The Mother Without a Child: Miriam Schaer and Reproductive Ideology

This paper looks at the work of Miriam Schaer, who interrogates the ideology of reproduction and the politics of infertility in contemporary culture in several bodies of work, including two artist’s books The Presence of their Absence (2015) and (w)hole: A Life in Parts (2017). Infertility has been constructed as a “failure of volition” on the part of the woman trying to conceive--somewhere, somehow, something was either done or not done, resulting in no children. In popular books such as Tanya Selvaratnam’s 2014 The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism, and the Reality of the Biological Clock, the culprit is feminism, which encouraged women to wait too long. Rather than blame feminism, Schaer has constructed her own childlessness through the agency of her feminism, and has used that feminism as a scaffolding for her life as an educator and artist. Schaer’s work can be seen as operating from the position of “the mother without child,” which Elaine Tuttle Hansen has defined as women who want a child but are unable to become pregnant and give birth to a biological child, women who are considered infertile or barren because their bodies “don’t work.” Schaer’s work should be understood as operating from the ambiguous position of mother and not-mother, a position that questions the role of mother from a feminist position. Schaer neither laments her childless state nor embraces it, but rather unpacks the ideological construction of childlessness today.