Congratulations to Vanessa Brandalesi who obtained her doctorate in social sciences at the University of Lausanne. She defended her thesis entitled: ‘I Am Not a Walking Uterus’: Gender Norms and the Experiences of Childless Women in Switzerland
Switzerland has one of the highest rates of childless women in comparison to neighbouring countries. According to the life-course and gender perspective, the non-occurrence of transition to motherhood in women’s lives challenges their trajectory, norms, and identity.
Dr Brandalesi wanted to break away from the typologies that usually frame demographic issues and analyse the issue of childlessness from the angle of 'making a family'. After all, Switzerland is still a conservative country when it comes to family organisation, with men the breadwinners and the majority of women at home. With a liberal economy, in Switzerland the family is politically a private matter.
Transition to motherhood represents a social and corporeal transition. This thesis explores the life trajectories of childless women by focusing on the role of gender norms which frame this expected transition throughout life trajectories. The overarching question Dr Brandalesi asks is how childless women experience gender norms. To answer this question, she conducted N = 56 in-depth, exploratory, semi-structured interviews of heterosexual childless women and their partners. She selected women without children who were settled in Switzerland of reproductive and post-reproductive ages. Including women from different age groups allowed me to capture the normative constructions across the trajectory of women’s lives. Adopting a thematic analytical approach, she shows the embodiment of gender norms all along the life trajectory. Her dissertation contributes to life-course and gender research by proposing an examination of gender norms and bodies (i.e., the materiality aspects of an expected life transition, or motherhood).
Her main findings are the perpetual processes of gender norms throughout life trajectories of childless women and the interdependence of age and gender norms in the social representation of the right moment to become a mother. Finally, childless women’s representations of their bodies as potentially maternal supports a discourse on the corporeal experience of motherhood while being childless.
The members of the jury, Laura Bernardi (thesis director), Jean-Marie Le Goff, Clémentine Rossier and Nicky Le Feuvre, in turn praised Dr Brandalesi's tenacity and resilience throughout her career as a doctoral student. Laura Bernardi underlined her commitment and loyalty to the theme of her thesis, as well as the richness of having collected original qualitative data in a trilingual field (French, German and Italian).