Constructing Non-Parenthood

Childfree and Childless Discourses between Television Series and Reddit

Autori

Parole chiave:

non‑parenthood, childfree, Reddit, Femininity, television series

Abstract

This article analyses how non-motherhood and voluntary non-parenthood are discursively constructed at the intersection between contemporary TV series and digital communities, focusing on the distinction between childfree and childless positions. Anchored in social constructionism and media and cultural studies approaches, the study examines a mixed corpus of posts and comments from r/childfree and four TV-related subreddits (The Handmaid’s Tale, How I Met Your Mother, Workin’ Moms, Fleabag), using quantitative (lexical frequencies, topic modelling) and qualitative (digital ethnography, interpretive coding) methods. The findings show that serialized narratives continue to foreground motherhood and frame non-motherhood mainly in terms of lack or failure, while sidelining childfree trajectories, whereas r/childfree functions as a gender-neutral space in which non-parenthood is explicitly named and normalised as a positive biographical choice. Here, non-motherhood and non-fatherhood are negotiated more horizontally, weakening the symbolic link between femininity, motherhood and a “successful” life course. Read through Fraser and Foucault, online childfree communities appear as counter-spaces where alternative grammars of reproduction and adulthood are elaborated against mainstream audiovisual imaginaries.

Biografie autore

Silvia Pezzoli, Università di Firenze

Silvia Pezzoli is Associate Professor of Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes and holds a PhD in Sociology of Communication. Her research lies at the intersection of cultural sociology and media/communication studies, focusing on how individual and collective identities are produced, negotiated, and contested across everyday life and mediated environments. A core strand of her work examines how media narratives shape symbolic boundaries, belonging, and exclusion—linking “real” territories to imaginary and platform-mediated ones. Alongside research on online hate speech (with a focus on gendered and racialized hostility), she has recently developed studies on contemporary TV series and digital cultures of reproduction, analysing how childfree and childless women are represented, legitimised, or stigmatized through recurring narrative scripts and cultural expectations surrounding motherhood.

Marina Brancato, Accademia delle Belle Arti di Firenze

Marina Brancato is a visual anthropologist. She received her PhD in Anthropological Science and cultural change analysis from L’Orientale University in 2011 working on the relationship between anthropology and journalism with a focus on the media coverage of Italian earthquakes. She is a member of the Postcolonial and Gender Studies Center at L’Orientale University, EASA Media Anthropology Network, and serves on the editorial board of the journal Visual Ethnography. Her research intersects multiple disciplinary paths, with a focus on collective imagination, the concept of loss, and the relationship between anthropology, gender, and feminism. She is the author of visual essays and works in media and feminist anthropology. She currently holds the position of Full Professor of Cultural and Visual Anthropology at the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence.

Niccolò Sirleto, Università di Firenze

Niccolò Sirleto is currently a research fellow at the University of Florence within the project Advanced Learning Multimedia Alliance for Inclusive Academic Innovation (ALMA). He obtained a PhD funded by the “PON Research and Innovation on Green Topics” programme in Communication Science at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo. He previously studied Sociology and Social Research at the University of Florence, and his research interests include climate change denial, disinformation, fake news, and social media. He has been a contract lecturer for the course Social Research Methodology in the Digital Era at Università Mercatorum. He collaborates with the Digital Editorial Office of the School of Political Science at the University of Florence. He has previously conducted research activities using both qualitative and quantitative methods with Poiein-Lab Ricerca Sociale, Opificio Sociologico, Istituto per la Formazione al Giornalismo of Urbino, and Federsanità ANCI Toscana

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Pubblicato

2026-06-30

Come citare

Pezzoli, S., Brancato, M., & Sirleto, N. (2026). Constructing Non-Parenthood: Childfree and Childless Discourses between Television Series and Reddit. Mediascapes Journal, 27(1), 174–195. Recuperato da https://rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa03/mediascapes/article/view/19397

Fascicolo

V. 27 N. 1 (2026): GEMINI-SCAPES. Detecting the Interplay between Serial Dramas, Gender Issues and European Young Audiences

Sezione

Saggi della sezione monografica

Licenza

Creative Commons License

TQuesto lavoro è fornito con la licenza Creative Commons Attribuzione 4.0 Internazionale.