Getting to Know You

(8/28/18)

A more nuanced pop culture reference which challenges Menkedick’s assertion that portrayals of motherhood are not taken seriously on a cultural scale is FX’s television series Pose. While Pose’s characters are fictional, the series is an historically accurate depiction of the drag ballroom scene in 1980’s New York City. In the series, family, and motherhood in particular, transcends their prevailing conceptions, asserting that family is not limited to blood and DNA, but is a rather flexible descriptor for a group of people who have no relation other than shared experiences of queerness, marginalization, and rejection. Pose’s universe consists almost entirely of queer and/or transgender people of color, which is not only inextricably important in terms of representation, but also in that older feminist texts such as Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique are centered only around the dichotomy between two sexes. Friedan’s text does not take into account those who are neither cisgender nor heterosexual, which only bolsters the influence Pose maintains on the collective cultural consciousness.

The series follows Damon Richards, a queer male-identified person of color, who is kicked out of his home by both his mother and his father following his coming out as gay. He is then forced to take to the streets of New York City, sleeping on park benches for weeks until he meets Blanca—a transgender woman of color who introduces him to ballroom culture. Damon’s story, while fictional, is rooted in history and truth. A large component of ballroom culture is the existences of “houses,” which are run by “house mothers”—queer women of color who take in and care for those rejected by their blood-families, such as Damon. The families created within these houses become alternatives for the biological families which failed to provide the affirmative and healthy relationships necessary to the human condition, and because these chosen families fall outside of the bounds of the heterosexual and cisgender societal conventions, they nourish queer folks who are denied the right to belong by their biological families and the world in general.

The fact that the history of ball culture and the stories of trans and queer people of color have been repressed by the collective consciousness does not mean that their concepts of motherhood are not taken seriously—it is just that the impact has not been recognized. Studies show that there is a critical connection between familial rejection and suicide attempts/other various mental health issues among trans youth (Lowery), and others prove that mental and physical health issues are more prominent in sexual minorities (Katz-Wise). The sense of motherhood depicted in this series and in a historical context should not be viewed as less than or unequal to “traditional” displays of motherhood, because these house mothers did more for their chosen children than did the biological parents of those children.

http://attheintersections.org/redefining-families/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5127283/