Volume 23, Issue 1, Spring 2016
Mothering from the Margins: Critical Conversations
Shelley M. Park
Pages 71-90
“When We Handed Out the Crayolas, They Just Stared at Them”
Deploying metronormativity in the war against FLDS mothers
In 2008, over 400 children living on the Yearning for Zion Ranch, a rural Texas polygamist community of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS), were forcibly removed from their mothers’ care by State troopers responding to allegations of child abuse. This essay examines the role of neoliberal ideologies and, more specifically, what some queer theorists have identified as ‘metronormativity’ in solidifying a widespread caricature of FLDS mothers as ‘bad’ mothers. The intersections of these ideologies with neocolonialist discourses, I argue, positions the FLDS mother as a subaltern subject unable to effectively speak in her own defense.