Despite establishing the gendered construction of infertility, most research on the subject has not examined how individuals with such reproductive difficulty negotiate their own sense of gender. I explore this gap through 58 interviews with women who are medically infertile and involuntarily childless. In studying how women achieve their gender, I reveal the importance of the body to such construction. For the participants, there is not just a motherhood mandate in the United States, but a fertility mandate—women are not just (...) supposed to mother, they are supposed to procreate. Given this understanding, participants maintain their gender by denying their infertile status. They do so through reliance on essentialist notions, using their bodies as a means of constructing a gendered sense of self. Using the tenets of transgender theory, this study not only informs our understanding of infertility, but also our broader understanding of the relationship between gender, identity, and the body, exposing how individuals negotiate their gender through physical as well as institutional and social constraints. (shrink)

The cultural construction of motherhood represents women of low socioeconomic status as excessively fertile, placing them outside of the infertility discourse. Previous research on infertility reinforces poor women’s exclusion by focusing on the experiences of women receiving medical treatment, typically women of high SES. In this article, the author explores how 20 poor and working-class women negotiate their experiences of infertility. In-depth interviews expose the contextual experiences of infertility among women of low SES, specifically revealing the structural inequality apparent within (...) those experiences. The women are not passive objects of dominant discourses; they are active subjects in resisting, redefining, and accepting the discourses according to their contexts. Women of low SES are outsiders—within to dominant understandings and resolutions to infertility. Their unique insights not only provide a more nuanced understanding of infertility but they also begin to deconstruct the stratified system of reproduction. (shrink)