New book explores non-motherhood

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.

The volume forms part of the Negotiating Non-Motherhood research cluster within the European Union Horizon 2020 research project MotherNet.

Chapters include:

• Conceptualising Non-Motherhood
  Jenny Björklund, Julie Rodgers
• Reclaiming Non-Motherhood: Abjection, Laughter and Failure in Twenty-First-Century Swedish Narratives of Childlessness
  Jenny Björklund
• Non-Motherhood and the Narrative of the Self in Nuria Labari’s The Best Mother of the World
  Dovilė Kuzminskaitė
  
• Meanings, Experiences, and Perspectives on Non-Motherhood in a Spanish Context
  Anna Morero Beltrán, Elisabet Almeda Samaranch
  
• Alternative Happy Endings? A Qualitative Study of Non-Mothers in Lithuania
  Lina Šumskaitė
  
• The Incomplete Mother as Non-mother: A Study of Secondary Infertility in Helen Davies’ More Love to Give
  Julie Rodgers
• Pregnancy Loss in Contemporary Italophone Literature
  Laura Lazzari
  
• Infertility, Desire for Motherhood and Surrogacy in Miguel de Unamuno’s Dos madres
  María Sebastià-Sáez
  
• Autonomy, Autocreation and Agency: Radical Non-Motherhood in Amandine Gay’s Une poupée en chocolat (2021)
  Jasmine D. Cooper
  
• Choosing Childlessness: Familial and National Acts of Resistance in Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young (2017)
  Orlagh Woods
  
• Voluntary Childlessness in the Spanish Graphic Novel: Irene Olmo’s No quiero ser mamá (2020)
  Mercedes Carbayo-Abengózar
  
• Adapting (to) Non-Motherhood: Ulrike Kofler’s Film What We Wanted (2020)
  Valerie Heffernan