In 2022, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the 1973 landmark decision Roe v. Wade that had guaranteed the constitutional right to abortion in the US for almost five decades. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the discussion has since frequently focused on the fact that not even the termination of pregnancies caused by rape and incest or to save the life of the pregnant person is exempted from this decision. Due to this emphasis, the actual issue – a person’s right to decide not to give birth for any reason including the wish to remain childfree – took a back seat. Importantly, it is not just the news media that (intentionally or unintentionally) promotes this pronatalist ideology. Abortions are generally rarely depicted in popular fictional narratives and childfree (i.e., voluntarily childless) female characters are hard to find.
In the field of sociology, the childfree woman has received considerable academic attention in the past few decades but fictional depictions of them have largely remained unexplored. The aim of this special issue is, therefore, to fill this gap by focusing on the childfree woman in popular North American literature, film, and television.
On June 24, 2022, the United States Supreme Court officially overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision thus ending the constitutional right to abortion. Much of the subsequent mainstream media narrative has focused on the fact that this decision does not even carve out exceptions for victims of rape and incest, which, while important and horrifying, diverts attention away from the actual issue: a person's right to decide not to give birth for any reason. This reframing of the abortion debate around the most extreme cases is clearly informed by a pronatalist ideology that is still pervasive in US culture. However, it is not just the news media that frequently buys into this pronatalist narrative by evading the inclusion of, if not actively undermining, a woman's right to be childfree. Depictions of abortions are rare in popular fictional narratives, be it in television, film, or literature, and so are voluntarily childless female characters, not only but particularly when it comes to lead characters. This introduction to the special issue on childfree female characters in fictional narratives frames the issue of childfreeness, i.e., voluntary childlessness, in the still dominant pronatalist ideology and examines some stereotypical depictions in recent US-American television series.
The article charts the way childless women are portrayed in contemporary US-American popular film and television. I argue that these representations can be summarized as two distinct figures: The shallow narcissist and the sad spinster. Both figures are unworthy of recognition. The shallow narcissist refers to the voluntarily childless woman, who is being depicted as selfish, childish, and manipulative; the sad spinster refers to the involuntarily childless woman, who is depicted as asexual, lonely, sad, and pathetic. Both figures are founded in the discourse of "reproductive futurism" (Edelman) and teach us that only a child can give meaning to women's lives. Without a child, there is no proper identity and no fulfilling relations or kinships. I also point out, though, that there are exceptions, such as Tanya McQuoid from The White Lotus and Diane Lockhart from The Good Fight, that bring important nuances to the prevailing stereotypes.
With the overturn of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which protected the constitutional right to abortion for almost 50 years, women in America are now faced with extreme difficulties when seeking an abortion. Given this dramatic pronatalist shift that seems only to be getting worse, more and more women will now have to travel through "abortion deserts" in order to seek safe and legal abortion care. Cinema has sought to mediate the troubles and struggles of women "on the road" to safe abortion. Thus, in recent years, we have watched a surge in the representation of abortion within the realm of the road-trip film genre in US-American cinema. Since 2015, several films, such as Grandma (2015), Little Woods (2018), Never Rarely Sometimes Always(2020), Unpregnant (2020), and Plan B (2021), have tackled this issue. Interestingly, only one of those films was directed/written by a male individual, highlighting the way female filmmakers are currently reshaping reproductive health narratives. Additionally, three of these films, namely Grandma, Unpregnant, and Plan B, also fall under the comedy-drama genre, particularly the road trip-buddy comedy genre. This paper aims to explore how the road-trip film genre, which has featured predominantly male characters, is now helping women to share their stories and gain more visibility regarding reproductive rights and how comedy is being used to subvert the overtly dramatic representation of abortion that enhances the pronatalist ideology in most film and television narratives.
Women who grow up in Western societies are confronted with media, cultural, and literary narratives conveying the notion that motherhood is "natural" and an integral part of womanhood from a very young age. Thus, having a child is frequently presented as the only option for adult women. Nancy Felipe Russo calls this "the motherhood mandate," which problematically suggests that every woman wants to become a mother and that this "is a woman's raison d'etre" (144). The normative conflation of womanhood with the obligatory assumption of motherhood is ingrained in North American society and reinforces rigid gender norms while exposing hegemonic reproductive expectations. These norms also extend into efforts to control reproduction and produce condemning, frequently ageist narratives that stigmatize those whose reproductive choices do not comply with heteropatriarchal norms. Therefore, this article proposes that age is a crucial lever of reproductive control and examines how ageist facets of such controlling efforts affect characters' lives in Brit Bennett's The Mothers and Sheila Heti's Motherhood. Based on the reproductive choices in The Mothers and Motherhood, I will argue that the ageist reproductive norms and concomitant stigmatizing narratives aim to exert reproductive control, on the one hand, by suggesting that young women are damned if they become pregnant, mothers, or have an abortion, and, on the other, by condemning adult women who decide to remain childfree.
Burdened with the choice whether to become a mother or not, the protagonist of Sheila Heti's autofictional work Motherhood develops a thoroughgoing critique of the notion of having to make that choice in the first place, encompassing philosophical musings on the impossibility of controlling one's existence by making decisions and astute commentary on social pressures on women to fulfill expected roles. It identifies pro-natalism as a culturally pervasive narrative, which is subtle but rigid in its exclusionary binarism and consequent pressure and divisiveness it imposes upon women. Heti dismantles the narratives that make up the concept of motherhood and redefines it as an inclusive, non-divisive, non-coercive concept. Maintaining its relational basis, she reverses its temporal trajectory and suggests the relationship with the mother as its central concern. Mobilizing the creative potential of writing, she rewrites the narrative of motherhood as the reconstruction of ancestral bonds between women through literature. Via this reversal, she undermines the one-directional conception of motherhood and allows for the term's inclusiveness of all women. In this way, she deflates the notion of decisional compulsion and so creates a spirit of egalitarianism and tolerance from which all mothers, non-mothers, and non-non-mothers can benefit.
In histories of exile and migration, LGBTQ+ people have often entered marriages of convenience. Within these arrangements, a gay man and lesbian woman typically enter a marriage to expedite immigration processes or to placate conservative family members. Most commonly, these relationships do not produce children, and they consequently call into question the pronatalism that is often associated with hetero-normative conceptions of marriage. This article explores the complex dynamics of these relationship structures through an analysis of childfree married women in the novels of two female queer exile writers: Jane Bowles and Patricia Highsmith. In Bowles's Two Serious Ladies (1943), a US-American upper middle-class couple, Mr. and Mrs. Copperfield, journey to Panama, where Mrs. Copperfield begins an affair with a female sex worker called Pacifica and refuses to return to the United States with her husband. In Highsmith's Ripley Under Ground (1970), the union between the US-American Tom Ripley and the French heiress Heloise Plisson provides a cover for Tom's ambiguous sexuality, as well as his diverse criminal activities, and allows Heloise to enjoy a life of aimless pleasure. In both these novels, queer marriages of convenience permit transnational mobility within unions that are markedly non-procreative and thereby occupy non-future oriented temporalities. This article demonstrates how these writers used the alternative temporal organization of the marriage of convenience plot to undermine the conventional structures of patriarchal genres, including the modernist quest narrative and suspense or crime fiction.
Karla Rohová reviews Sheri-Marie Harrison's, Arin Keeble's, and Maria Elena Torres-Quevedo's Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays (Edinburgh UP, 2023).
Lena E. Leßlhumer reviews Virginia Jackson's Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023).