title: How women in Bangladesh confront the stigma of childlessness: agency, resilience, and resistance.
abstract: In a context where motherhood is an integral part of a woman's stereotype, being childless is a devastating experience. We explore how these so-called deviant women manage this situation. The objective of this article is to contribute to the debate regarding infertile women's agency, resilience, and resistance. This article is based on anthropological fieldwork among urban middle-class and rural poor women. Their life histories reveal that childless women in Bangladesh, a pro-natalist, patriarchal society, are not passive victims, but rather actively fight their stigmatization and manage to survive. The childless women follow overt and covert strategies to overcome their stigmatized identity and create space for themselves in various innovative ways. The women do not resist in a coordinated way as a group, but do so individually. Given the collective nature of a society like rural Bangladesh, we believe that the women's individual acts will eventually have collective effects.
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, Durham University, UK, Institute of Health and Society, Newcastle University, UK. papreen.nahar@durham.ac.uk, papreen21@yahoo.com, papreen.nahar@ncl.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Papreen
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Nahar
authors.forename: Sjaak
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: van der Geest
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D060432:Anthropology, Medical; D001459:Bangladesh / Q000208:ethnology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007247:Infertility, Female / Q000208:ethnology* / Q000523:psychology*; D012424:Rural Population; D057545:Social Stigma; D014505:Urban Population; D014930:Women / Q000523:psychology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Bangladesh; agency; childless; infertile; resilience; resistance; stigma