“Childless? Childfree? Neither, Just ME”: pronatalism and (m)otherhood in Paula Knight’s The Facts of Life

ABSTRACT

Defining female identity primarily in terms of their childbearing capacity is prevalent across cultures. Centrality of motherhood within discursive formations of womanhood has resulted in establishing inextricable linkages between maternity and femininity. The reproductive ethic privileged by sociocultural discourses and institutions, which are impelled by the pervasive ideology of pronatalism, coerces women to procreate, reducing their identity to mere reproducing bodies. Consequently, those who are unable to reproduce due to fertility-related disorders encounter severe cultural derision and social stigmatisation. Paula Knight’s autopathography The Facts of Life is a harrowing account of the author’s struggles with infertility in a pronatal society. In a close reading of Knight’s graphic memoir, this article aims to investigate how the pluripotent space of the comics medium allows the author to arraign the ideology of pronatalism as an oppressive force that mediates her lived experience of infertility. Drawing theoretical insights from Ellen Peck, Judith Senderowitz, and Louis Althusser, among others, the essay also seeks to examine the socially constructed and gendered nature of (m)otherhood as it unfolds in Knight’s narrative.

KEYWORDS:

• Graphic medicine
• pronatalism
• motherhood
• infertility
• reproduction
• stigma

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Ellen Peck and Judith Senderowitz define pronatalism as ‘any attitude or policy that is “pro-birth”, that encourages reproduction, that exalts the role of parenthood’ (1).

2. ‘Autopathography’ is a term introduced by Thomas Courser to denote autobiographical narratives that are concerned with the author’s encounter with an illness condition.

3. From the medical perspective, infertility is ‘a disease of the reproductive system defined by the failure to achieve a clinical pregnancy after 12 months or more of regular unprotected sexual intercourse’ (WHO 2009). Alarmingly, infertility affects ‘an estimated 48.5 million couples worldwide’ (Mascarenhas et al. 2012), which reflects the profundity of the condition. While ‘around 10% of women aged 15 to 44 years are estimated to have difficulty conceiving or staying pregnant’ in the US alone (Nordqvist 2018), infertility has been found to affect one in every four couples in developing countries (WHO 2012).

4. A. K. Summers’ Pregnant Butch (2013), Endrene Shepherd’s A Significant Loss: The Story of My Miscarriage (2014), and Ryan Alexander-Tanner and Jessica Zucker’s Overwhelmed, Anxious and Angry: Navigating Postpartum Depression (2015) are some of the recently published graphic narratives on female reproductive quandaries.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sathyaraj Venkatesan

Dr. Sathyaraj Venkatesan is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli. He is a Senior International Bibliographer with the Publications of Modern Language Association of America (PMLA). He is the author of The Idea and Practice of Reading (2018, Singapore; Springer) with R. Joseph Ponniah, Edgar Allan Poe: Tales and Other Writings (2017, Orient BlackSwan), AIDS in Cultural Bodies: Scripting the Absent Subject (1980-2010) (2016, Cambridge Scholars Publishing) with Gokulnath Ammanathil and Mapping the Margins: A Study of Ethnic Feminist Consciousness in Toni Morrison’s Novels (2011). His articles have appeared in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Journal of Medical Humanities, American Medical Association Journal of Ethics (AMA), Health, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, The Explicator, among others.

Chinmay Murali

Chinmay Murali is a PhD graduate student in the Department of Humanities and Social sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli. His research interests include literature and medicine, graphic narratives and visual culture, critical health humanities, and narrative medicine. His ongoing doctoral work concentrates on infertility comics and graphic medicine.