Infertilité conjugale et rapport de genre : stratégies des acteurs, représentations et incidences sociales dans la ville de yaoundé

Abstract

This research is entitled: “marital infertility and gender relations: strategies of actors, representations and social impacts in the city of Yaoundé”. Considering the literature on social representations of infertility, it emerges that sociocultural constructions are established based on knowledge, experiences, perceptions, these contribute to constructing the personality of individuals and lead them to have a representation of their alter -ego about infertility. Infertility is a disease characterized by difficulty and/or inability to conceive in men and women. Several factors are at the origin including psychological, biological, and cultural causes. However, there are modern technologies to overcome the difficulty of procreation. Nevertheless, the social impacts of infertility persist within couples. The problem that arises is that of the persistence of negative social representations of infertility in general. From this problem arises the following question: does marital infertility influence the structuring of gender relations? The hypothesis was formulated as follows: marital infertility influences the structuring of gender relations. For this, data collection was done following the quantitative approach with the questionnaire and the qualitative approach with an additional interview guide. The survey was carried out with 116 participants in total. Content analysis was used for the qualitative data and the descriptive approach for the quantitative data. The theories that allowed us to understand this impact are Moscovici's theory of social representations (1989) and Tajfel and Turner's theory of social identity (1979). The theory of social representations has shown that traditions influence the way of thinking about the phenomenon of infertility. This creates conflicts within couples; hence the theory of social identity demonstrates that people are marginalized in relation to infertility and have a negative perception because of the way society views it. And fertile people have a positive self-identity but tend to discriminate against infertile people. Which reinforces conflict relationships within couples? However, social identity theory also shows that men are less discriminated against when encountering an infertility situation compared to women who are more stigmatized by society. To this end, men have a more positive identity of themselves when it comes to infertility, which is reinforced by the patriarchal system, sociocultural constructions, stereotypes, prejudices, and discrimination unlike to women who have a more negative identity when they are infertile. In addition, social representations, practices, and the social impacts of infertility are at the origin of the conflicting relationships and the different treatments received by men and women when one of them faces infertility.