The terminology Andrea uses is indicative of the negotiation of kinship terms relating to co-mothers. Charis Cussins[289] has examined the strategies used by women using assisted reproductive technologies at a US clinic to determine who would be considered the mother of a child resulting from donor eggs and/or the use of (host or full) surrogacy. She has noted that ‘legal and familial constraints bring their own forms of plasticity and relative invariance which are very powerful in determining kin’.[290] Two features of Andrea’s account are particularly salient. First, she draws a distinction between her lack of legal rights and those afforded to parents in heterosexual relationships, whose status as ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are formally legally recognised (s 27 and s 28 HFEA 1990 respectively). Clearly, legal parenthood is limited to the recognition of one mother and one father.[291] Second, Andrea does not refer to herself as a mother. Rather, she categorises her role with the gender-neutral term ‘parent’. She reiterates this later in the interview: ‘Obviously Louise is his mum and he will always call Louise his mum, but I am Andrea, I am a parent. I see myself as a parent not another mum.’ Therefore, it seems that the ‘relative invariance’ of the formal recognition of the gestational mother in legal discourse, as well as the legal exclusivity of motherhood, have a powerful normalising effect with regard to the kinship terms used by Andrea.
However, it is not only legal discourse which may have a powerful normalising effect with regard to the negotiation of kinship terms for lesbian co-mothers. Gillian Dunne[292] has noted ‘the power of ideas about the singularity and the exclusivity of the identity of “Mum” in a social world structured by heterosexual norms that polarise parenting along lines of gender’. The gendered, heteronormative framing of parenting in social and legal discourses clearly can have powerful normalising effects. Andrea does not claim the status of ‘mother’ in the interview. On the one hand, this is demonstrative of the constraints of language in describing kinship relations in lesbian families resulting from donation. In fact, during the interviews none of the co-mothers claim the term ‘mother’, although Beverley refers to her partner and co-mother Fiona as the ‘other-mother’, and Jane refers to Helen, her partner, as ‘mummy Helen’ (discussed further below). On the other hand, Andrea’s use of the term ‘parent’ could also suggest the possibility that lesbian couples can re-conceptualise kinship terms in ways that are non-gender — specific.[293] Hence, subjects can resist dominant discursive constructions. Consequently, the refusal to use the gendered term ‘mother’ in this instance can point to the productive potential of discourse and ongoing negotiation of kinship terms. Hence, the authority of legal and social discourse is not absolute, but rather is continually negotiated and renegotiated at the capillary of power relations by particular subjects in specific circumstances.[294]