The visibly absent child
Creators: name: Joshi, Meghana
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2017

description: This dissertation describes and interprets various articulations of ‘German child- unfriendliness and friendliness’ as they relate to a generation’s experience of gendered reproduction and childlessness in reunified Berlin in the context of a German demographic crisis. I focus on the narratives of the Wende or reunification generation, often represented in policy documents as producing a culture of childlessness in Germany. A 2015 report of the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs states that 29% of this generation, i.e. those between the ages of 30 and 50, is childless. My work records and analyzes experiences of living with low fertility for those who often become demographic statistics. I show how reproduction has become hypervisible in the wake of this alarmist demographic discourse and post-reunification in-migration of former West German families with children and gentrification in Berlin. I do this through the lens of the hypervisible child and what she comes to stand in for at a particular moment in time in Berlin. Reproduction emerges as a form of exclusion and simultaneously inclusion and often marks women as disinterested in having children or as performing an aggressive style of motherhood, while men as resisting their marginal reproductive status and potentially (re)defining their roles as fathers.  This dissertation then records shifting meanings of biological, social, and cultural reproduction from the perspective of the Wende generation in the short time period between the late 1980s and 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I draw on and contribute to literatures on anthropology of childhood, masculinity and fatherhood, reproductive technologies and kinship to explicate the relationship between forms of ‘child-unfriendliness,’ gendered reproductive practices, and individual and national anxieties and aspirations related to ‘Germanness.’ I argue that the unstable emplacement of the German child, animated through multiple national, local, and personal histories, and memories and narratives, signals on the one hand, a preoccupation with national belonging confirmed through biological reproduction. On the other hand, kinning practices established through care, produce divergent forms of social and familial belonging.  I used a range of qualitative research methods including interviews, focus group discussions and life history narratives. Other than these more structured methods, I also participated in and observed the everyday routines of mothers, fathers and childless men and women in the city. I took walks, bike rides and traveled in subways and buses, alone and with Berliners to get a sense of how the city has changed materially and otherwise after reunification. I spent many hours conversing over meals and at parties or in children’s playgrounds asking questions about German romanticism and fascination for say barefoot playgrounds or the forest or hiking, or discussing politics in India, United States and Germany. Several hours of observations on streets and during travel as well as random conversations with strangers or participating in demonstrations against gentrification were less direct ways in which to learn about life in Berlin.