Research Framework: In a sociocultural context where marriage and reproduction are fundamental components of social status, infertility is perceived as a threat to social order, prompting individual and family strategies to identify its causes and to find solutions. However, previous studies have often adopted medical definitions of infertility, focusing mainly on the biological dimension and neglecting social temporalities.

Objectives: This article examines the influence of biological and social temporalities on the life courses of women facing infertility in Cameroon.

Methodology: The sample is made up of seven women whom life stories were collected, transcribed and analyzed according to an inductive thematic approach using Nvivo software.

Results: Infertile women navigate between sociocultural norms and their subjective perceptions of time, creating significant tensions. The unpredictability of social and family events strongly influences the coping strategies adopted by these women and their families. Ultimately, temporalities continuously reshape reproductive trajectories, highlighting the complexity and dynamics of infertility experiences in the Cameroonian context.

Conclusion: The analysis of unpredictable events poses challenges that the notion of temporality helps to approach by providing a rhythm to the narrative. This rhythm highlights different areas of the life story, and the way in which the unpredictable event structures and reshapes them over time.

Contribution: This article opens up new avenues of research on how to take account of “social” unpredictability in contexts where social norms and cultures are often thought of as stable and rigid, and life trajectories as linear.

• reproduction
• infertility
• temporality
• vital conjonctures
• Cameroon

https://journals.openedition.org/efg/21776