CfP: Voluntary Childlessness: Perspectives and Practices from the Global South
Friday, June 14, 2024
University of Tübingen, Germany
Key themes
- Ideas and practices of non-reproduction from the Global South
- Post-secular conceptualizations of contraception and birth control
- Ritual, cosmology, morality, and voluntary childlessness
Please send your title, abstract and short bio-note to carola.lorea@gmail.com by March 1st at the latest.
Funding for travel expenses and accommodation is available.
Childless, Childfree or Whole? This workshop investigates moral, religious and spiritual dimensions of non reproduction in the Global South. In mainstream narratives of religion and family planning, “fertility” and religious piety are commonly discussed in a linear and directly proportional relation: the more religious the society, the higher the fertility. In other words, religious commitment is entangled with pronatalist feelings and negative perceptions of both contraception and childlessness (Uecker et al. 2021). However, voluntary childlessness has been closely connected to religious knowledge and ritual practice throughout the global history of religions, within and beyond the institutions of renunciation, asceticism and monasticism, as the case of yogic-Tantric consorted renouncers from Bengal clearly demonstrates (Openshaw 2004; Knight 2011; Lorea 2018).
The immediate goal of this workshop is to focus on reproductive politics and the decision of not producing progeny to develop a transcultural project on voluntary childlessness that considers practices and discourses of Global South thinkers, practitioners, minorities and subcultures. For example, subaltern Tantric couples from Bengal, often from low caste backgrounds, follow an ideal of divine love (prem) in accordance with yogic bodily practices learned from a guru; renunciate couples are sexually active and choose to not reproduce as they pursue an ideal of wholeness, completeness, and integrity (akhanda).
Diverse conceptualizations of childlessness have the potential to unsettle the epistemic ethnocentrism of hegemonic and secularist vocabularies of childlessness like the environmental, neo-liberal, and white feminist declensions of “voluntary childlessness” in Global North modernity.
The long-term goal of this workshop is to gather a network of scholars interested in exploring the meanings of childlessness while transcending the disenchanted and positivist language of the Global North, integrating diverse understandings of birth, non-birth, contraception, womanhood, parenting, emancipation and degrowth that take into consideration the entanglement of ritual, spiritual, moral, cosmological, and affective dimensions with human (non-)reproductive bodies.
This workshop is part of a 3-day international conference on
Making and Unmaking Procreation: Global Perspectives on Religion, Gender and Reproductive Matters — organized by the Center for Religion, Culture and Society (CRCS), the Center for Gender and Diversity Research (ZGD), the Methods Center (MC) and the Global Encounters Platform, University of Tübingen, Germany.
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