between black female professors and white male students in the chapter, "They Don’t Know They ARE My Sons: A Black Female Professor Speaks of Teaching across Race. A Ritual of Reconciliation. However, there are instances wherein the naming of the relationship obfuscates the characterization of wrongly assigned, fluid, unfixed, or contested identities, as with the parenting of transgender sons or daughters engaged by Christian Potter in the chapter Queering Confucius: Mothers and Transgender Sons in Contemporary China, and Rutkowski in It’s a… Penis!; Or the Epistemology of the Ultrasound. This brings to fore philosophical questions that highlight the limitations of purely biological definitions of the relationship, such as who is a son or who is a mother? As stated earlier, in certain cultures, a mother is recognized primarily through relationships rooted in biology or legality while in others, social and spiritual motherhoods are also prized. Recognition of the socially constructed nature of gender must necessarily open the door to the question about the gender of the identity mother." In so far as this book questions the gendering of parental legacy, it joins the debate by scholars like Oyeronke Oyewumi who question the feminization of motherhood or masculinization of fatherhood beyond biology.

Contributing to the multifarious nature of these complex identities and relationships is the fact that the two identities are enveloped in other identities, including sexual identities, diverse masculinities and femininities, racialized and ethnic identities, and role-focused identities. The mother-son dyad also interrelates with extended family and community structures, which may involve blended families, divorce, remarriage, adoption, fostering, stepmothering, othermothering, and other bonded or fragmented family scenarios. The functioning of the relationship is not immune to these external pressures. This is discernible in the performance of sonhoods in different familial locations as captured in Helena Wahlström’s "Sons Write Mothers in Contemporary Swedish Literature: Mustafa Can’s Close to the Days and Erik Wijk’s Only the Right Words, Nicole L. Willey’s Raising Men: My Two Boys, Co-Parenting, and the Fight against Culture, and Wanda Thomas Bernard’s Life Lessons from My Mother: Reflections of An Adult Son. The mother-son relationship, thus, has to be understood as part of other structures and relationships, and mother knowledge tenders insight into the nature of different mother-son relationships and connections with each other and to others. The chapters of this text define the appellations mother and son" as paired in distinctive relationships, which demonstrate unique rituals of motherhood and sonhood informed racially, geographically, politically, socially, religiously, ethnically, and even economically. The definition and acknowledgement of a mother-son relationship axiomatically signals a reality imbued with emotions, so this volume’s contributing authors also tease out the feeling and emoting of motherhood and sonhood.

THE EMOTIONAL: FEELING AND EXPRESSING MOTHERHOOD

As a relationship, the mother-son pairing presents spiritual and emotional constituents and practices. Pala captures this aspect of the mother cosmos when she states that the spiritual dimension of motherhood expands the scope of motherhood to include the deeper, psychosocial aspect of nurturing and care (9). Pamela Courtenay in the chapter Disability and the Price of Myths about Mothering details

the intricate understanding of a human being that can come with being his or her primary caregiver. This maternal or paternal understanding is not medical expertise. It is a deeply intuitive form of knowledge loaded with years of daily minute observations and dedicated hypothesis testing. It can be an invaluable aid to medical diagnosis. (this volume)

The nature of nurturing and care demanded as well as the breadth and depth of representations of psychosocial expression is varied for different mothers and sons. Consider the following mothers, all represented in this book: mothers and sons with illness; mothers of problem sons; mothers of black sons; mothers of sons outside their own race; mothers of queer sons and daughters; mothers of biracial sons; mothers of differently abled sons; mothers who work outside the home; poor mothers of sons; and feminist mothers. The demands of emotional presence and performance are altered by circumstance. Essentializing mother emotions as intrinsic and universal in nature whitewashes these intricacies. It also delegitimizes maternal non-practical experiences as areas worthy of study.

The implicit claim is that one need not talk about mother emotions because they are inherently embedded in the mother label and identity. With no further examination of the nature and variety of emotions, this assumption obliterates the nuances and sophistications of mother knowledge in relation to emotions and, in fact, contributes to the myth of good and bad mothers as well as to the myth of natural motherhood. This volume centres mother emotions as part of mother knowledge and chronicles emotions that mothers are often too afraid to share for fear of being considered failures. Indeed, this bold exposition of a range of simple, complex, and pure emotions by mostly women within the academy, where motherhood regularly attracts penalty, is a political statement. Furthermore, this engagement of emotions confronts the reality that because of the misplaced notion that mothers should self-sacrifice in the service and care of others, they habitually avoid talking about their own emotions and feelings.

The study of emotions takes on even greater significance when it comes to raising sons. As boys grow older and boy-codes and bro-codes come into play, emotional expressiveness faces challenges and can be strongly contested by the son and society. The language and emotional rituals of mothering sons, thus, require added specificity in practice—and in scholarship as well. Emotions and parenting must be engaged from two angles in scholarship: the emotional expression one assumes is inherent in the mother-son relationship, and the idea of parenting out of emotions occasioned by the aforementioned circumstances and societal structures. Take the example of mothers of queer or black sons who in certain environments or countries, consciously or not, parent with or out of fear. Consider, too, lesbian mothers or lone-female parents who perform with added scrutiny because they are parenting sons. This ever-present fear of not doing enough is captured in the chapters But I Am A Feminist!: Masculinity, Privilege, and Mothering by Dara Silberstein, and Mamas’ Boy: Queer Women Raising a Cohort of Men by Sara Graefe. Of importance, too, are mothers of sons with disabilities, who fear for the survival of their children or about how their children will cope.

Most mothers confront the anxiety attached to the question of whether they have prepared their sons enough for the larger world. For some mothers, however, emotionally informed parenting is a necessary part of childrearing. These emotional reckonings necessitate extra psychological and practical motherwork. Statements such as I don’t want him to go through what I did or I don’t want him to be another Trayvon Martin¹ are commonplace among this set of mothers. Also on this spectrum, for example with migrant mothers apprehensive for their progeny, are those who desire that their children would have conditions and experiences similar to their own. Ogunyankin in the chapter Parenting Cross-Culturally: Migritude and the Contradictions of Black Masculinity articulates her wish that her Nigerian-Canadian son would share her understanding of blackness. Such an understanding would erase the necessity for the talk, illustrated by Davis et al. in the chapter Black Mother-Son Relationships in the Age of Ferguson, and Renata Ferdinand in Letters to My Son, which mothers of black sons in North America assume in a way that mothers in her country of origin do not. Ogunyankin expounds: As first generation immigrants, my partner and I are acutely aware of the ways in which we became black in Canada…. Our son … will not have a conscious awareness of how he became black, because to him, his blackness would seem natural (this volume).

Indisputably, emotional and psychological demands for certain groups magnify the convolution surrounding mothering sons. The mother-son relationship is a practice from childhood to manhood and beyond, and so the raising of boys to men is a key project of mothering sons. For some, this is an abstract concept understood unaffectedly as raising anatomically male children into socially acceptable men who perform as real men, patriarchally defined, should. For others, the connotation is literal. Reflect on Toya Graham, the fifteen-minute mother of the year from Baltimore. On April 28, 2015, Graham became a polarizing figure globally, at once extolled and vilified for striking her son, who had joined protestors following the death of Freddie Gray. Gray, a twenty-five-year-old African American man, passed away after sustaining spinal and neck injuries while in police custody. Graham, as she elaborated on her disciplinary action, was a mother trying to protect her son. For mothers of sons susceptible to potentially fatal discriminatory handling, their children’s survival to adulthood is a real and ever-present fear. As anthropologist Mieka Brand-Polanco facilely states, It is not the bad guys who end up in jail, but the vulnerable ones (Personal exchange). The profundity of this observation is demonstrated in Nontsasa Nako’s chapter (Re)calling Sons into Action: Mothers before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as well as in Besi Brillian Muhonja’s chapter Our Sons; both capture the inflexible nature of certain societies’ framing of the gaze on the bodies of black males. If societal expectations of manhood inform the parenting of sons, how does one raise a son of and for whom the society has little expectation and support for becoming that very man society desires? For parents of black, queer, differently abled sons, and those from other vulnerable groups who are framed by the larger society in ways that erase them or seek to redirect them, figuring this out presents added emotional responsibilities.

In response to or against patriarchally constructed masculinities, mothers acclimate their expectations for the children to those of society by either adapting or contesting them. Whichever route the mother takes, for mothers of vulnerable sons, this requires extra emotional and spiritual lifting because expectations of mothering do not change. Different cultures have expectations of sons, but in practice, these expectations in many cultures seem to extend only to the eldest son. In contrast, expectations on the mother in relation to the proper upbringing of sons across cultures appear to stay constant. Furthermore, the expectations on the eldest son often come with privileges, such as inheritance and patriarchal authority, which is not necessarily always the case with motherhood. For mothers in patriarchal societies, raising a good son, and sometimes just raising a son at all, is expected to be reward enough. To understand this, one must separate wifehood and motherhood. Many legal rights a woman enjoys as part of a marriage are attached to their wifehood, not motherhood. Motherhood is often considered its own reward.

MOTHERS DISCOURSE (WITH (EACH) OTHER(S))

The struggle with raising a son who fits society’s definition of manhood emerges constantly in this volume with mothers seeking to raise feminist sons who are expected to be actors in a world that defines masculinity in starkly different terms than the mothers do. The desired result for these mothers, in the face of social constructs supporting multiple jeopardies for many, is to raise feminist independent sons—good men. The mothers and the authors reflect on whether such an approach others their sons or curtails them from following their own path. Although raising feminist sons has historically been a part of many cultures, the deliberations by these authors present it as still a contentious space. Yet new avenues of achieving and enacting this relationship inspire new opportunities and approaches to performing motherhood and sonhood as well as new ways to studying this dyad. The centring of mother knowledge, which this collection offers, is a great starting point in studying the complexities of mother-son relationships. The contributors to this volume, from a plethora of perspectives, illustrate how to do so.

The editors have resisted the urge to group the chapters into thematic sections, estimating that such an approach would, in fact, contribute to de-centring mother knowledge. Sectioning the chapters would foreground different themes, philosophical, or theoretical areas at the expense of mother knowledge and would sever interactions and symbiosis among the diverse chapters and mother voices. Instead, interweaving analytical, creative fictional, and creative non-fictional chapters on an assortment of topics and identities offers the reader the opportunity to imagine the chapters as existing in dialogue with one another across historical, geographical, economic, cultural, and political spaces. This arrangement offers the advantage of showcasing the array of multidisciplinary philosophies, theories, frameworks, and formats employed while, at the same time, freeing readers to come up with their own connections regarding whether and how the chapters, or the experiences therein, speak to one another. Moreover, such an approach prevents categorization and labels, and addresses the challenge of having academic discourse in formats that do not always dichotomize demographic groups, or centre some while othering others. Therefore, what might appear as a disconnect between neighbouring chapters, the editors see as a strength of the volume.

With this approach, which also allows for the mother-wit captured in each chapter to be recognized autonomously, this volume contends that motherhood studies demands spaces in which different mother voices and narratives across the globe can speak to one another. Centring mother knowledge allows for the amplifying of mother voices and mother-wit, for which academics need to create platforms for dissemination. The majority of the chapters in this book have the authors as subjects, as they chronicle and audit their own (her)stories, which forces readers to consider the question of how what mothers know affect their own and others’ ways of knowing and being. The resounding answer by academics who responded to the call for papers for this collection with mostly personal reflective essays on motherhood, mothering and motherwork reveals the depth and breadth of experiences that remain unexplored. It demonstrates that scholars are starved for opportunities to deliver these accounts in styles that maintain their voices and foreground the personal space and politics. Summer Cunningham persuasively sums this up in ‘Mom’s School’ by Ben: An Epistemology of Falling Objects: Although, it is true, I do love those big books with big words and big ideas. Yet when I think about what it is I love about theory and ideas, it is the way they provide us with the ability to see the world anew through other perspectives: to know differently (this volume). She adds of the comic produced by her son, and which is central to her chapter,

Benjamin’s comic, Mom’s School, can be read as a critique of an academic institution that values only certain kinds of knowledge; a reminder that there are other ways of knowing that matter. The knowledge I have gained as a result of being a mother to this child matters…. Likewise, other mothers bring different ways of knowing to academic contexts; their knowledge matters as well. (this volume)

This volume contributes to the project of defining new languages, perspectives and approaches for the study of mothers and sons, and mother phenomena in general.

NOTE

¹Trayvon Martin was a seventeen-year-old African American boy who in Sanford, Florida, on February 26, 2012, on a trip from a local convenience store to buy a drink and candy, was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a community watch member. Zimmerman was charged and acquitted of second-degree murder and of manslaughter.

WORKS CITED

Brand-Polanco, Mieka. Personal exchange. 9 Nov. 2015.

O’Reilly, Andrea. A Mom and Her Son: Thoughts on Feminist Mothering. Mother Outlaws: Theories and Practices of Empowered Mothering. Ed. Andrea O’Reilly. Toronto: Women’s Press, 2004. 387-400. Print.

Oyewumi, Oyeronke. What Gender is Motherhood?: Changing Yoru’ba’ Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Print.

Pala, Achola. Dimensions of African Motherhood. JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies. 0.23 (2013): 8-10. Online. Web. 22 Jun. 2015.

1.

In Black and White

African American and Anglo American Feminist Perspectives on Mothers and Sons

ANDREA O’REILLY

IN MAN CHILD: A Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response, African American poet and essayist Audre Lorde (1995) asks us to consider the two western classic myth/models of mother/son relationships: Jocasta/Oedipus, the son who fucks his mother, and Clytemnestra/Orestes, the son who kills his mother (76). These ancient myths are continually retold and re-enacted in Western culture and function, in Louis Althusser’s terms, as ideological apparatuses that interpolate mothers and sons into specific relationship positions that are most fully dramatized in the narratives of Clytemnestra and Jocasta. The sanction against mother–son closeness and connection is signified and achieved by the incest taboo, whereas the enforcement of mother–son separation is represented and enforced by the murder of Clytemnestra. Both patriarchal narratives are enacted through the denial and displacement of the maternal presence.

I open this chapter referencing the above narratives because it is my contention that maternal erasure and disconnection are central not only to patriarchal thinking on mothers and sons but also to Anglo American feminist thought on mothers and sons as well. Through a close reading of three early, classic, Anglo American, feminist texts on mothers and sons, this chapter will examine how the early Anglo American perspective on mothers and sons scripted mother–son attachment in terms of these hegemonic narratives of maternal erasure and disavowal. Next, the chapter will consider how recent Anglo American feminist writings on mothers and sons call into question this patriarchal and early feminist view of maternal displacement to emphasize mother–son connection. Finally, the chapter will review recent African American feminist theory on mothers and sons to explore both its emphasis on maternal presence (as opposed to maternal erasure) and its specific, racially determined mode of rearing sons.

PATRIARCHAL NARRATIVES

The story of Oedipus and his mother Jocasta was first told by the playwright Sophocles, but it is known to us today through Freud’s psychological theory of the Oedipal complex. The son’s first love object, according to Freud, is the mother, but the son renounces this love upon the realization that this desire is forbidden and will result in his castration by the father. In the story of Clytemnestra and her son Orestes, the mother, as most accounts tell