In/Fertile Monsters: The Emancipatory Significance of Representations of Women on Infertility Reality TV.

Reality TV is immensely popular, and various shows in this media genre involve a storyline of infertility and infertility treatment. Feminists argue that normative and constructed realities about infertility and infertility treatment, like those in reality TV, are central to the emancipation of women. Such realities are able to steer viewers' perceptions of the world. This article examines the emancipatory significance of representations of women on 'infertility reality TV shows'. While the women in these shows all have 'abnormal' qualities, we consider their portrayal as figurations of monstrosity. In the literature, monstrosity is understood as a way to challenge nonemancipatory norms by offering an alternative identity. Through a content analysis of seven reality TV shows, we identified four types of in/fertile monsters: the cyborg, the freak, the abject, and the childless. We show that these monsters are predominantly non-emancipatory as they all involve mechanisms of altering, excluding, or condemning infertility in relation to what is considered normal and acceptable womanhood. Therefore, at the end of this article, we make a plea for more diverse and emancipatory representations of infertile women in popular culture.

Epistemic in/justice in patient participation. A discourse analysis of the Dutch ME/CFS Health Council advisory process.

In healthcare settings, patient participation is increasingly adopted as a possible remedy to ill people suffering from 'epistemic injustices' - that is to their unfair harming as knowers. In exploring and interpreting patient participation discourses within the 2013-2018 Dutch Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME)/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) Health Council advisory process, this paper assesses the epistemological emancipatory value of this participatory practice. It reveals that in the analysed case, patient representatives predominantly offer biomedical knowledge about ME/CFS. They frame this condition as primarily somatic, and accordingly, perceive appropriate diagnostic criteria, research avenues and treatment options as quantifiable, objectifiable and explicitly non-psychogenic. This paper argues that such a dominant biomedical patient participatory practice is ambiguous in terms of its ability to correct epistemic injustices towards ill people. Biomedicalized patient participation may enhance people's credibility and their ability to make sense of their illness, but it may also undermine their valid position within participatory practices as well as lead to (sustaining) biased and reductive ideas about who ill people are and what kind of knowledge they hold. The final section of this paper offers a brief reflection on how to navigate such biomedicalized participatory practices in order to attain more emancipatory ones.

Virile Infertile Men, and Other Representations of In/Fertile Hegemonic Masculinity in Fiction Television Series.

Fiction television series are one of the few cultural expressions in which men's infertility experiences are represented. Through a content analysis of twenty fiction series, this article describes and analyzes such representations. By drawing on Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity and Ricoeur's understanding of paradoxical power structuring, four character types of infertile men are identified: (1) the virile in/fertile man, (2) the secretly non-/vasectomized man, (3) the intellectual eunuch, (4) the enslaving post-apocalyptic man. While these various dramatis persona outline different ways of how infertile men relate to normative hegemonic masculinity, they all represent infertile men as diverging from shared masculine norms. This non-normativity initially excludes many represented men from hegemonic positions. Eventually, however, these men generally aspire to and succeed in reaffirming their hegemonic masculinity through coercive force towards women and other men, through instigating the precondition for any power structure - the shared will to live together as a community -, and/or by seeking and finding explicit recognition for their normativity and dominance. At the end of this paper, I will reflect on the potential harmful effect of these outlined representations of infertile men and make a plea for diversifying representations of infertile men in our culture.

Beyond pathology: women's lived experiences of melancholy and mourning in infertility treatment.

Throughout history, melancholy and mourning are predominantly understood within the tradition of psychopathology. Herein, melancholy is perceived as an ailing response to significant loss, and mourning as a healing experience. By taking the philosophies of Freud, Ricoeur and Kristeva together with relevant social scientific research as a theoretical framework and by drawing on women's accounts of melancholy and mourning in infertility treatment, we offer an exploration of melancholy and mourning beyond this pathological ailing/healing logic. We do so by asking what it means for women to actually live with melancholy and mourning in infertility treatment. In answering this question, we show that women in infertility treatment may have different kinds of melancholic longings: they desire their lost time as a pregnant woman, lost love life and lost future. Within these longings, women derive their sense of self predominantly from their lost past: they understand themselves as the mothers or lovers they once were or could have been. We further reveal that some of these women attempt to escape this dwelling of identity and mourn their losses by (re)narrating their pasts or through performing rituals. While these results show how melancholy and mourning are coshaped in relation to these women's embodied, temporal, sociocultural and material lived context, they also give insight into how melancholy and mourning may be understood beyond infertility treatment. We reveal how the binary dynamic between melancholy and mourning is inherently ambiguous: melancholy instigates a joyous painfulness, something that is or is not overcome through the agonising exertion of mourning. We show, moreover, that underlying this melancholy/mourning dynamic is a pressing and uncontrollable reality of not being able to make (sufficient) sense of oneself. At the end of this work, then, we argue that it follows out of these conclusions' urgency to have context-sensitive compassionate patience with those who live with melancholy and mourning.