In Sweden in the twenty-first century, childlessness has emerged as a topic in literature across genres. These narratives take stories about non-motherhood, which are often invisible and abjected from mainstream society, and tell them in new and defiant ways. Moreover, this body of literature depicts a variety of ways of being a non-mother: through involuntary childlessness and infertility, through childlessness by choice, and through childlessness by circumstance. In this presentation, I explore a variety of literary representations of women without children in twenty-first-century Swedish literature. I discuss fiction, autofiction and personal essays that deal with childlessness and analyze how these representations reclaim the position of non-motherhood in various ways: by telling stories of failed fertility treatments, by embracing the abjected position of non-motherhood and claiming it as a livable life, and by using laughter and failure to turn things around and propose alternative ways of living. I bring together theories of abjection, laughter and failure to analyze stories that are usually expulsed from the public domain in order to uphold the fertility norm. I show how abjection, laughter and failure are employed in these narratives to reclaim the position of non-motherhood, to criticize dominant discourses and to imagine different futures.

In the late years graphic narratives about journeys to motherhood and maternal experience have populated the Spanish market. These narratives appear together with other forms of communication like blogs, maternal chronicles, novels, movies, or associations. However, the issue of non-motherhood is still under explored. No quiero ser mamá is a graphic novel that explores the process of deciding not to be a mother. The novel stands out as it shows the process as a subjective experience, drawing attention to the specific conjunctions of visual and verbal texts in autobiography (Gillian Whitlock 2006: 966), visually arranging the relationships of the protagonist with other people in social situations and spatial environments. Through these visual relationships we see how Irene Olmo conveys her struggle to conform with societal expectations of women and mothers by making us sense gaps between the protagonist’s femininity and motherhood norms. Olmo uses her graphic novel as a feminist tool to explore the choice of a voluntary childfree life as a response to social attitudes towards non-motherhood that have emerged from culturally sanctified religious ideologies. No quiero ser mama creates new discursive spaces in which the naturalization of motherhood can be challenged, the silence surrounding this experience can be broken, and non-motherhood can be imbued with the potential for enlightenment, community, self-realization, and exceptionality

My paper proposal is to explore non-motherhood and surrogacy in a century-old text, Miguel de Unamuno’s novella-play Dos madres (‘Two Mothers’), included in his work Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo (‘Three Exemplary Novels and a Prologue’, 1920). Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) of the most recognised Spanish writers and philosophers. One of the main topics of his literary works is non-motherhood vs. motherhood. The Dos madres plot starts from the same core leitmotiv as the biblical passage it is inspired by, the story of Rachel and Jacob (Gn. 30: 1-6). There are three main characters: Raquel, don Juan and Berta. Raquel is a widow who could neither have a child with her husband nor with her younger lover, don Juan. Rachel is desperate to become a mother and makes a plan to achieve her goal. She encourages don Juan to marry a young woman, Berta—who is supposed to be fertile—and have a child with her but then give the child to Raquel, who will raise the baby as her own. Therefore, my paper will explore, through a literary text, non-motherhood and how the desire to become a mother is dealt with and given a solution via surrogacy. In addition, my paper will put on display how in Unamuno’s novella-play surrogacy is represented as something beyond a cure for infertility and produces new ways of imagining family formations.

Amandine Gay’s book-length personal essay, Une poupée en chocolat (2021), first and foremost treats the politics and violences of transracial adoption. Yet, alongside her critique of transracial adoption both within and beyond France, Gay also speaks of her own lack of desire to become a biological mother or to partake in traditional family-making, culminating in her seeking out voluntary sterilisation at the age of thirty-five. Her fight to get a hysterectomy – accounts of which are rarely explored by literature or personal writings, especially among cisgender women of ‘reproductive’ age – is a radical act of defiance and self-determination. For Gay, it is as much an act of self-care as it is a reclamation of her body from the sexist, racist paternalism which underpins medical discourses. In this chapter, I argue that Une poupée is a rageful reclaiming of autonomy, autocreation and agency for the (black) non-mother and transracial adoptee. By refusing the glorification of biological or normative kinship, Gay imputes new ways of understanding care, ethical kinship and love beyond the colonial and racialised logics of traditional family-making which have been ensured by the French republican model of assimilation and filiation (‘kinship’). I explore how Gay advances the importance of “othermothering” or ‘l’alloparentalité’ as part of an afrofeminist ethics and tradition. I turn to examine the role of creativity as a form of autocreation and transmission in Gay’s work, understanding it as a radical way in which agency can be reclaimed and restored for the marginal, ‘non-mothering’ subject.

Women’s experiences of non-motherhood were not analysed in Lithuania until recently. Women in Lithuania as in other Eastern European countries experience the pressure of pro-natalist society to have children (Gedvilaite et. al. 2020). Their decisions whether and when to have children are often not free, as they are influenced by circumstances and internalized cultural beliefs (Meyers 2001). In will present analysis of narratives of 12 reproductive-age women (29-47 years old), interviewed by the author in 2017. The findings show that most interviewed women hadn’t questioned the reproductive temporality (Halberstam 2005) and heteronormative life path – becoming an adult, creating a family (by marriage), and having children. Even though for most of the women, family meant more than the nuclear family. They valued extended family networks, which provided emotional and practical support. Despite the partners ' income, employment was crucial to women’s feelings of current and future financial and emotional security. Still, the qualitative interviews demonstrated that reproduction was central to women’s lives. Only a few women felt comfortable with not having children. This indicates that pressure for motherhood remains strong, and experiences of non-motherhood don’t hold sufficient weight to demonstrate an alternative path for a happy life.