The Queer Motherhood Project is a devised performance created by writer-director Hannah Phillips and musical director Rachel Jones. They are part of Worcester-based Mobilise Arts, the same company who brought Just Be You to the Midlands Arts Centre (mac) in June. The show is being presented in conjunction with The Hayward Gallery’s touring exhibition Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, which is also currently at the mac.
The initial inspiration for the show was an article Hannah Phillips wrote for Diva magazine last year in response to legislation passed in Italy requiring local councils to remove the names of non-biological mothers in same-sex partnerships from their children’s birth certificates. That provides a jumping-off point for a wider examination of motherhood in queer families, which highlights the continuity with, and differences from, the experience of heterosexual couples.
Abigail King’s set consists of three rostra with the word MOTHER in big, illuminated letters spread out between them and a projector screen upstage centre. The show has an agitprop theatre style in which the cast of three, Rachel Jones, Katy Rooke and Elexi Walker, sing, dance and present verbatim accounts of queer women’s experiences of motherhood interspersed with video interviews.
It opens with a spoken-word piece written from the perspective of a woman who is involuntarily childless and then goes into an Andrews Sisters-style close-harmony number, "Queer Mothers Unite!", which presents a manifesto for the show with lines like, “Being a mother is more than biology”, “A mother’s love, that’s what defines us” and “What defines a mother has changed”.
Some aspects of motherhood will be familiar to any parent: the exhaustion and the overwhelming sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of your child. Many heterosexual women will also recognise the grief and sense of loss of infertility, as opposed to being childfree by choice. Stella Duffy’s story, presented in the form of a mobile phone FaceTime call, is a deeply moving account of how she had her eggs frozen before she started her cancer treatment and then lost five embryos in turn after she recovered. She describes the shame she felt in a pro-natalist culture in which mothers are seen as ‘graduate’ women.
Other experiences are specific to women in a same-sex relationship. In another FaceTime call, the stand-up comic Jen Brister talks about being the ‘other mother’ when your partner is the birth mother of your child. Other queer mothers talk about how their own conception was managed, and what role, if any, the biological father has in the life of their child. Some women had children by a male partner early in life, others entered into an agreement with a gay male friend and some looked for a sperm donor online.
Some older women talk about how difficult the question of sexuality and motherhood was in the 1980s with no role models to look to. One woman wishes now that she’d had a child when she was younger, but lesbians were barely visible at the time—the only lesbian she had ever seen on television was Martina Navratilova—and she simply didn’t realise it was an option.
All of the women have to deal with intrusive, personal questions from friends, colleagues, teachers and healtcare professionals. Some welcome their heterosexual friends’ interest in their lives and they are glad to offer them, and their children, a different, more open family role model. But others are worn out by the need to come out again and again, day after day and keep explaining their family to doctors, nurses and teachers when all they want to do is look after their child.
The simple staging focusses the audience’s attention on the testimony of the women who contributed to the show. Hannah Phillips’s direction and Rachel Jones’s videography are unobtrusive, Nik Haley’s music has a folkie directness and Liz Wilson’s choreography is well integrated into the action. This is a warm-hearted, generous-spirited show which speaks to, and for, women whose experiences are not widely acknowledged.