Transformations: Gender, Reproduction, and Contemporary Society

1. Transformations: Gender, Reproduction, and Contemporary Society Lecture 2: Why Children?

2. Why do people have children? • Write down as many reasons as you can think of:

3. Why do people have children? • Is it ‘natural’: the expression of an innate drive? For socio-biologist Richard Dawkins, our genes drive the process in a ‘selfish’ requirement to reproduce themselves (The Selfish Gene). OR • Is it an outcome of complex social, political, cultural and economic factors, many of them gendered?

4. Looking beyond the biological Morgan and King discuss and problematize various biological predispositions: • Heterosexual drive leading to children (but humans have long sought to control reproduction, is heterosexuality biological anyway?) • Need to make our own families to love (but what about ‘dark side’ of family?) • Human drive to seek status through children (but today status sought through commodities) They favour analysis of institutions of family, work and state, as shaping fertility rates, alongside social norms

5. Institutions and Norms • Stigmatization of those without children • Educational opportunity and labour market shapes opportunity cost of caring for children • Norm to want to leave something of oneself behind • Children as sources of economic and/or social capital • Children as marker of ‘progress’ and stability in life cycle • Reciprocal love

6. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering • Psychoanalytic account that argues that ‘Women mother daughters who, when they become women, mother’. • Object relations theory: women, as mothers, are primary love objects of their children • Boys transfer love to other women, but repress emotions • Girls learn to transfer erotic love away from mother and women in general, but not required to shun mother or other women emotionally. • In adulthood a man can find all he needs in a woman, emotionally and sexually • A woman will feel an absence with a man – she’s not in the customary triangle and he may not meet her emotional needs. Having a child completes the relational triangle in adulthood (woman, male partner, child) that echoes the relational triangle she felt as a child (daughter, father, mother).

7. Critiques of Chodorow • Assumes heterosexuality • Class, racially biased • What about ambivalent/bad mothering • What about absent mothers? • The theory doesn’t explain female heterosexuality very well; its terms make female-female sexuality more likely • Will women want to ‘mother’ more than men want to ‘father’? • General assumption that biological parents are social parents; not necessarily so

8. Why do some people not want children • Write down as many reasons as you can think of:

9. A Question of Terminology • Childless • Childfree • Not mothers • Voluntarily childless

10. Gillespie Reactions 25 women who have chosen not to have children receive when they tell people: • Disbelief • Disregard • Deviance • These shore up the myth that real women want to have children

11. Childless Men What about men who have chosen not to have children. How might they be perceived?

12. Next Week… Fertility rates are not just related to individual motivations, they are of national importance and important for particular communities within the nation. We’ll ask who needs children and consider how various stakeholders in reproduction have sought to influence fertility rates