Despite establishing the gendered construction of infertility, most research on the subject has not examined how individuals with such reproductive difficulty negotiate their own sense of gender. I explore this gap through 58 interviews with women who are medically infertile and involuntarily childless. In studying how women achieve their gender, I reveal the importance of the body to such construction. For the participants, there is not just a motherhood mandate in the United States, but a fertility mandate—women are not just (...) supposed to mother, they are supposed to procreate. Given this understanding, participants maintain their gender by denying their infertile status. They do so through reliance on essentialist notions, using their bodies as a means of constructing a gendered sense of self. Using the tenets of transgender theory, this study not only informs our understanding of infertility, but also our broader understanding of the relationship between gender, identity, and the body, exposing how individuals negotiate their gender through physical as well as institutional and social constraints. (shrink)

Higher education has become more student-centered as the Bologna process assigns students more time to study and research. Online teaching has been needed during the pandemic, which can be challenging regarding didactic and assessment. This paper analyzes project-based learning (PBL) as a form of teaching and assessing students in a bioethics course on reproductive ethics. The team project was the final assessment of the Faculty of Bioethics core curriculum course, "Bioethics, Technology and Procreation,” offered to two student groups in the (...) 2019–2020 school year. The analysis of the results of PBL is descriptive qualitative with semi-quantitative data from student feedback. Forty students were presented with a detailed methodology of team projects and were encouraged to form teams of 3 to 5. They need to develop a team project with creativity and pastoral sensibility that will communicate the content assimilated in class to a selected target audience, with adequate means to measure the impact of their project on their target. Thirty-eight students formed ten teams and presented ten projects. Each team had 2–4 encounters with the professor and 6–10 encounters among team members. Six of the ten projects were categorized as didactic, three mediatic, one didactic-mediatic and 0 artistic. The grades of this final assignment ranged from 7 to 10, with an average of 8.7 out of 10. The survey feedback demonstrated high satisfaction, as students discovered new values in teamwork and pastoral applications. However, this innovation can be more time-consuming for the professor and the students, requiring more significant time management, teamwork and communication competency. (shrink)

Drawing on an ethnographic study of Roman Catholic sisters in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I show how women in the Global South draw on religious imagery to redefine cultural ideals of womanhood and family responsibility. By taking the religious vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, the Congolese sisters I interviewed seemingly betray local expectations regarding women’s responsibility to reproduce and repair the clan. Although sisters’ vows subject them to social ridicule for violating cultural expectations to bear children and support (...) kin, they devise new strategies to negotiate the connection between womanhood and the maternal role of caregiver and nurturer outside of marriage and fertility. In social ministries that affirm their communal, moral, and spiritual ties to others, the sisters realize these cultural ideals through a “spiritual motherhood” that transforms their traditional heteronormative obligations. Framing their decision to live outside accepted kinship structures in religious terms mutes the radicalness of this lifestyle and provides religious legitimation for what would otherwise be considered a selfish choice for a woman acting independent of family well-being. In this context, I demonstrate how doing religion is inseparable from doing gender as Catholic sisters embody alternative ways of being a woman in post-colonial Congolese society through their religious practices. (shrink)