Depictions of non-motherhood remain a rarity in Francophone literature. The persistent silence surrounding maternal refusal communicates the strength of pronatalist and naturalising discourses which undergird notions of “normalcy” (typified by the heteronormative family). Within these discourses, the Mother remains the ethical figure par excellence and is the central vector in assessing successful femininity. Iterations of maternal refusal, when depicted, see non-mothers invariably figure both as a threat to the natural order (suggestive of the paradoxical symbolic power wielded by the childless cisgender woman in the collective imaginary) and bound by narratives which produce them as lacking, deviant or unnatural women, commensurate with a failed and futile existence. Condemned to endure clichéd representations, non-mothers are all-too often rendered faceless, voiceless and powerless anomalies in a sea of women qua would-be mothers. Further, binary thinking of “voluntary” or “involuntary” childlessness is imperfect, often masking a host of intersecting issues relating to “choice” around becoming a mother. Through an intersectional framework and a diverse corpus of authors, my thesis explores how authors challenge (or, indeed, fall foul of) such portrayals and how the non-mother reveals the failings of the feminist project in the contemporary to extricate the “woman” from the Mother, something which traps mothers and non-mothers alike. I draw on the theoretical works of Paul B. Preciado, Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, Anne Dufourmantelle, Cathy Caruth, Lauren Berlant, Françoise Vergès, amongst others. Breaking the silence on both disempowered, dysphoric motherhood and the possibility of empowered, fulfilled non-motherhood, my first chapter explores Fatou Diome’s Inassouvies, nos vies (2008). Rewriting the traditional enmity between mothers and non-mothers, the central themes of un/fulfilment and dis/empowerment are enhanced through several childless figures, who give voice to alternative, extra-familial models of kinship and connection, permitting for a radical recasting of ethical (co-)existence. In my second chapter, I look at the iniquity of what I term the “political infertility” of queer couples seeking to become parents in the novels of Désorientale (2016) by Négar Djavadi and Gabrielle (2015) by Agnès Vannouvong. As laws expand to allow queer couples access to fertility treatments, I am interested in how the decidedly heterosexual stigma of the childless figure translates to operate within an emergent homonormative queer paradigm. I show how the female protagonists appeal to female biological determinism and normative affective responses towards the childless body to assert their right to become mothers. I also explore the convergence of racial discrimination in the context of (queer) reproduction. The second half of the thesis moves to work on two authors who explicitly choose not to have children. Whilst their treatment and exploration of non-motherhood emerges from vastly different circumstances, I am interested in the way in which refusals of motherhood can be not only an act of defiance, but positive affirmations of female subjectivity as “an end in itself” rather than a body for others. In Linda Lê’s autofictional letter À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas (2011), maternal refusal is also one which writes against the narrowness of feminine ideals and the myths of “bad” women, revealing the way in which female bodies are heavily pressurized and biopolitically managed to conform. My final chapter turns to Holocaust survivor and filmmaker Marceline Loridan-Ivens’s memoirs, Et tu n’es pas revenu (2015) and L’amour après (2018). Having survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, Marceline raises important questions about female trauma, female pleasure and female subjectivity in relation to naturalizing discourses about the female body. After the prison of the camps, her refusal to reproduce is situated as a refusal of the imprisonment that women found themselves outside the camps and is as much a refusal of maternity as it is an act of choosing freedom.