From “I’m Never Having Children” to Motherhood: A Critical Analysis of Silence and Voice in Negotiations of Childbearing Face

Abstract

ABSTRACTWomen who once communicated themselves as permanently childless/childfree by choice but then became mothers must negotiate a drastic shift in childbearing identity. To study this identity work, the present study adopts performative face theory, a critical interpersonal and family communication theory that places Goffman’s theory of face in conversation with Butler’s theory of performativity. In this theorization, negotiations of face sediment oppositional identities through the reiterative power of discursive and bodily acts. Critical-qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with mothers who once told others they never wanted to have children demonstrates how the facework strategies of voice and silence allow women to perform the “sincerely childfree” face and then the “good (future) mother” face. These negotiations of face are enabled and constrained by relations of power that define identity categories. Although these negotiations of face are often relationally harmonious, they also reify power/knowledge about motherhood as intensive and positive.