"Alla kan utom jag" : - Hur utanförskap och stigmatisering skapas och tar sig uttryck hos ofrivilligt barnlösa kvinnor

This paper is grounded in the previous research that indicated that involuntary childless women feels stigmatized and outside society. The purpose of this paper was to find out how the feeling of being an outsider and a stigmatized person is created and takes form in the category involuntary childless women. I asked the questions; -In what parts of the interviewed women’s answers indicates that they are outsiders and stigmatized? –Who is creating the stigma and the outsiderness and how is it created? I answered these questions by interviewing six women in the ages of 28-40, who all had undergone In vitro fertilization-treatment and lived in heterosexual relationships. I used Erving Goffmans theory about stigma and Howard Beckers theory about outsiders to analyse the empiric data. The results show that these women indeed are stigmatized and outsiders, but it doesn’t evolve from the people around them, but from the women themselves. These women tend to cling on to everything that relates to pregnancies and babies, and because of this they embrace the fertility norms more than others. I also find that these women differs from Goffmans empiric results in his theory about stigma. The women in my study seems to want to be treated different than “normal people”. Even though they want help to remove their dysfunction, they also have high demands on their surroundings regarding respectful language and a considerate behaviour.