I’mOther explores the concept of childfreeness, and the notion of being childfree by choice as a cis woman, through multidisciplinary practices and theories that combine methods from art and crafts, metadesign and feminist sociology. The project is situated in a Swedish context through an autoethnographic-inspired orientation that brings in situated knowledge, and in addition aims to invite and acknowledge diverse experiences and insights from creative and influential collaborations, in order to weave together a bigger picture. To uncover the elements that uphold the hegemonic fertility norm, and look into what a deviation from this norm means in an everyday context, the project seeks to move between individual and sociocultural levels through a norm critical and norm-creative design approach. Through a process of unpicking, going from norm, to language, to sentence, to word, the project has engaged in different levels of languaging with the ambition to intervene at a paradigm level and open up for conceptual spaces when thinking and talking about what adulthood can include. In a collaborative probing of spaces, which can invite conversations about childfreeness, craft have acted as a means of social interplay. Engaging with the crafshership of embroidery in combination with the comics medium, the project further elaborates through an artistic interpretation to convey narratives of childfree women. In a celebratory way, the project wants to give agency to women who experience life outside of the norm and speak to those who have the privilege to shape their own lives and to those who want to understand the choice of others.

Le processus menant à la stérilisation irréversible chez les femmes nullipares comporte plusieurs enjeux sur le plan individuel et social. L’objectif de cette recherche est de comprendre de quelle façon est vécue cette expérience par ces femmes au sein du système de santé québécois en portant attention aux difficultés administratives et émotionnelles du processus et aux moyens utilisés pour surmonter ces difficultés et parvenir à réaliser l’opération de stérilisation. Cette recherche a été concrétisée grâce à la participation de treize femmes qui n’ont pas d’enfant et qui souhaitent se faire ligaturer les trompes de Fallope. Les entrevues semi-dirigées réalisées auprès de ces participantes qui composent le corpus de données de cette recherche ont été effectuées sur les plateformes de visioconférence Zoom et Facetime. L’analyse des résultats de l’étude a permis de démontrer qu’une identité liée à la biosocialité émerge au fil du processus, que l’expérience de ces femmes témoigne d’une forme d’agentivité à la fois active et passive et enfin que la relation que ses femmes établissent avec les médecins au sein du système de santé peut être problématisée en termes de biopouvoir. Cette recherche permet d’une part d’offrir un regard anthropologique sur l’expérience des femmes sans enfant par choix tout au long du processus menant à la ligature des trompes de Fallope. D’autre part, elle contribue à cerner les enjeux qui sont en lien avec la reproduction et ceux qui concernent l’hégémonie de la biomédecine au sein du système de santé québécois. / The process leading to irreversible sterilization for nulliparous women involves several individual and social issues. The objective of this research is to understand how this experience is lived by these women within the Quebec healthcare system by paying attention to the administrative and emotional difficulties of the process and to the means used to overcome these difficulties and achieve the sterilization operation. This research was carried out by the participation of thirteen women who do not have children and who wish to undergo tubal ligation. The semi-structured interviews conducted with these participants make up the corpus of datas for this research. They were conducted on Zoom videoconferencing platforms as well as on Facetime. The analysis of the results of the study allowed to demonstrate that an identity linked to biosociality emerges throughout the process, that the experience of these women testifies to a form of agency that is both active and passive, and finally that a form of biopower emerges from their relationship with the physicians within the health system. On the one hand, this research provides an anthropological look at the experience of women who are childfree by choice throughout the process leading to tubal ligation. On the other hand, it contributes to identify issues related to reproduction and those concerning the hegemony of biomedicine within the Quebec health system.