The Impossibility of Queering the Mother: New Sightings of the Virgin Mother in the ‘Secular’ State

In this part autobiographical essay, I explore the social consequences of the rise of the so-called ‘tender years’ doctrine coinciding with the rise in divorce. I argue that this has led to increased gender apartheid around the figures of M-for-Mother and F-for-Father, and a new sanctification of the figure of the holy mother-and-child. I look at the inverse and complementary relations between M-for-Male and F-for Female and M-for-Mother and F-for-Father, and I argue (counterintuitively) that origins, mothers and fathers are queerer in ancient myths and the Bible than they are in contemporary semantics and law. The idea of mothering-as-caring is a recent etymological innovation, hatched in the nineteenth century for very particular reasons, and supported by a distinctly modern infrastructure of ‘home’, ‘child’ and the ‘nuclear family’ (again, very recent creations). Thus this new mother-and-child is and is not like the Virgin Mary, for she relies on modern ideologies that separate the aneconomic ‘home’ from the house (the material/economic infrastructure) and on wealthy economies that create ‘children’ through the emergence of schooling for all. I call for more expansive forms and new mythologies, which are desperately needed. I use strange old biblical texts (Solomon’s judgement; the trial of Abraham) to create unheimlich echoes for the so-called secular state and its strange constructions of the family; and I show how the Ten Commandments continue to influence family law.