Negotiating Non-Motherhood

Representations, Perceptions, and Experiences
2025
ISBN: 978-3-031-66696-4
Verlag: Springer Nature Switzerland

Buch, Englisch, 251 Seiten, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 466 g

Reihe: Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life

This open access edited volume focuses on the representations, perceptions, and experiences of women who do not have children against the backdrop of traditional gender norms, pronatalist policies, and patriarchal structures. While involuntary and voluntary childlessness have typically been treated separately and studied within different disciplines in most previous scholarship, contributing authors explore non-motherhood beyond the involuntary/voluntary divide and consider a wide range of conceptualizations of women who do not become mothers. The editors bring together a variety of perspectives from different national contexts and disciplines, including family studies, gender studies, literary and cultural studies, sociology, and film studies to explore non-motherhood. The book focuses on how women who choose or experience non-motherhood are negotiated, felt, represented, and received.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Björklund, Jenny

Rodgers, Julie

Kuzminskaite, Dovile

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Familiensoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Regierungspolitik
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Arbeit/Sozialpädagogik
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1. Conceptualising Non-Motherhood.- Chapter 2. Reclaiming Non-Motherhood: Abjection, Laughter, and Failure in Twenty-First-Century Swedish Narratives of Childlessness.- Chapter 3. (Non)-Motherhood and the Narrative of Self in Nuria Labari’s Chapter 4. Meanings, Experiences, and Perspectives on Non-Motherhood in a Spanish Context.- Chapter 5. Alternative Happy Endings? A Qualitative Study of Non-Mothers in Lithuania.- Chapter 6. The Incomplete Mother as Non-Mother: A Study of Secondary Infertility in Helen Davies’ Chapter 7. Pregnancy Loss in Contemporary Italophone Literature.- Chapter 8. Infertility, Desire for Motherhood, and Surrogacy in Miguel de Unamuno’s Chapter 9. Autonomy, Autocreation and Agency: Radical Non-Motherhood in Amandine Gay’s  (2021).- Chapter 10. Choosing Childlessness: Familial and National Acts of Resistance in Preti Taneja's (2017).- Chapter 11. Voluntary Childlessness in the Spanish Graphic Novel: Irene Olmo’s (2020).- Chapter 12. Adapting (to) Non-Motherhood: Ulrike Kofler’s film (2020).

Über Autor(innen)

Jenny Björklund is Professor of Gender Studies at Uppsala University. She is the author of (2021) and (2014), as well as the co-editor of several volumes including (2016). She has published extensively on motherhood and family in contemporary Swedish literature, gender and sexuality in Nordic literature and film, women and modernism, and literature and embodiment. 

Dovile Kuzminskaite is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Philology at the Institute for Literary, Cultural, and Translation Studies at Vilnius University, Lithuania. Her research interests include contemporary Latin American literature, experimental literature, and identity problems depicted in literary works. 

Julie Rodgers is Associate Professor of French at Maynooth University, Ireland. Her research focuses on the production and reception of maternal counternarratives and incorporates the study of a wide range of experiences that do not correspond to the normative, patriarchal script of motherhood.