Reconceiving the Motherhood Mandate
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Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Sociology Dissertations Department of Sociology 12-2009 Not Trying: Reconceiving the Motherhood Mandate Kristin J. Wilson Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/sociology_diss Part of the Sociology Commons Recommended Citation Wilson, Kristin J., "Not Trying: Reconceiving the Motherhood Mandate." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2009. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/sociology_diss/41 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Sociology at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Sociology Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. NOT TRYING: RECONCEIVING THE MOTHERHOOD MANDATE by KRISTIN J. WILSON Under the Direction of Wendy Simonds ABSTRACT Infertile and childless women think about, live with, and defend their status as mothers and as nonmothers, arguably more so than other women for whom motherhood comes about accidentally or relatively easily in accordance with a plan. Within this group of infertile and childless women are those who are otherwise socially marginalized by factors like class, race, age, marital status, and sexual identity. This dissertation asks about the ways in which marginalized infertile and childless women in America make sense of their situations given the climate of “stratified reproduction” in which the motherhood mandate excludes them or applies to them only obliquely. While other researchers focus on inequalities in access to treatment to explain why many marginalized women eschew medically assisted reproduction and adoption, I emphasize women’s resistance to these attempts at normalization. I take a critical, poststructural, feminist stance within a constructivist analytical framework to suggest that the medicalization, commodification, and bureaucratization of the most available alternative paths to motherhood create the role of the “infertile woman”—i.e., the white, middle class, heternormative, married, “desperate and damaged” cum savvy consumer. By contrast, the women who participated in this study are better described as the “ambivalent childless” (i.e., neither voluntary nor involuntary) and the “pragmatic infertile.” These women experience infertility and childlessness—two interrelated, potentially stigmatizing “roles”—in ways that belie this stereotype, reject the associated stigma in favor of an abiding, dynamic ambivalence, and re-assert themselves as fulfilled women in spite of their presumed deviance. INDEX WORDS: Infertility, Childlessness, Intersectionality, Marginalization, Medicalization, Adoption, Procreative politics, Reproduction NOT TRYING: RECONCEIVING THE MOTHERHOOD MANDATE by KRISTIN J. WILSON A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2009 Copyright by Kristin Jean Wilson 2009 NOT TRYING: RECONCEIVING THE MOTHERHOOD MANDATE by KRISTIN J. WILSON Committee Chair: Wendy Simonds Committee: Elisabeth Burgess Ralph LaRossa Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University December 2009 iv DEDICATION For Evan and Leo v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work bears my name but I did not do it all by myself. Far from it. Dan Kercher took the second shift for too many months to count, caring for our household and our children all while working full-time. Besides that vital labor, he sweetly provided loads of encouragement and insight all along the way. He also graciously let me write about him as I wrote about our shared experience with infertility. I am grateful to have an extraordinary mentor, advisor, and friend in Wendy Simonds. I hardly know where to begin in acknowledging her contributions to this dissertation. Not only did she read my work, discuss my work, and guide my progress, she generously lent her friendship throughout my obtacle-strewn route to sudden motherhood. When our second son arrived with no warning, Wendy cooked, played with the older baby, supported my first attempts at nursing an adopted baby, and helped us choose his name. Most importantly for me, she reminded me that the dissertation would still be there after those early months of intensive baby care; it gave me permission to revel in my children without over-worrying the dissertation. Many other people helped make this dissertation possible. Jorie Henrickson and my mother, Mary Arterburn, each produced many excellent and thorough interview transcripts. Katie Griffith, Jennifer Robertson, Ashley George, Lupe Cortes, Kathee Lyda, Martha Munoz, and Adriana Castillo provided excellent childcare so that I could work with peace of mind. Two fellow graduate students who I admire and respect enormously, Amy Palder and Elroi Windsor, gave me friendly feedback whenever I got stuck and reached out to them via e-mail. I also want to thank Claire Sterk and Kirk Elifson for providing a challenging and fascinating training ground for sociological field methods. This experience gave me the confidence to undertake a difficult project. Many times during the analysis phase of this vi dissertation, I silently thanked Ralph LaRossa’s tireless efforts in giving me and all of his other students the tools with which to conduct good qualitative work. Thanks also to Ralph for his pleasant humor and careful reading of the dissertation. His apt advice greatly improved this work. And in spite of her busy schedule and growing responsibilities, Elisabeth Burgess generously joined my committee after the proposal defense and data collection were complete. Thank you to Elisabeth for her support and illuminating comments. Though many helped bring this work to fruition, any shortcomings of this work are entirely my own. Finally, this dissertation would not exist were it not for the willingness of 25 women who shared with me their time and their intimate thoughts. Not only did they help me achieve this academic milestone, these women broadened my understanding of infertility and childlessness in ways that extended beyond scholarly significance and reached me personally. To each of them: thank you. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS LIST OF TABLES CHAPTER 1 ENTERING OTHERHOOD 1 Word Binds, Coercive Metaphors, and the “Fertility World” 6 Alternatives to Infertility and Involuntary Childlessness 11 Accessing Motherhood and “Otherhood” 16 CHAPTER 2 DEFINING WOMEN 22 Goodwives and Witches 23 Lonely Spinsters, Good “Breeders,” and Chinese Slave-Girls 24 Republican Mothers Redux and “Overbreeding” Immigrants 25 Fertile Wives, Frigid Women, and the Feeble-Minded 27 viii Childless or Childfree? 29 Welfare Queens, Working Moms, and the “Desperate” Infertile 32 Soccer Moms, The Infertile Woman, Lesbian Mommies, and Hyper-fertile Latinas 35 Cultural Dupes, Earth Mamas, and the Childfree: Feminist Research and Philosophies of Infertility and Childlessness 40 Maternal Bodies and the Social Body: Empirical Studies of Infertility and Childlessness 47 CHAPTER 3 RESEARCHING WOMEN 60 Recruiting a Nonexistent Population 62 Interviewing Interlocutors 68 Setting the Stage for a Good “Conversation” 69 Listening and Learning as Feminist Praxis 72 ix Interpreting Conceptions 78 CHAPTER 4 MOTHERHOOD FROM THE MARGINS 86 Real Moms, “Bad” Mothers, and Other-than-Mothers 90 Real Moms 96 Nominal Mothers 108 Godmother Aunties 115 Less-Involved Nonmothers 122 CHAPTER 5 INDECISIONS 131 Motherhood Motivations 133 Readiness 142 Finding Mr. Right 144 x Finding the Right Time 152 Age Talk 159 Mystical Ascriptions 168 Magical Motherhood 172 Holy Paternalism 178 Chance 182 CHAPTER 6 CONCEIVING COMPLEXITIES 192 Dynamic Ambivalence 194 Transcending Realizations 195 Well, Do You Want ‘Em, or Not? 196 Reflexive Realizations 201 Coping and Regret 207 xi Not Meeting Expectations 210 Altering the Lifecourse 213 Intersecting Strategies 216 CHAPTER 7 DEFYING NORMALIZATION 223 Normalization and Normalizability 224 Not Fitting In 226 Being Too Independent 227 Feeling Less a Woman 229 Defending Difference 231 Having Special Insights 232 Medical Interventions 234 xii Questioning the Experts 237 The ART of Horror Stories 243 Taking Control 246 Adopting Discourses 253 The Good Deed 255 The Impossible Dream 257 The Inferior Choice 259 The Ethically Questionable 261 Adoption Agency 263 Enough is Enough 268 Ambivalent Childlessness and the Pragmatic Infertile 272 xiii CHAPTER 8 FROM MANDATE TO OPTION 275 Disrupted Definitions: Re-casting Infertility and Childlessness 278 Theoretical Conceptions 280 Future Research Directions 289 REFERENCES 292 xiv LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Participant Characteristics 85 Table 2. Birth per 1,000 in the last 12 months by age and race 160 (U.S. Census Bureau 2008). Table 3. IVF pregnancy rates by age: nationwide and at Zouves Fertility Center. 185 1 CHAPTER 1: ENTERING “OTHERHOOD” Regardless of the cause, however, and regardless of age, infertility wreaks inestimable havoc on those who suffer from it—from The Baby Business (Spar 2006:16) “How’re you doing with your plight?” asked my new fertility doctor upon entering the exam room. While sitting fully-clothed awaiting this initial consultation, I looked over the thick files that comprised my fertility history up until that point (it would get much thicker in the coming years). There was much more to the experience than these papers indicated.