HJEM UDEN BØRN

Abstract

This article explores how childless men and women in Denmark connect their

longings for children and their purchase of a house with notions of home and

kinship. It investigates thereby how their stories about hopes and longings for

children stage and confi gure relationships between materiality and sociality. I draw

primarily upon an ethnographic study of interfi le men and women in Denmark in

the late nineties and their encounter with procreative technologies. The fi eldwork

was centred on three local groups of the National Association for Involuntary

Childless. Taking part in their meetings and social gatherings over a period of

two years gave me an opportunity to obtain insights in how infertility affected

and challenged their lives and plans, and it opened a window to a multi-faceted

understanding of kinship in Denmark. This article thus focuses on the material

dimensions of kinship and relatedness from a childless perspective. The childless

people are in a particular empirical position because what they think and

say about children and family life exists primarily as hopes, longings and future

projections. The aspirations for children nevertheless contain things and materiality

and they epitomize how physicality, locality, dwelling, things and consumer

goods are part and parcel of kinship thinking.

Keywords: Kinship, involuntary childlessness, things, house/home.