Voluntary Childlessness in the Spanish Graphic Novel: Irene Olmo’s No quiero ser mamá (2020)
摘要
In recent years, graphic narratives about journeys into motherhood and the maternal experience have populated the Spanish market. These narratives appear alongside other forms of creative exploration of motherhood like mom blogs, maternal chronicles, novels, and films. However, the issue of non-motherhood is still under-explored across all genres. No quiero ser mamá is a graphic novel that explores the process of deciding not to be a mother. The novel is innovative in the way that it presents the process as a subjective experience, drawing attention to the specific conjunctions of visual and verbal texts in autobiography and visually arranging the relationships of the protagonist with other people in social situations and spatial environments. Through these visual relationships, we see how Irene Olmo conveys her struggle to conform to societal expectations of women and mothers highlighting the perceived gap between the protagonist’s femininity and motherhood norms. Olmo uses her graphic novel as a feminist tool to explore the choice of a voluntary childfree life as a response to social attitudes towards non-motherhood that have emerged from culturally sanctified religious ideologies. No quiero ser mamá creates a new discursive space in which the naturalisation of motherhood can be challenged, the silence surrounding this experience can be broken, and non-motherhood can be imbued with the potential for enlightenment, community, self-realisation, and exceptionality.