ABSTRACT
Our academic understandings of lesbian motherhood have been strongly influenced by the resistance/assimilationism paradigm. Poststructuralist efforts to better understand the fluidity and multiplicity of subjectivity often fail to make the practical leap between theory and people’s everyday experiences. Efforts to understand people’s stories about their lived experiences from a poststructuralist perspective are badly needed. The goal of this chapter is to provide a rudimentary understanding of one such framework in order to apply it to the parenting stories of the women participating in this study. Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s (1987) conceptual tools are utilized to understand how lesbian mothers’ subjectivities are not completely constituted by normalizing discourses, nor are they radical examples of resistance.1 It is my hope that such an approach can offer the tools for analyzing other seemingly mundane life experiences and shed light on new ways to think about ourselves and our interactions with others in our social world.
