Childlessness Lived in Silence as Longing and Exclusion

This autoethnography offers the reader insight into how childlessness is lived in a pronatal culture that discursively elevates mothers and mothering, while ignoring at best, and too often demonizing childless women. Unfulfilled longing is at the heart of how this author has lived her nonnormative female body’s inability. Yet, even more influential as she ages as a childless woman are the day-to-day relational exclusions that she experiences from and with childed women because of her subject position. Through layered autoethnographic narrative and reflective vignettes covering intra- and intercommunicative encounters, the author explores the silences that envelop a childless woman’s lived experiences within society and among other women to begin to illuminate them for the reader. This essay serves as the first step in complicating how childlessness, currently lived as an un-identity, is constructed relationally and therefore requires the attention of all women if we desire a collective identity of inclusion.