Close Your Eyes and Think of England

Abstract

Faced with declining fertility rates, media in Britain are reacting with anxiety about cultural annihilation. To look at how nationalism inflects concerns over biological and cultural reproduction, the authors analyze coverage of falling fertility and rising immigration in Great Britain in major newspapers in 2000-2. They find pronatalist appeals to be commonand especially directed at women but varying in how women’s duty to the nation is framed. Appeals characterized as begging, lecturing, threatening, and bribing express different relationships between individual interest and the national good and offer positive and negative views of women. The political leanings of specific newspapers affect how they connect biological reproduction to the cultural threat seen in immigration. Even positive views of women as making rational reproductive choices are tainted by alarmist views of immigration as a threat to national survival.

‘I just think something like the “Bubs and Pubs” class is what men should be having’: Paternal subjectivities and preparing for first-time fatherhood in Australia and the United Kingdom

“…Barclay and Lupton 1999;Camilleri, 2003;Cosson and Graham, 2012), Changing expectations and cultural assumptions about men as fathers and fatherhood practices in Australia and the UK are also configured in relation to pro-natalist discourses and policies which shape maternal and paternal domains. Historically, these have emphasised biological and cultural reproduction, with a central focus on women as mothers, reinforcing binary (and 'classed', 'raced' and heteronormative) dimensions of reproduction (Brown and Ferree, 2005). Thus men have been largely absent from pro-natalist rhetoric and associated policies, reinforcing expectations and particular constructions of hegemonic masculinities, which in turn overlook possibilities of caring, emotionally involved paternal forms of masculine practices and paternal desire (Hadley and Hanley, 2011;Marsiglio et al, 2013;Miller, 2014).…”

On the Margins of the Motherhood Discourse: Childlessness in Lithuanian Women’s Magazines during 1991–1996

“…Žiniasklaida turi galią formuoti mūsų supratimą apie pasaulį (Bryant, Oliver, 2008) ir kartu keisti nuostatas, taip mažindama visuomenės grupių stigmatizavimą. Pagal žiniasklaidos rėmų teoriją (angl.…”

Reproducing the nation: reproduction, citizenship and ethno-demographic survival in post-communist Romania

“…There is an extensive literature focusing on the demographic changes in Europe and elsewhere. This includes works that look into the ethnic and cultural dimension of demographic changes (Coleman 2006;Goldstone, Kaufmann, and Toft 2012) and studies that analyse the ethno-demographic implications of various reproduction policies, such as abortion, pronatalism and family policies (King 2002;Brown and Ferree 2005;Jinga et al 2010). There is also a separate body of research focusing on the ethnic dimension of citizenship and migration policies (Joppke 2005;Žilović 2012;Dumbrava 2014).…”