Pepper LaBeija tells the story of how her mother watched her become a woman before her very eyes. In her drawling voice, Pepper tells of her mother destroying women’s clothing whenever she found them stashed in the house. Pepper tells the story of her mink coat which her mother brunt up. In that devastating, yet poetically told, moment we see the image of Pepper watching her mink coat burn as she ‘cried like a baby’.  That is a beautifully told moment of terrifying violence. Through the mink coat, her mother subjects valued artefacts of Pepper’s womanhood to death. It signified Pepper’s queerness, as an expression of her gender or alignment to femininity. You can discard an item of clothing or sell it or donate it but to burn it in front of Pepper was of destructive anger and refusal. It’s clear that the maternal sentiment between her mother and Pepper is absent and this is quite the case with queer people. Interestingly, Pepper is the Mother of the House of LeBeija.

In Paris is Burning, we see how the Ballroom community creates families through the ball competitions and the vogueing houses. Dorian Corey, Mother of the House of Corey, describes how when someone has lost their mother or father, they search. They look for someone to fill the void of their mother’s rejection, and that’s where the House Mothers comes in. Strathern (2011) describes how a child may exist independently of their origins however parents are created; ‘a parent is a relative term that is defined only with respect to another – its orientation is prospective: to be a parent is to have a child’ (p. 246). The role of a parent is something which is constructed, it is through the practice which the concept is fulfilled. To be a parent is to be the origin of another person (Strathern, 2011).

Normative understandings of mothering in the West rely on reproduction as the point of origin (Strathern, 2011). For others, they come into being and into themselves within the queer scene. Sometimes, it takes seeing another to know that you can exist. A 13-year-old boy from Harlem, in the documentary, is asked ‘where is your mother’, he responds ‘I don’t have a mother’. The houses are families, – ‘they’re families… for a lot of children who don’t have families’. Can these houses and mothers be seen as the origins of queer kids on the scene? From the care and even the assuming of surnames, such as Corey or Ninja or LeBeija, they subvert heteronormative parenthood whilst replicating kinship practices.

The representation of a mother is as natural and of paternity as a social fact (Strathern, 2011). However, the depiction of parenthood as physiological process denies the processes of parenting which takes place in the Ballroom scene and the wider queer community. Parenthood is concept, which emerges from social relationships. Indeed, the normative/dominant representation of parenthood reveal the social and political notions that reproduce heteronormality and the nuclear family.

Strathern, M. (2011) What is a Parent? Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 1(1), pp. 245-278.

Mother of the House / Afrin Ahmed / Anthropology of Sex and Reproduction (2020-2021)[SEM2] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0