Cisgender men’s narratives about their desires to be pregnant: re/constructing reproduction, gender, and their entanglement

Abstract

Pregnancy capacity, and gestational desire are shared by people of different genders and sexes. Yet, gestational embodiment and subjectivity are feminized in the normative cisheteropatriarchal pregnancy imaginary where cisgender non-intersex women are constructed as essentialized pregnant subjects. An important part of this normative pregnancy imaginary is the preclusion of men’s desires to be pregnant, and the medico-socio-cultural construction and enforcement of men as non-gestational and non-uterine subjects. This construction of masculinity and manhood is reflected in much pregnancy-related research conducted among cisgender men, but is subverted by research on trans men’s and masculine people’s pregnancy and birth experiences, and by some depictions of cis men’s pregnancies in some novels, fanfiction and films. Set against this backdrop, in this article we report on the results of a qualitative study conducted in South Africa in which six cisgender men with diverse identities and geo-locations were asked about their desires to be pregnant. Using a narrative-discursive approach, we analyse micro-narratives constructed by participants in which they speak about their desires to be pregnant and/or gestational parents. We argue that their micro-narratives both challenge and reproduce normative discourses on masculinities and sex/gender more broadly, pregnancy, reproduction and parenthood, and their presumed entanglement.