Childlessness in the Age of Communication

Deconstructing Silence

Cristina Archetti

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000033427
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Cristina Archetti started researching childlessness after being diagnosed with "unexplained infertility". She soon discovered that, although involuntary childlessness affects an increasing number of women and men across the world, this topic is shrouded taboo and shame. This book is both a first-person reflection about the existential questions posed by involuntary childlessness and a readable account of the way the silence surrounding this topic is socially and politically constructed.

Revealing the invisible mechanisms that, from the microscopic details of everyday life to policy, make up the structure of silence around childlessness, Archetti demonstrates what it means not to have children in a society that is organized around families. Through a prose that mixes analysis, excerpts of interviews, media fragments, and evocative writing, she develops a new language of feeling-in-the-body fit for the twenty-first century and exposes the devastating effects infertility has on relationships, identity, health and well-being, in societies that fetishize parenthood.

Childlessness in the Age of Communication draws upon a range of disciplines and fields including sociology, health, gender and sexuality studies, communication, politics and anthropology. It is a book for all those interested in childlessness and innovative qualitative research methodologies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Part I

Unravelling silence

Of silence and invisibility

Silence does not really exist. If you listen carefully, there is always some small sound in the background (Lars Erlend Tubaas Øymo, photographer, checking the sounds settings before shooting a conversation between film director Hilde Haug and me for her documentary Mammaen i meg [The mum in me]. forthcoming).

This first part of the book is fundamentally about explaining the silence that surrounds the story of childlessness. Silence, understood as the absence of speech, is not necessarily an expression of powerlessness (Basso 1979; Sattel 1983; Gal 1989; Glenn 2004; Gardezi et al. 2009). Depending on the context, it can be a tool of domination—when a surgeon reaffirms his authority over a nurse by not replying to her questions, for instance (Gardezi et al. 2009: 1396)—or it can serve as a form of resistance—the tortured who refuses to deliver any secrets (Glenn 2004: 2).

For the purposes of public life, however, silence is undesirable. Not only, as Cheryl Glenn (2004: 5) writes, ‘[c]onversation remains our social glue, the coin of the realm, the way to win friends and influence people.’ Feminist scholar Susan Gal (1989: 1) also points out that ‘[t]hose who are denied speech cannot make their experiences known and thus cannot influence the course of their lives and of history.’ Silence is thus taken here as a synonym for “invisibility.” Although these terms belong to two different sensory domains, for all purposes of public life they overlap: not speaking out and not being seen, literally or figuratively, in the sense of not making the pages of a newspaper or TV screen, not having a recognized identity, or not getting one’s needs acknowledged, in fact, go hand in hand (Casper and Moore 2009). They both produce a form of non-existence—or a distorted one, when it is always “the others” who define the silent group—on the radar of public awareness.

Part I contains all I have learned from writing and analysing my own story, as well as all the stories I have encountered in my study: the life narratives of my interviewees, of the participants in online discussion groups and Facebook pages, the plots written between the lines of movies. Although it is placed at the beginning, it was in fact written at the end of the process. I present it now, though, because it will help the reader see deeper among the details of my personal story and to identify connections where, at first sight, it might look like there are only fragments. Perhaps you even want to probe, by rummaging in my life’s forensic file, whether I drew reasonable conclusions, even if I am a reliable narrator.

What I have understood through my journey is that silence/invisibility is not just the absence of sound, or writing, or images for that matter. It is not hollow, like vacuum. Silence is a hard outcome. It hurts and damages. It has a structure, even if it cannot be seen. It can crash you and erase you. It has a logic: there are conditions that support its existence and might even enable, when modified, its breaking down. It might be the result of not wanting to speak out—because, for example, we know that what we are going to say is not going to be understood, we expect it to be met by a hostile or indifferent reaction, or that it will lead to nothing changing anyway. Silence may also be rooted in the fact that we cannot talk in the first place: because the story we want to tell is so painful that it makes us physically ill—perhaps we feel short of breath, our mind goes blank (as I have myself experienced while conducting the interviews), and become conscious about the tears that have started welling up in our eyes; because there are no words to fully convey our emotions; because we have no available vocabulary we can draw from, especially if the experience we are going through has no name or it is not expected to exist at all by those we want to communicate with.

For all these reasons this part is going to cover a wide range of issues. It starts from where all human affairs begin and where all lives, identities, meaning, and politics ultimately reside: stories. I will also call them “narratives,” where by this term I understand a set of events tied together by a plot.¹ And this part is in itself organized like a story: of where I come from as a researcher and where I am going; the role of narratives in our lives as much as in science; the kind of new narrative I am trying to write about childlessness and about myself; and why ultimately some stories get told and others do not. Each section, more specifically, adds a new piece of the puzzle of why involuntary childlessness is, from a public perspective, invisible, unspoken, unheard of in the childless individuals’ own terms.²

Section 1 sets the stage by making the point that stories are not all equal. The stories that exist about involuntary childlessness, in fact, even those told by individuals with first-hand experience of infertility, might be misleading. They reflect a person’s viewpoint. As such, they should be honoured and deserve respect. Yet, for a researcher, they are only a starting point. There are deeper and broader stories that, as an investigator, I need to assemble and tell. They include a scientific explanation of why involuntary childlessness is hidden. Section 1 thus also provides a preliminary reason why the story of involuntary childlessness is not known: when it comes to studies of (in)fertility, there is a gap in research. The childless researcher, the only one who is able to identify what is in fact absent, realizes that her own experience and that of individuals in similar circumstances is not represented. The most direct way to redress the balance is to speak out about what she knows from the perspective of her personal story. This, however, is problematic in an academic context that tends to see the personal as antithetic to the “objectivity” to which science should aspire. This section further tells the story of how, as a political communication researcher, I came to see the importance of the human body in explaining communication—or rather in the lack of communication. Given that bodies, and materiality in general, tend not to be regarded as relevant in communication studies, Section 2 takes up the challenge of demonstrating, on the one hand, that bodies matter in how we communicate and even what we say (the content of the narratives about who we are); on the other hand, communication (in the form of publicly available narratives about what it means to be “happy,” “fulfilled,” “realized”) affects our bodies, especially our well-being and health. I particularly explain how suffering is ultimately rooted in a “narrative mismatch”: between what is regarded as a valued self according to standards defined by the majority, and what our bodies and daily practices “tell” us we are. Section 3 presents a range of theories that could help explain silence around involuntary childlessness, highlighting their limitations. Section 4 both brings all the threads together and takes them further by revealing which conditions support silence and which circumstances can help break it. These are, effectively, the wheels and cogs of the plot behind mine and other childless individuals’ stories. Finally, Section 5 provides a rationale for the writing choices that have been made in telling my personal story. It underlines a last reason for silence: the problem, sometimes, is not the absence of stories, but the inability of the reader/listener/watcher to read/listen/watch them. This is because the story that the involuntarily childless wish to convey covers experiences, emotions, feelings that are so alien that it is not possible for “the others” to relate to them. Empathy, according to Fredrik Svenaeus (2016: 243), is ultimately ‘feeling alongside’ another person by being able to imagine and develop a rich understanding of their predicament. It is therefore important to create an experiential bridge through rhetorical devices that not only enable the readers to take the perspective of the childless person, but that also leave “spaces” for them to fill with their own feelings about the material presented, thereby encouraging interactivity and participation.

Notes

1 According to Dieter Teichert (2004: 181), a narrative is ‘a semiotic, mostly linguistic presentation of at least two successive states of affairs, events or actions.’ What distinguishes it from other linguistic presentations that might contain a temporal dimension is their ‘explanatory function’: ‘[w]hereas chronicles present a stock of brute information about putative facts of the past, narratives give explanations for certain states, events or actions’ (ibid.: 182, emphasis in original). This is the same reason why Stephanie Lawler (2002: 242) states that narratives do not simply ‘carry […] a set of “facts,” ’ but they are ‘interpretative devices through which people represent themselves, both to themselves and to others.’

2 The story of childlessness of course exists but, in the great majority of cases it figures publicly, it involves a “happy ending” and takes the form of the “miracle baby” narrative. This is a one-sided representation that does not reflect the much broader, complex and, in many respects, traumatic reality experienced by most of the involuntary childless. As Larry Gross (2001: 12) puts it in discussing the invisibility of gays in the media: ‘minorities share a common media fate of relative invisibility and demeaning stereotypes.’

References

Basso, Keith H. (1979). Portraits of ‘the Whiteman’: Linguistic play and cultural symbols among the Western Apache. New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511618147.

Casper, Monica J. and Lisa Jean Moore (2009). Missing bodies: The politics of visibility. New York: New York University Press.

Gal, Susan (1989). Between speech and silence: The problematics of research on language and gender. IPrA Papers in Pragmatics, 3(1): 1–38. https://doi.org/10.1075/iprapip.3.1.01gal.

Gardezi, Fauzia, Lorelie Lingard, Sherry Espi, Sarah Whyte, Beverley Orser, and G. Ross Baker (2009). Silence, power and communication in the operating room. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 65(7): 1390–1399. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2648.2009.04994.x.

Glenn, Cheryl (2004). Unspoken: A rhetoric of silence. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Gross, Larry (2001). Up from invisibility: Lesbians, gay men, and the media in America. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lawler, Stephanie (2002). Narrative in social research. In Qualitative research in action, edited by Tim May, pp. 242–258. London: Sage.

Mammaen i meg [The mum in me] (forthcoming). [documentary]. Directed by Hilde Merete Haug. Haugtussa Film.

Sattel, Jack W. (1983). Men, inexpressiveness and power. In Language, gender and society, edited by Barrie Thorne, Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley, pp. 119–124. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Svenaeus, Fredrik (2016). The phenomenology of empathy: A Steinian emotional account. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Science, 15(2): 227–245. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9411-x.

Teichert, Dieter (2004). Narrative, identity and the self. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 11(10–11): 175–191.

Section 1

T-word: the story behind my story

“Theory” is a scary word. Especially when English is not your mother tongue and, in the first few years of learning the language, you never know how to pronounce the “th” without it stiffening into a “t” or deflating it into a “f.” I do not want to mention it because I am afraid this will put off the reader as much as it scares my students when I lecture. ‘Theory,’ though—this is what I tell them—‘can take many forms.’ It can resemble an equation-like proposition, as in the case of Newton’s law of gravitation, or it can take the form of ‘a “story” about why and how events in the universe occur’ (Turner (1991), in Blaikie 2000: 141). Although the equation might look more authoritative—how many students have I met who think that just having numbers in their dissertation is going to make their work more “scientific”?—even a mathematical formula is still a tale about how different factors are related and why, when those factors change, the result also transforms. In the social world, however, stories are everywhere and it is important to understand that they are not all equal. This section is precisely about drawing lines between plot lines.

For sociologist Charles Tilly (2002), for whom the very fabric of social reality is made up of stories, the task of the researcher is to step back from the myriad narratives of ‘independent, conscious, and self-motivated’ individuals—which he calls ‘standard stories’ (ibid.: 26–27) and where we tend to be protagonists in charge of our destiny—in order to outline a ‘superior story’ (ibid.: xiii, 39–42). To explain this point and going back to the topic of childlessness, the ‘standard story’ is that of the woman who embarks upon multiple IVF cycles because she wants to fulfil her dream of becoming a mother, or the woman who feels ashamed because her body is not getting pregnant and there is something “wrong” with her. These stories, as all ‘standard stories,’ accomplish ‘essential work in social life’ (ibid.: 27). For instance, when they are spun by political activists or social movements (the subject Tilly is most interested in) they can consolidate people’s commitment to a common cause, spur them to action they would not otherwise take, or, as in the case of childless women, just help them ‘make sense of what is going on’ (ibid.: 27). The ‘superior story,’ though, contributes to deeper understanding by exposing explanatory layers that were not necessarily visible from the perspective of the single person (or organization, in the domain in which Tilly operates). From the perspective of a ‘superior st...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Author biography
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Breaking the silence
• Part I Unravelling silence
• Part II Life journeys
• Conclusion: Roadmap for the foreseeable futures
• Appendix: methodology
• Index