Single Mothering as Critique and Vision

“Single Mothering as Critique and Vision,” is a proposal for a roundtable session on single mothering as an ethical, theological, philosophical, and historical act from which to challenge contemporary systems and theories of social reproduction and to imagine alternatives. This roundtable offers a discussion on what it means to single mother under white supremacist heteropatriarchy, as well as capitalist ableism. We suggest that single mothering serves as a binary breaker against the hierarchies constructed under contemporary systems of social reproduction: mother/whore, straight/queer, independent/dependent, mature/immature, able/disabled, and productive/unproductive. Hence, rather than the single mother inhabiting a position of lack, we offer theological, theoretical, and religious visions of single mothering as a political and collectivizing force needed for more just approaches to social reproduction. Since the Covid-19 pandemic the field of mother studies has exploded. From foundational authors such as Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Sarah Ruddick, Jane Lazarre, Cherrie Moraga and bell hooks to newer contributions from Sarah Knott, Andrea O’Reilly, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs scholars have pointed out the gendered, raced, and classed dynamics of care labor, as well as alternative visions of family. Additionally, authors such as Michael Cobb, Rebecca Traister, and Briallen Hopper have explored the theoretical status of singleness. However, lacunae exist in terms of single mothering as a theological, theoretical, and political frame. This roundtable addresses this absence. Panelists will offer 6-8 minute reflections followed by a facilitated discussion and audience input. Panelist one is a political theologian working in feminist, queer, affect, and crip study. She will reflect on the political theological status of single mothering in relation to institutional practices–from racist welfare policies, to designating embryos as children, to the treatment of single mothers in the workplace. She suggests that the state acts as both an authoritarian and neglectful father-God who offers control, but little care. Alternatively, single mothering calls into being oceanic relations of collective care. Such collectivity serves as a theological model for labor solidarity and liberation. Panelist two is a constructive philosophical theologian from a womanist tradition with liberation commitments. She will reflect on soteriology and salvific community. In her previous work she discusses the need to think about salvific community from a womanist process perspective. In that text, she notes the role of Saviors, as leaders of local communities engaged in salvific activity. As a single mother who works outside of the home, she has developed a network/ village of other Black single mothers who work together to manage the labor of caring for their school-age children. This network has created salvific community without a Savior; there is no single leader. Hence for this roundtable, she will offer a more rhizomatic vision of salvific community. This vision overlaps with ways of thinking about multireligious engagement (since this is not a religious community) and the kind of leadership structure seen in movements like the Movement for Black Lives that operate effectively without a single leader/ figure. As a multireligious or areligious salvific community, the emphasis is on wholeness, health, well-being (and sometimes just survival as Delores Williams discusses) made up of (in her case) Black women caring for their daughters into a better life than they had. Panelist three is a feminist New Testament scholar, who draws on feminist and queer theory to write on topics such as slavery, gender, sexuality, and ancient families. Forty years ago (1984) in Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center, bell hooks called for a shift in feminism to include “revolutionary parenting.” While feminist activists had begun to value domestic labor, they had not, as hooks noted, “attribute enough significance and value to female parenting, to motherhood” (pg 134). Since hooks, a number of feminist and queer theorists have taken up this challenge in a variety of ways. In panelist three’s contribution to this roundtable, she will suggest that single motherhood is a revolutionary feminist act. Using feminist and queer theory, she theorizes single motherhood as a challenge to the traditional heteronormative family and a facet of queer kinship. Drawing from her own experiences as a single mother by choice, she calls for not only a recognition of single motherhood as revolutionary, but also for the incorporation of communal support for parenting (something hooks recognized the need for as well in 1984). Finally, she will consider the possibilities of single parenting as a facet of queer kinship. Panelist four is a theologian, ethicist, and scholar of women, gender, and sexuality studies. She is a feminist cultural critic who pays special attention to religion, violence, trauma, and wellbeing. She will offer thoughts on the reciprocal dynamic whereby single motherhood calls on the mothering figure to show up ruthlessly for their child, which in turn, both pushes that figure to show up ruthlessly for themselves and simultaneously changes the constitution of the self one is showing up for — a change which could be narrated either as erasure or transformation, death or transfiguration. She will parse out the ways in which this dynamic reveals gendered, classed, racialized, and religious structures of inequality and also offers a possible model for resistance by way of transformation as transfiguration. Panelist five is a scholar of classical studies with emphasis on citizenship, slavery, and animality. While this panelist is partnered, she offers a vision of alternative family that brings insight into the conversation on single mothering. She will focus on her family’s creation of a multigenerational household as a non-normative way of familying in the US, with a nod to the Confucianist roots of her Japanese heritage. She will reflect on how the recent embrace of her heritage in her scholarship is enmeshed with her praxis as she produces a feminist household collective. Additionally, she will focus on the issues of being an advanced-age new mother, which has come with its own health costs and career stumbling blocks. In foregrounding how there is never a “best” time to have a child in academia, she will reflect on the tensions between feminist parenting and institutional labor and production.