Desiring Queer Motherhood and Mothering Ourselves

This essay is an open-ended, poetic reflection connecting findings from my ethnographic research on same-sex desiring women in southern Ghana with my own journey of becoming a queer mother in Switzerland. It suggests that desires for motherhood cannot be reduced to the wish for procreating or tapping into the power of extending our heteronormative lineages, but reflect feminist desires for loving, growing and connecting across generational divides. It asks to what extent mothering a child and sugar-mothering a younger woman lover can be thought (and lived) alongside each other while connecting us to our own mothers. By documenting the challenges of finding ways into queer motherhood, it hopes to encourage collective ways of "doing" families beyond marriage and childbirth.