Part of the normalization of assisted reproductive technologies is the premise that the children born from in vitro fertilization are no different from their counterparts conceived spontaneously. However, interest in peri-conception health and new epigenetic understandings of biological plasticity has led to some questioning the presumed irrelevance of conception in vitro, and when doing so, describing IVF children as “apparently healthy.” Taking “apparently” and “healthy” seriously, this article explores how modes of attention—ways of naming and framing embryo potentiality—shape understandings of (...) health and normality. I contend that understanding the politics of potentiality, and how they may emerge in a postgenomic age, requires an unpacking of various modes of attention and framing. Ethnographic findings from South Africa’s fertility clinics and emerging literature on epigenetic variation in IVF conception demonstrate how, under a genetic mode of attention, IVF clinics views “abnormality” as fated, unviable, and discardable. Exploring the possibility of answering the postgenomic questions to IVF reveals structural challenges to knowing long-term health implications. Incipient attempts within the fertility clinic at managing these questions shows various strategic techniques, such as leveraging epigenetics to marketable ends and shifts to individual responsibility. (shrink)

This article contributes to a more nuanced and contextual approach to women’s decision-making concerning their stored IVF (in vitro fertilisation) embryos through attempting to craft a space for the expression of the complex, and contradictory, emotions attached to these decisions, unhooked from any notion of abstract moral status inhering in the embryo itself. Women struggle to express the confounding nature of the relationship to the stored IVF embryo as something of-the-body but not within the body, neither self nor other, person (...) nor thing. In order to try to address this sense of the ineffable, I draw in this article upon a series of images by German-born American artist, Kiki Smith. The article explores three major themes, each alongside one of Smith’s artworks connecting to an experience of discomfort or confounding unease. (shrink)

In everyday life, we usually go by theone-body-one-person rule: one person has one body. This social belief builds on two assumptions: bodies are individual units and they are the same in different situations. This is also the conceptual resource for social theories that build on the notion of individuals. In this article, we turn it into a sociological topic. We develop a vocabulary for reconstructing bodily one-ness and bodily sameness as practically achieved social order, asbody boundary work: what belongs to (...) a body is a matter of local practices that define its situational contours, limits and margins. Practices of identification and personification draw on social memories and enact bodies as trans-situational entities. Persons and bodies, we argue, evolve in co-individuation. Personal corporality, then, can be conceptualized as abody of workthat encompasses these practical efforts of boundary-making. (shrink)

The placenta has played an important role in feminist theories of subjectivity; however, the placenta of feminist theory has been the fully functional placenta of what is considered a successful full-term pregnancy. Pregnancy loss, a topic that has been generally overlooked within feminist scholarship, is absent from feminist theories of the placenta. This article uses early placental development, particularly development that takes place before the placenta becomes fully functional as an organ for hormone production and interchange, as a space through (...) which to consider theorising subjectivity, reproduction and relation through pregnancy loss. In so doing, I argue that turning our attention to the placenta’s early development, regardless of outcomes, allows us to reimagine the role of process for feminist theories of subjectivity while also making room for a wider array of pregnancy outcomes, reinvigorating our ability to think about relations and models of hospitality that do not end as we might imagine. (shrink)