Irina L. G. Todorova

Social discourses, women's resistive voices: facing involuntary childlessness in bulgaria

Abstract The article discusses the way in which culturally available discourses of the expected transition to motherhood are negotiated in womens narratives of living with involuntary childlessness in Bulgaria. We follow the meanings that the situation holds for the women and the ways in which they creatively appropriate, transform, and resist culturally available discourses in the process of constructing their narratives and identities. For the purpose of this analysis, we use the Listening Guide Method of interviewing and interpretation of interview transcripts. For the women we interviewed in Bulgaria, both subtle and explicit forms of resistance were evident. They protest stigma and mistreatment through voicing their anger, and they also appeal to social change through organized action. Childless women in Bulgaria are slowly changing the available cultural images of infertility, as well as the models of womanhood, introducing more societal options.