ABSTRACT
The term and concept of ‘mother’ remains strongly and perhaps intractably aligned with women and femininity. The un-contestability of motherhood as normative becomes deeply problematic for women who do not perform femininity in this way and, I also suggest, for sole parents. Following Butler (2005), sole parents potentially give an account of themselves in conditions that re-work and often contest the gendered binaries largely associated with heteronormative nuclear families. I suggest that sole parents often traverse the gendered constructs of feminine motherhood across masculine notions of fatherhood to performatively enact parental care-work. When we apply Butler’s gender performativity to motherhood we can begin to explore the power and productions of motherhood and the ways in which gender is reinforced problematically through discourses and practices of ‘mother.’ My use of the term ‘mother’ is a theoretical move that informs the methodology of my research. Theorizing gender expands our understandings of the operations of higher education because it enables examination of structural, institutional and social influences that determine how people negotiate conditions within higher education. Sole parents in higher education experience particular conditions of account that tend to defy and re-work conventional understandings of ‘mother.’
