Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

Under 2000-talets första decennier sveper en våg av litteratur om moderskap in över Norden. Flera böcker utmanar den moderskapsnorm som dikterar hur kvinnor ska leva genom att skildra mammor som lämnar sina familjer och kvinnor som inte blir mammor. Med hjälp av ett queerbegrepp som betonar den icke-reproduktiva positionen kan litteraturen läsas som ett motstånd mot kärnfamiljsnorm och pronatalism, men också som en kritik av den neoliberalisering som skett i de nordiska länderna.

How can you be a good parent to a child who, with the current speed of global warming, will likely live their adult life in a world ravaged by floods, wildfires, and pandemics? In the absence of scholarship that centres the question of how to be a good parent in times of climate change, fictional literature can provide a way to explore this dilemma. This article analyzes how parenthood is conceptualized in relation to environmental consciousness as well as gendered and national ideals of good parenthood in two contemporary Swedish climate change novels, Jens Liljestrand’s Även om allt tar slut (Even If Everything Ends) and Anna Dahlqvist’s Det är tropiska nätter nu (Now We Have Tropical Nights). Liljestrand’s novel depicts how ideals anchored in Swedish family politics trump environmental consciousness when it comes to good parenthood, and it suggests that parents need to take responsibility for the climate crisis. The climate-friendly motherhood represented in Dahlqvist’s novel fails, but it also challenges Swedish family ideals and is in some respects an answer to the call in Liljestrand’s novel: that parents take responsibility for climate change.

This chapter introduces the volume by theorising non-motherhood, outlining existing scholarship on the topic, and presenting the chapters in the volume. While feminist theory has paid close attention to motherhood and mothering, there has been less rigorous focus on non-motherhood, and research has typically focused on either involuntary or voluntary non-motherhood. This volume seeks to deconstruct the barriers between these two positions, instead allowing them to enter into dialogue with each other. It unites scholars from different disciplines and national contexts in the study of non-motherhood across a variety of materials and from diverse perspectives. The chapters draw attention to the fact that non-motherhood cannot be defined as a singular experience, and they carefully engage in the probing and widening of the term ‘non-motherhood’ itself. By including representations and experiences that are not usually discussed as part of the research field on non-motherhood, such as secondary infertility, miscarriage, and perinatal loss, the volume expands the definition of non-motherhood. Moreover, it interrogates social and cultural norms that continue to conflate motherhood with womanhood and creates a space where the silenced stories of non-mothers can be articulated and where non-mothers can claim an identity that is legitimate.

This open access edited volume focuses on the representations, perceptions, and experiences of women who do not have children against the backdrop of traditional gender norms, pronatalist policies, and patriarchal structures. While involuntary and voluntary childlessness have typically been treated separately and studied within different disciplines in most previous scholarship, contributing authors explore non-motherhood beyond the involuntary/voluntary divide and consider a wide range of conceptualizations of women who do not become mothers. The editors bring together a variety of perspectives from different national contexts and disciplines, including family studies, gender studies, literary and cultural studies, sociology, and film studies to explore non-motherhood. The book focuses on how women who choose or experience non-motherhood are negotiated, felt, represented, and received.

In Sweden in the twenty-first century, childlessness has emerged as a topic in literature across genres. These narratives take stories about non-motherhood, which are often invisible and abjected from mainstream society, and tell them in new and defiant ways. Moreover, this body of literature depicts a variety of ways of being a non-mother: through involuntary childlessness and infertility, through childlessness by choice and through childlessness by circumstance. This chapter explores a range of literary representations of women without children in twenty-first-century Swedish literature. This chapter discusses fiction, autofiction and personal essays that deal with childlessness and analyses how these representations reclaim the position of non-motherhood in various ways: by telling stories of failed fertility treatments, by embracing the abjected position of non-motherhood and claiming it as a liveable life, and by using laughter and failure to turn things around and propose alternative ways of living. The chapter brings together theories of abjection, laughter and failure to analyse stories that are usually expulsed from the public domain in order to uphold the fertility norm. It shows how abjection, laughter and failure are employed in these narratives to reclaim the position of non-motherhood, to criticise dominant discourses and to imagine different futures.

Despite concerns that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vectors for reproducing and amplifying social biases such as sexism, transphobia, islamophobia, and racism, there is a lack of work qualitatively analyzing how such patterns of bias are generated by LLMs. We use mixed-methods approaches and apply a feminist, intersectional lens to the problem across two language domains, Swedish and English, by generating narrative texts using LLMs. We find that hegemonic norms are consistently reproduced; dominant identities are often treated as 'default'; and discussion of identity itself may be considered 'inappropriate' by the safety features applied to some LLMs. Due to the differing behaviors of models, depending both on their design and the language they are trained on, we observe that strategies of identifying "bias" must be adapted to individual models and their socio-cultural contexts.

Med denna Festskrift firar vi att Centrum för genusvetenskap i över fyrtio år har fungerat som en viktig mötesplats för kunskap och vetenskapande – en sådan plats som många uppfattar som absolut nödvändig för sin överlevnad i akademin. Genom att sätta genus i centrum på Centrum skapar vi kunskap över gränser mellan vetenskapsområden, fakulteter och forskningsfält.

Centrum består i grund och botten av de människor som verkar där. Den här Festskriften är också en hyllning till alla dessa människor – deras arbete, engagemang, intelligens, uthållighet och inspirationsförmåga. Centrum existerar också tack vare de viktiga nationella och internationella nätverk inom forskning och utbildning som Centrum är del av. Med denna bok skickar vi alltså en hälsning och ett tack till alla våra kollegor inom fältet. 

Kapitlen i denna volym är en blandning som sträcker sig från essäer och personliga historieskrivningar om Centrum, till reflektioner om arbetslivet vid Centrum eller som genusforskare överlag, till forskningsartiklar om en rad mycket olika områden, vilka i sig också vittnar om den livliga och variationsrika forskningsmiljö som vi fortsätter att bygga tillsammans.

This chapter focuses on literary representations of childlessness, more particularly, Swedish novels from the twenty-first century, with female protagonists and where the struggle to have children takes center stage: Pernilla Glaser’s 40 minus (2010; 40 Below), Martina Haag’s Glada hälsningar från Missångerträsk: En vintersaga (2011; Happy Greetings from Missångerträsk: A Winter’s Tale), and Tove Folkesson’s Hennes ord: Värk I–III (2019; Her Words: Ache I–III). I analyze the literary representations of involuntary childlessness and the women at the center of the narratives, focusing in particular on how non-motherhood is positioned in relation to femininity and (hetero)normativity. I also situate these representations in their national context and analyze how they relate to Swedish-branded values like gender equality and progressive family politics. On the one hand, the representations of non-motherhood illustrate the centrality of motherhood to normative femininity, and all three novels reinforce heteronormative temporalities. On the other hand, the novels to some extent also resist these norms. Moreover, none of these novels ends with children or even a pregnancy, and thus the narratives break with the conventional infertility plot line and frame the struggle to become a mother as a story that can be told in its own right.