Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures -- Author biography -- Preface -- 28 May 2016, Stockholm. A woman out of place -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: breaking the silence -- Untold stories -- A personal and a public issue -- Aims of the book I: documenting childlessness -- Aims of the book II: reclaiming childlessness -- Reaching out -- Structure of the book and a warning -- Notes -- References -- Part I -- Unravelling silence -- Of silence and invisibility -- Notes -- References -- Section 1 T-word: the story behind my story -- Finding a place for "me" -- "Me" the researcher: where I come from and where I am going -- Notes -- References -- Section 2 The body and communication -- Note -- References -- Section 3 What my story brings to the debate -- Studies of (in)fertility and childlessness -- Understanding stigma -- Political communication from a minority perspective -- Notes -- References -- Section 4 Silence, deconstructed -- Reality and fiction: not an odd couple -- Explaining silence: when bodies, narratives, and suffering collide across the private-public domain -- References -- Section 5 Revealing the unspeakable: finding a different language -- Dreams and imagination -- Establishing a different relationship with the reader -- Notes -- References -- Part II -- Life journeys -- Folder 1 "About me"? -- Cutting the long story short -- We, vanilla flowers -- My (failed, of course) IVF story -- ICSI and the unexpected -- The other story: infertility, ethics, and the crisis of higher education in the UK -- Uncertainty and the unsustainability of hope -- Adoption is not an option and having children of a different kind -- The wrong solutions for no problem: Is life without children impossible? -- References -- Folder 2 Relationships -- Variable pressure.
In: Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Health and Illness
Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures -- Author biography -- Preface -- 28 May 2016, Stockholm. A woman out of place -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: breaking the silence -- Untold stories -- A personal and a public issue -- Aims of the book I: documenting childlessness -- Aims of the book II: reclaiming childlessness -- Reaching out -- Structure of the book and a warning -- Notes -- References -- Part I -- Unravelling silence -- Of silence and invisibility -- Notes -- References
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.
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