Transformations: Gender, Reproduction, and Contemporary Society

1. Transformations: Gender, Reproduction, and Contemporary Society Lecture 2: Why Children? DrSherah Wells Sherah.Wells@warwick.ac.uk

2. Why do people have children? • ‘Natural’ OR • Outcome of complex social, political, cultural and economic factors, many of them gendered

3. 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.

4. Critiques of Chodorow • Assumes heterosexuality • Class, racially biased • Ambivalent/bad mothering • Absent mothers • Does it encourage sexual relationships between women? • Will women want to ‘mother’ more than men want to ‘father’?

5. Why people don’twant children

6. Terminology • Childless • Childfree • Not mothers • Voluntarily childless

7. Gillespie • Disbelief • Disregard • Deviance

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