Mother? I Hardly Know Her!: Manipulating Gendered Language and ‘Mothering’ in the LGBTQ+ Community

In this runner-up Queer Futures Prize-winning essay, Lucy Wilson offers a historical analysis of current social media use of the term ‘mother’, arguing how LGBTQ+ subcultures manipulate gendered language to subvert conventional understandings of family and create community.

The terms mother and mothering are increasingly used by LGBTQ+ people on social media to refer to queer or feminist icons, usually when they do something warranting praise from queer people – from standing up for LGBTQ+ rights to turning a look at an awards ceremony. To unpack the use of this term, I draw on queer histories and queer conceptions of family.

Queer people exist in a speech community, sharing unique linguistic behaviours that help construct a collective identity. This is well demonstrated by the ‘secret’ language of 1940s-60s Britain spoken almost exclusively by gay men, Polari. Baker (2019) wrote a pioneering book on this ‘secret’ and fragmentarily remembered language, highlighting how gender is linguistically reversed in Polari, in playful and pointed ways. For instance, feminising language was used to poke fun at homophobic people and institutions, as with Polari’s multiple terms for police, including Betty Bracelets, Hilda Handcuffs, and Lily Law, illustrating a unique intersection between humour and politics. Thus, in Polari, gendered language is used to undermine rigid gender binaries rather than perpetuate them.

Prior to the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, homosexual acts were criminal offences in the UK. So, Polari facilitated romantic and sexual relations between queer people, providing a means by which LGBTQ+ people could identify one another without risk; it offered an extensive vocabulary of words for sex, evaluations of attractiveness, and genitalia, as well as instilling a strong sense of belonging and community for many queer folk at the time. The language was largely unrecognisable to heterosexual people and culture; it truly was a ‘secret’ language. Although the language itself is based on English, Polari was different enough that we would not be able to decipher conversations without a lot of help. Importantly for the purposes of understanding social media use of mother today, Polari included a rich vocabulary of familial metaphors, e.g., auntie, sister and mother. In Polari, the term mother referred to an older gay man who took on a mentoring role for younger gay men; these relationships were distinctly non-sexual. 

Although mother was thus part of the vocabulary of Polari, use of this term is arguably more well-known in the NYC ballroom scene. Documented in Paris is Burning, the ballroom scene was a subculture that took on in the 1980s where primarily queer and trans people of colour organised themselves into houses and competed against each other in balls for trophies and cash prizes. This subculture emerged from the discrimination LGBTQ+ people faced in their own families, wider society, and the government during the particularly hostile and dehumanising era of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Importantly, these houses tended to be headed by a mother – usually a gay man or trans woman with more experience in the scene. This mother status bore no biological standing but was rather based on provision, encouragement, inspiration, and empowerment, providing a safe alternative family for queer people who had been abandoned by their biological families. These houses and chosen families in ballroom culture directly critique the centrality of the biological, nuclear family in society; they provide an alternative to the institutionalisation of marriage and family and celebrate queerness – something that many queer folks’ biological families failed to do.

Queer speech communities can also be observed in drag communities through camp talk, which Passa (2021) refers to as ‘drag lingo’. Like Polari, camp talk feminises and inverts gender, using linguistic techniques like gender-crossing and feminine kinship terms. Drag lingo is another way in which LGBTQ+ folk continually reinforce their collective identity. An accessible example of this is portrayed in the reality competition show RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-). In this show, terms like mother, trade, boots, snatched, beat, dusted, gagged, mug, serve and werk stand out as drag lingo. To drag queens, mother often refers to the queen that introduced them to drag or significantly helped them develop their drag. Frequently, this mother is part of a wider family of drag performers. With the popularisation of shows like RPDR, which seek to represent queer culture and expose these queer speech communities, some camp talk has been adopted by the wider LGBTQ+ community and allies – in particular the term mother, which is now used increasingly widely and flexibly.

Returning to the social media use of mother today, in pop culture, we see mother being used as a complementary label for icons and music artists. By comparing the dynamics and effects of parasocial relationships between celebrities and fans to those of chosen families, I argue that by spreading an empowering, LGBTQ+ positive message, fans can use these celebrities’ self-love as an inspiring example similar to that of drag mothers and house mothers. Hence, I argue that the pop culture icons who campaign for LGBTQ+ rights and genuinely impact queer fans’ behaviour and self-image can be considered mothers in some shape or form. In fact, for many fans, these parasocial relationships involved more love and acceptance than their biological families did.

Using evidence from several LGBTQ+ subcultures, I cautiously define queer mother figures as people who are seen as supporting LGBTQ+ individuals or the community through, for example, empowerment, love, sharing of expertise, financial help, protection, and the creation of a safe space or community free from homophobia or transphobia. Fundamentally, mothering is a shifting, personal concept, differently defined from person to person; for many queer folk, their mothers saved their lives. Conclusively, the familial networks in the LGBTQ+ community and their corresponding speech communities continue to pose a radical critique to the heteronormative discourses in society and deprioritise biologically defined familial relationships.

Author biog:

Lucy Wilson wrote this essay, which won the runner-up Queer Futures Prize 2025, in their second year of Sociology and Politics at the University of Edinburgh for ‘Introduction to Queer Studies’. This essay incorporates several of Lucy’s interests, such as the representation of LGBTQ+ communities in media, drag and gender performativity, and queer chosen families.

References:

Baker, P. (2019) Fabulosa!: The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language. London: Reaktion Books Ltd.

Passa, D. (2021) ‘“You all are sisters! We are all family!” The construction of parenthood in ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’’, Linguaculture, 12(2), pp. 127-144.

RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-) LogoTV.