Sheila Quaid

Mothering in an Age of Austerity

The primacy of motherhood in feminist theory is understood as a necessity for understanding cultural, political, social and economic positions of women. This chapter examines the discursive process of neoliberal ideologies and how polarisations of ‘mother’ occur in austere times. In addition, questions surrounding possible new cultures of domesticity are considered alongside intersections of class, nationality, ethnicity and place in this review of mothering under austerity. Drawing on existing published work the author reviews analyses of ideological processes and policy analyses. The debates are highly moralised and new divisions between the deserving an undeserving mother proliferate. Whilst there is a steady shift of responsibilities from the state to individual families the particularities of austerity impacts on ‘mother’ are considered across a range of positions.

Reflections on Reading Spare Rib: Personal and Political

Sheila offers a personal account of her emergent feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, informed by her reading of Spare Rib. She explores how sexuality was tackled by the magazine and how this in turn affected her own understanding.

Lesbian Mothering and Risky Choices; ‘Dangerous’ New forms of love and kinship

During the last four decades new forms of family have been emerging in Western liberal democracies that have presented challenges to thinking about what family is. In this chapter, drawing on Douglas’s ideas about purity and danger, there will be an exploration of how families headed by lesbians have been constructed both in public discourses and legislation as presenting risks to social order. The responses to these perceived risks have led to, variously, recognition, exclusion and regulation. In their work on non-heterosexual families of choice, Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan (2001) argued that lesbian and gay parenting provides a litmus test of how far a society has come in tolerating non-heterosexual identities and intimate lives. In this chapter it is argued that lesbian-headed families have been constructed as representing an antithetical family to that most desired and idealized in society: the heterosexual nuclear family. This ideal is based on a heterosexual couple enacting gendered roles in which motherhood is constructed as the most important role for women. Thus it will be shown that different constructions of lesbians have been used and continue to be used, to reinforce the risks they pose to the social order of intimate life as well as, by extension, to society as a whole.