‘I try to be true to myself but other people have to fit you into a box’: Exploring how voluntarily childfree women discursively negotiate their sense of self in a pronatalist society

Abstract

Women who have consciously remained free of having children, also known as voluntarily childfree (Blackstone, 2019), occupy liminal spaces created for them by dominant social discourses that valorise reproduction and vilify childfreedom (Gotlib, 2016). Reproductive desire is socially constructed as biologically innate (Franke, 2010) and pronatalist discourses construct voluntarily childfree (VC) women as making an ‘unnatural’ choice (Gillespie, 2003). This research aims to explore how socially constructed positions about voluntarily childfree women have impacted their sense of self. Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis (Thompson et al., 2018) was used to listen for contrapuntal voices within VC women’s negotiation of identities. Through semi-structured interviews with six women, three prominent discourses were heard: Negotiating Identity in a Pronatalist Society; Still Being a Woman Whilst Not Being a Mother; and Political Implications of Being Voluntarily Childfree. Contrapuntal voices heard within these discourses highlighted that VC women skilfully negotiate complex and conflicting subject positions to create space for their identities as women. The complex nature of VC women’s subjective experience of selfhood serves as a challenge to the homogenised view of women’s identity perpetuated by the patriarchal discourses prevalent in political structures of social policies, healthcare and workplace settings.