Review of Shelley Park, Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood

Shelley Park’s Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood brings some critical new insights to philosophical scholarship on maternity. Her central concern is to challenge the notion that a child will have only one “real” mother. She takes us through a variety of social phenomena where we see this assumption manifested: custody battles, adoption policies, children’s literature, and, most personally, her struggles with her eldest adopted daughter. She further demonstrates how the “ideological doctrine” of monomaternalism is a joint manifestation of patriarchy, heteronormativity, capitalism, and Eurocentrism (7). Park’s argument is bolstered by turning our attention to non-normative maternal practices in adoptive, lesbian, blended, and polygamous families. This adds important new dimensions to a phenomenology of motherhood and strengthens the feminist critique of biological essentialism, demonstrating that some mothers will be more or less capable at different times.