Using Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness as an inspirational backdrop, a novel whose story unfolds on a genderless planet that nevertheless relies on reproductive sex for the sake of generativity, this paper tackles the sex/gender debate, its entanglements with procreation, and its consequences for transgender pregnancies. More specifically, I analyze three issues that pose barriers to thinking about a more inclusive reproductive ethics: state-sanctioned sterilization, non-reproductive futurism, and access to assisted reproductive technology.

Research has consistently revealed gender differences in attitudes toward science and technology. One explanation is that women are more personally affected by particular technologies, so they consider them differently. However, not all women universally experience biomedical technologies. We use the concept of technological salience to address how differences in subjective implications of a technology might explain differences in women’s attitudes toward biotechnology. In a sample of U.S. women from the National Survey of Fertility Barriers, we examine how women with and (...) without a biomedical barrier to fertility evaluate biotechnology for infertility, which, we argue, reflects differences in technological salience. For women with a biomedical barrier, various experiences, beliefs, and values impacted their attitudes; yet, most of these did not affect attitudes if women had not experienced a fertility barrier. Results suggest that technological salience contextualizes women’s attitudes toward these biotechnologies and may also have broader implications for other biotechnologies. (shrink)

This article explores the idea of agential multiplicity in medical treatment of childlessness. The analysis illustrates the kinds of agencies that emerge in the use of assisted reproductive technologies. The article begins with a discussion on feelings as participants in IVF treatment and as elements of women’s embodied experience. This is followed by an analysis of three consecutive steps of IVF: ovulation induction, assisted fertilization in the laboratory and embryo transfer. The article aims to show that feminist theory and praxis (...) benefits from empirical analyses of lived bodily experiences as they take form in relation to non-human agencies. Also, it provides a view into how biological processes and material elements can be taken into account in anti-essentializing ways in feminist research. (shrink)

The placenta’s role as a mediating passage between bodies has been a conceptual resource for feminist theorists and philosophers interested in developing more nuanced explanations of the maternal–fetal relation, a relation that has tended to be identified with maternal and fetal bodies rather than with the placenta between them. I draw on efforts by philosopher Luce Irigaray and her readers to theorise placental relations as a model for the negotiation of differences. In her more recent work, Irigaray figures the placenta (...) as an enveloping space of metaphorical enclosure. The placental relation in Irigaray’s work thus offers insights into the temporal structure of her theory of becoming and can inform a more ‘materialist’ account of pregnancy. I then consider how placental relations are conceptual resources for re-imagining relations of self–other in pregnancy, and for addressing emergent ethical concerns over the transformation of the placenta into a scientific object. (shrink)

Ranging from miniaturized biological robots to organoids, multi-cellular engineered living systems (M-CELS) pose complex ethical and societal challenges. Some of these challenges, such as how to best distribute risks and benefits, are likely to arise in the development of any new technology. Other challenges arise specifically because of the particular characteristics of M-CELS. For example, as an engineered living system becomes increasingly complex, it may provoke societal debate about its moral considerability, perhaps necessitating protection from harm or recognition of positive (...) moral and legal rights, particularly if derived from cells of human origin. The use of emergence-based principles in M-CELS development may also create unique challenges, making the technology difficult to fully control or predict in the laboratory as well as in applied medical or environmental settings. In response to these challenges, we argue that the M-CELS community has an obligation to systematically address the ethical and societal aspects of research and to seek input from and accountability to a broad range of stakeholders and publics. As a newly developing field, M-CELS has a significant opportunity to integrate ethically responsible norms and standards into its research and development practices from the start. With the aim of seizing this opportunity, we identify two general kinds of salient ethical issues arising from M-CELS research, and then present a set of commitments to and strategies for addressing these issues. If adopted, these commitments and strategies would help define M-CELS as not only an innovative field, but also as a model for responsible research and engineering. (shrink)

This article views capitalism not only as a mode of production, but also as a mediation of the reproduction of life, following the concept of ‘social metabolism’ that Marx employs to analyze the interaction between the individuals composing a society and their natural environment. Insofar as the ‘value-form’ is the distinctive social relation of capitalism, it appears necessary to ask whether the metabolic process of reproduction can be fully subsumed under this form. Marx takes for granted the idea that the (...) reproduction of labor-power consists only in the consumption of commodities resulting from abstract labor, thus omitting the appropriation of unpaid domestic work, mostly performed by women. Feminist criticism clarifies how capitalism always depends on some reproductive work being appropriated for the accumulation of surplus-value without being integrated in the value-form. Following Jason W. Moore, I attempt to indicate that the same logic is at work for the reproduction... (shrink)

With an increasing number of ways to ‘assist’ reproduction, some bioethicists have started to wonder what it takes to become a genetic parent. It is widely agreed that sharing genes is not enough to substantiate the parent–offspring relation, but what is? Without a better understanding of the concept of reproduction, our thinking about parent–offspring relations and the ethical issues surrounding them risk being unprincipled. Here, I address that problem by offering a principled account of reproduction—the Overlap, Development and Persistence account—which (...) I believe best captures the meaning of ‘genetic parenthood’. (shrink)

Sarah Franklin’s Biological relatives: IVF, stem cells, and the future of kinship and Charis Thompson’s Good science: the ethical choreography of stem cell research, examine recently normalized biotechnologies. Franklin’s monograph extends her previous work on in vitro fertilization , deconstructing the success of a technology that, she argues, has grown “curiouser and curiouser” while taking hold in scientific and social life. IVF in its diverse aspects becomes a lens for scrutinizing our ambivalence about new technology, which Franklin articulates by putting (...) disparate literatures into conversation: feminist science studies, political economy, fine art, and more. Thompson’s Good science focuses more concretely on the first decade of human pluripotent stem cell research, tracing the field from the innovation of cultured human embryonic stem cells through Bush-era policy debates, to current acceptance of stem cell research as a part of the scientific and policy landscape. Th .. (shrink)

In this ethnography of transnational commercial surrogacy In a small clinic In India, the narratives of two sets of womenInvolved In this new form of reproductive travel - the transnational clients and the surrogates themselves - are evaluated. How do these women negotiate the culturally anomalous nature of transnational surrogacy within the unusual setting of India? It Is demonstrated that while both sets of women downplay the economic aspect of surrogacy by drawing on predictable cultural tools like 'gift', 'sisterhood' and (...) 'mission', they use these tools In completely unexpected ways. Previous ethnographies of surrogacy In other parts of the world have revealed that women Involved In surrogacy use these narratives to downplay the contractual nature of their relationship with each other. Ironically, when used In the context of transnational surrogacy 1n India, these narratives further highlight and often reify the Inequalities based on class, race and nationality between the clients and suppliers of reproductive tourism In India. (shrink)

My project here is to argue for situating moral judgments about Indian surrogacy in the context of Reproductive Justice. I begin by crafting the best picture of Indian surrogacy available to me while marking some worries I have about discursive colonialism and epistemic honesty. Western feminists' responses to contract pregnancy fall loosely into two interrelated moments: post-Baby M discussions that focus on the morality of surrogacy work in Western contexts, and feminist biomedical ethnographies that focus on the lived dimensions of (...) reproductive technologies and how they are embodied and negotiated in specific cultural contexts. Both approaches have their shortcomings. Uncritically extending Western moral frameworks (for example, liberal feminist political values) to Indian surrogacy work raises the specter of discursive colonialism; with it, worries arise about how Western normative traditions can distort, erase, or misread non-Western subjects' lived experiences. Feminist biomedical ethnographic approaches correct this, but raise the specter of a weak moral absenteeism; with it, concerns arise about under-theorizing the structural harms and injustices shaping surrogacy worker's lives. I suggest that we might reduce these shortcomings by framing normative and ethnographic engagement with global surrogacy as questions of reproductive justice. (shrink)

We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biology gained independence from cosmology and theology and came to depend less on strictly circular forms. As potent ‘canonical (...) icons’, cycles also interacted with representations of linear and irreversible change, including arrows, arcs, scales, series and trees, as in theories of the Earth and of evolution. In modern times life cycles and reproductive cycles have often been held to characterize life, in some cases especially female life, while human efforts selectively to foster and disrupt these cycles have harnessed their productivity in medicine and agriculture. But strong cyclic metaphors have continued to link physiology and climatology, medicine and economics, and biology and manufacturing, notably through the relations between land, food and population. From the grand nineteenth-century transformations of matter to systems ecology, the circulation of molecules through organic and inorganic compartments has posed the problem of maintaining identity in the face of flux and highlights the seductive ability of cyclic schemes to imply closure where no original state was in fact restored. More concerted attention to cycles and circulation will enrich analyses of the power of metaphors to naturalize understandings of life and their shaping by practical interests and political imaginations. (shrink)

Going through reproductive experiences (especially pregnancy and childbirth) in contemporary Western societies almost inevitably involves interaction with medical practitioners and various medical technologies in institutional context. This has important consequences for women as embodied subjects. A critical appraisal of these consequences—coming dominantly from feminist scholarship—relied on a problematic theory of both technology and the subject, which are in contemporary approaches no longer considered as given, coherent and well individualized wholes, but as complex constellations that are locally situated and that can (...) only be described empirically. In this study, we will be relying on the developments in phenomenological theory to reconceptualize women as technologically mediated embodied subjects and on the new paradigms in philosophy of technology and STS to reconstruct medical technology as situated—with the aim of reconceptualizing their relationship and exploring different possibilities for the mediating role of medical technology. It will be argued that technologization of female reproductive processes and alienating consequences for women are not necessary or directly interrelated. The role of technology varies from case to case and depends mainly on the nontechnological and relational aspects of institutional context, in which medical practitioners play a decisive role. (shrink)

This thesis examines the practice of haemodialysis and kidney transplantation, the two medical therapies available for persons with kidney failure, from a phenomenological perspective. A basic assumption made in the thesis is that contemporary biomedicine is deeply embedded in the cultural, historical, economic, and political circumstances provided by the particular local, national, and transnational contexts in which it is practiced. The aim of the thesis is twofold. On the one hand, the aim is to examine the forms of person- and (...) patienthood enacted and negotiated in haemodialysis and kidney transplantation care and in the daily lives of persons with kidney failure. On the other hand, the aim is to investigate the ways in which the enacted and negotiated forms of person- and patienthood are culturally embedded and normatively charged. In order to examine and investigate this twofold aim, an empirical material has been gathered that comprises observations and in-depth interviews with patients and caregivers at four haemodialysis units, one in Riga, Latvia, and three in Stockholm, Sweden. The theoretical approach and methodology of the study is cultural and phenomenological in character, drawing on an ethnological and anthropological understanding of culture as processual and relational, and on a phenomenological understanding of personhood as embodied and intertwined with the surrounding world. The thesis shows that patients’ encounters and attempts to deal with the diagnoses and treatments associated with kidney failure are complex and often misalign them with the normatively charged orientations enacted and recommended by medicine. The complex situation that emerges when they undergo transplantation, for example, stands in stark contrast to the widespread official view of organ transplantation as a self-evidently health-bringing and normalising therapy. Through their repeated and extensive experiences of undergoing haemodialysis and living with the disease, patients eventually become able to create a synthesis between their lived experiences of their own body and their body as a medical object – what in the thesis is called a ‘sick body’ – a synthesis that allows them to reorient themselves in life and experience a sense of direction. This process relies, to a large extent, on the temporal structure that haemodialysis affords life; it is by repeatedly undergoing the treatment that patients become able to create a sick body. Even so, many of them find this temporal structure problematic; they experience it as disruptive of their control and future-orientedness and as causing an existentially difficult-to-handle boredom. The thesis also shows that the political developments and the norms prevalent in the two national contexts studied greatly affect the orientations of the treatment practices and the participants’ lives. In both Riga and Stockholm, ideals of freedom, activity, control, and self-actualisation influence what forms of patienthood and personhood are enacted. The study indicates that persons who fall ill with a serious and chronic disease only gradually become able to understand and actively cope with their differently embodied circumstances of life. This suggests that medical professionals should not too hastily enlist their patients as experts on their own bodies, but rather provide them with the time and support necessary for making repeated attempts at creating and maintaining a life with a sick body. (shrink)

This note suggests that, viewed from a feminist perspective, the reforms contained in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 represent a missed opportunity to re-think the appropriate model of regulation to govern fertility treatment and embryology research in the UK. It argues that reform of the legislation was driven largely by the government’s desire to avoid re-igniting controversies over the legal status of the embryo and abortion and to maintain Britain’s position at the forefront of embryo research and related (...) biotechnologies. It also highlights the importance of media debates, which were highly selective, to the reform process, and suggests that in order to inject feminist values into the process of legislative reform, feminists need to become more media savvy. In the short term, it suggests that there is little prospect of a radical re-thinking of the appropriate ethico-legal response to the wide variety of family forms that reproductive technologies potentially enable, much less of considering our ethical obligations to the new forms of embryos that are now permitted by the 2008 Act. In the meantime, however, it argues that these issues provide productive opportunities for feminist legal theorists to address questions that have been erased or obscured in the course of the 2008 reforms. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical investigation into the discourse of egg freezing on Xiaohongshu, a prominent social media platform in China, to uncover the complexities of female identity, reproductive autonomy, and consumer narratives within this context. Employing Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), it examines the discursive construction of self by single Chinese women who share their egg freezing experiences online. This study scrutinizes the semiotic resources utilized in these narratives, including textual and visual elements, to reveal how individuals craft their (...) identities in relation to emerging reproductive technologies. The analysis identifies dominant themes in the discourse, such as ‘negotiation of motherhood’, ‘women’s empowerment’, and ‘technologization of egg freezing’, juxtaposing these against the backdrop of China’s market socialism and shifting social attitudes. By engaging with the posts of Xiaohongshu bloggers, the research dissects how these women articulate their journeys, challenging traditional paradigms and contributing to ongoing debates about women’s rights and feminist ideologies in the context of advanced reproductive technologies. (shrink)

The identification and valorization of unacknowledged, feminized forms of economic productivity has been an important task for feminist theory. In this article, we expand and rethink existing definitions of labour, in order to recognize the essential economic role women play in the stem cell and regenerative medicine industries, new fields of biomedical research that are rapidly expanding throughout the world. Women constitute the primary tissue donors in the new stem cell industries, which require high volumes of human embryos, oöcytes, foetal (...) tissue and umbilical cord blood. Such material is generally given for free in the advanced industrial democracies, constituted as a surplus (‘spare’ embryos) or waste (umbilical cord ‘afterbirth’, cadaveric foetuses, poor quality oöcytes) whose generative powers should not be withheld from others. At the same time, among impoverished female populations in developing nations, such biological material is now often procured through frankly transactional relations, where women undertake risky procedures for small fees. In each case, female bodily productivity is mobilized to support bioeconomic research, yet the economic value involved in these relations is largely unacknowledged. In this article, we consider both the gift economy and the transactional economy for reproductive tissues as a form of labour. In order to fully conceptualize the specificities of feminized productivity in the bioeconomy, we distinguish between earlier feminist theories of reproductive labour and the emerging practices generated by stem cell research, which we term regenerative labour. We consider how historical transformations in the regulation of feminized labour and the technical repertoires of stem cell research renegotiate the productivity limits of female reproductive biology, opening it out to novel and profitable forms of surplus value and enrolling women in complex negotiations over their role in bioeconomic activity. (shrink)

According to some authors, Latour’s attention to politics during the last decades is the result of his proposing a different approach to politics that entails, with respect to his overall project, one of two situations. Either his epistemological proposal has suffered a “normative turn”—which necessarily breaks with the previous assumptions of Actor-Network Theory (ANT); or, if ANT’s view on technosciences remains valid, his political proposal becomes not possible as a new normative approach. In this paper, I will focus on the (...) critique voiced by John Law, as well as Graham Harman. I will argue that this is a false dilemma because there has not been a change in Latour’s conceptual basis, nor a lack of coherence within his thought that would undermine the democratic commitment of his Political Epistemology. I will justify this by exposing the fact that Latour’s overall project, as part of Science Studies, has not lately followed a “political” but an “ontological” turn, which has been underling his works since the very beginning of ANT. (shrink)

How might the agency of the subaltern be conceptualized within the intersection of multiple worlds? Actor-network theory’s translation framework for understanding agency portraying this as entrepreneur and talking of a world in the making is arguably “imperialist,” “managerial,” and “monolithic.” Draws from the enactment turn of ANT and insights into the politics of representation, this article elaborates an alternative framework which focuses on displacement. By examining the case of dialysis patients, the article explores the displacing practices that follow the disruption (...) of routines in dialysis. Patients have to go through a process of problematization, distribution, hybridization, and restabilization, in order to sustain the coexistence of their alternative practices with dialysis. Unlike entrepreneurs in the translation model who transform the world by interesting others, enduring trials, and becoming spokespersons for all, those patients who manage to displace and sustain the coexistence of multiple worlds avoid interesting, still less confronting, the hegemonic actors and claiming representation for themselves. This article suggests the displacement of agency as a generic alternative. (shrink)

In this article, I draw on my fieldwork creating protein models of hepatitis B at a biotech laboratory to think through how to approach the body and disease from ontological and phenomenological perspectives. I subsequently draw on Mariella Pandolfi’s work on how bodies can be made to suffer history and Paul Farmer’s work on global tuberculosis disparities to explore ways of analysing embodied activity as a means of identifying and clinically addressing enactments of social inequality and disease. I also introduce (...) Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological concept of ‘flesh’ as a conceptual heuristic that allows us to understand the meaningful structuring of ontological worlds beyond our own. As I argue, bringing these perspectives together not only allows us to re-envision what an effective disease treatment should be in diverse medical contexts, but also how to better understand health disparities and the nature of disease itself. (shrink)

Studies on surrogate motherhood have mostly explored paid arrangements through the lens of a contract model, as clinical work or as a maternal identity-building project. Turning to the under-examined case of unpaid, so-called altruistic surrogate motherhood and based on an analysis of interviews with women who had been unpaid surrogate mothers in a full gestational surrogacy with a friend or relative in Canada, the United States or Australia, this article explores altruistic surrogate motherhood as relational work. It argues that this (...) form of surrogate motherhood within close interpersonal relations can be conceptualised through the relational work involved in hosting a child for the intended parents. The article explores how relational work in this context implies an embodied, asymmetrical and far-reaching sense of responsibility that surrogate mothers describe as characteristic of their surrogacy experience. In this way, the article sheds light on feminist concerns about surrogacy as an embodied and objectifying work of women while at the same time illuminating how surrogate mothers respond to the intended parents in light of their pre-surrogacy relationship, how meanings are negotiated by them and how relationships are managed during the pregnancy. (shrink)

Global reproductive landscapes and with them cross-border routes are rapidly changing. This paper examines the reproductive routes and choices of fertility travellers from China to Russia as reported by medical professionals and fertility service providers. Providing new empirical data, it raises new ethical questions on the facilitation of cross-border reproductive travel and the commercialisation of reproductive treatment. The relaxation of the one-child policy in 2014 in China, the increasing demand for ART exceeding the capacity of national fertility clinics and the (...) difficulty of accessing treatment with donor eggs concomitant with a growing economic power of the upper–middle class are shaping the ART industry in Asia in new ways. A new development is Chinese citizens increasingly seeking ART treatment in Russia, which has a long-standing practice of ART governed by a liberal legislation. Furthermore, as China prohibits the export of gametes, Chinese fertility travellers rely on acquiring donor gametes once starting treatment abroad. Clinicians in Russia report three strategies amongst their Chinese patients: One group is using donor eggs of women of Asian appearance living in Russia or is hiring women of resembling appearance from third-party countries to donate their eggs in Russia to create resemblance in their offspring. Another group is buying white donor gametes to create Eurasian mixed children and thus ‘enhance’ their offspring. Providing novel empirical data, this article informs ethical deliberation and raises imminent questions for further research in this understudied geographic region and on cross-border reproductive treatment. (shrink)

Algorithms, or rather algorithmic actions, are seen as problematic because they are inscrutable, automatic, and subsumed in the flow of daily practices. Yet, they are also seen to be playing an important role in organizing opportunities, enacting certain categories, and doing what David Lyon calls “social sorting.” Thus, there is a general concern that this increasingly prevalent mode of ordering and organizing should be governed more explicitly. Some have argued for more transparency and openness, others have argued for more democratic (...) or value-centered design of such actors. In this article, we argue that governing practices—of, and through algorithmic actors—are best understood in terms of what Foucault calls governmentality. Governmentality allows us to consider the performative nature of these governing practices. They allow us to show how practice becomes problematized, how calculative practices are enacted as technologies of governance, how such calculative practices produce domains of knowledge and expertise, and finally, how such domains of knowledge become internalized in order to enact self-governing subjects. In other words, it allows us to show the mutually constitutive nature of problems, domains of knowledge, and subjectivities enacted through governing practices. In order to demonstrate this, we present attempts to govern academic writing with a specific focus on the algorithmic action of Turnitin. (shrink)

Contemporary debate suggests that the new genetics may be changing ideas about the body and what it is to be human. Specifically, there are notions that the new genetics seems to erode the ideas that underpin modernity, such as the figure of the integrated, discrete, conscious individual body-self. Holding these ideas against the practices of genetic medicine, however, this article suggests a quite different picture; one that does not erase, but helps to keep in play, some crucial tenets of humanism. (...) The article examines how the genetic clinic constructs clinical pictures as new forms of portraiture: assemblages in which multiple and heterogeneous images of bodies and their parts are juxtaposed. Rather than these portraits just making the distributed and hybrid nature of personhood explicit, shifts in ground mean that what is being portrayed is the possibility of a ‘syndrome–genotype’ relation. At first sight this appears as a straightforward geneticization of the body and the unravelling of the figure of the individual. But the article illustrates how, at the same time as the portraits of syndrome–genotypes are made up of many heterogeneous parts, the clinic still keeps in play an idea of persons that remains, unlike their bodies, much more than the sum of their parts. All the parts that make up the body of the person can still, at moments, be transcended, to refigure the human: the complex individual of humanist thought. (shrink)

Reality TV is immensely popular, and various shows in this media genre involve a storyline of infertility and infertility treatment. Feminists argue that normative and constructed realities about infertility and infertility treatment, like those in reality TV, are central to the emancipation of women. Such realities are able to steer viewers' perceptions of the world. This article examines the emancipatory significance of representations of women on 'infertility reality TV shows'. While the women in these shows all have 'abnormal' qualities, we (...) consider their portrayal as figurations of monstrosity. In the literature, monstrosity is understood as a way to challenge nonemancipatory norms by offering an alternative identity. Through a content analysis of seven reality TV shows, we identified four types of in/fertile monsters: the cyborg, the freak, the abject, and the childless. We show that these monsters are predominantly non-emancipatory as they all involve mechanisms of altering, excluding, or condemning infertility in relation to what is considered normal and acceptable womanhood. Therefore, at the end of this article, we make a plea for more diverse and emancipatory representations of infertile women in popular culture. (shrink)

Surrogacy and adoption are both family-making measures subject to extensive domestic and international regulation. In this nationally representative survey study (N = 1552), we explore public attitudes to various forms of surrogacy and adoption in the United Kingdom, in response to an early proposal to allow “double donor” surrogacy as part of the ongoing legal reform project. We sought to both gauge public moral support for adoption and surrogacy generally, the effect that prospective parents’ fertility had on this support, and (...) the extent to which the public would find equivalencies between “double donor” surrogacy (DDS) and planned private adoption (PPA) to be morally significant. Our findings indicate that whilst there is broad baseline support for all forms of adoption and surrogacy, this support increases significantly when one or both prospective parents are infertile. These findings also suggest that the language in which a family-making arrangement is characterized has a greater influence on moral support for the arrangement than practical features such as the biological relationship (or absence thereof) between one/both parents and the child. (shrink)

Assistive reproductive technologies are increasingly used to control the biology of fertility and its temporality. Combining historical, theoretical, and socio-empirical insights, this paper aims at expanding our understanding of the way temporality emerges and is negotiated in the contemporary practice of cryopreservation of reproductive materials. We first present an historical overview of the practice of cryo-fertility to indicate the co-production of technology and social constructions of temporality. We then apply a theoretical framework for analysing cryobiology and cryopreservation technologies as creating (...) a new epistemic perspective interconnecting biology and temporality. Thereafter, we focus on the case of ‘social egg freezing’ to present socio-empirical findings illustrating different reproductive temporalities and their connection to the social acceptance of and expectations towards the practice. SEF is a particularly interesting case as it aims to enable women to disconnect their reproductive potential from their biological rhythms. Based on 39 open interviews with Israeli and German SEF users, the cross-cultural comparative findings reveal three types of attitudes: postponing motherhood/reproductive decisions ; singlehood and “waiting” for a partner ; and the planning of and hope for multiple children. For theory building, this analysis uncovers temporality formations embedded in gender and reproductive moral values; including the ‘extended present’, ‘waiting’, and ‘reproductive futurism’. We conclude by discussing the contribution of our findings by advancing the theoretical framework of ‘cryopolitics’ highlighting the theoretical implications and importance of gendered and cultural imaginaries constructing medical technological innovations and related temporalities. (shrink)

Analyses of assisted reproductive technologies have demonstrated how objectification and agency can coexist in infertility centres. How objectification creates opportunities for empowerment, however, has not yet been explored. In analysing women’s narratives of assisted conception in Colombian infertility clinics, I demonstrate the complexity in women’s embodied experiences of various objectifying stages of assisted conception and argue that their experiences produced multiple forms of embodied agency. Women used diagnostic procedures to learn about their bodies and infertility complications, which augmented their authority (...) over their bodies and treatment. They drew upon their embodied knowledge to reduce treatment anxieties, while sensations such as pain were made purposeful, and hence meaningful, as women strove to reconfigure the significance of the embodied sensations of conception in a context of medicalized reproduction. In these narratives, we see that lived bodies are productive agents of social change, generating meanings and working to reshape dominant social understandings. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the auditory technopolitics of prenatal sound systems, asking what kinds of futures, listeners and temporalities they seek to produce. With patents for prenatal audio apparatus dating back to the late 1980s, there are now a range of devices available to expectant parents. These sound technologies offer multiple benefits: from soothing away stress to increasing the efficiency of ultrasonic scans. However, one common point of emphasis is their capacity to accelerate foetal ‘learning’ and cognitive development. Taking (...) as exemplary the Babypod and BabyPlus devices, I argue that prenatal sound systems make audible a particular figuration of pregnancy and gestational labour that combines divergent notions of responsibility and passivity. Contra the equation of neoliberalism with self-control and individualism, I argue that prenatal sound systems amplify neoliberal capitalism’s elision of personal, maternal and familial responsibility. As reproductive sound technologies, prenatal sound systems facilitate maternal–familial investment in the pre-born as future-child. Consequently, financialised notions of inheritance are substituted for biological inheritance. Drawing attention to the common rhetorical figuration of the sonic as womb-like, furthermore, I argue that prenatal sound systems exemplify what I refer to as uterine audiophilia. By treating the womb as ‘the perfect classroom’, prenatal sound systems imply an intense maternal obligation to invest in and impress upon the future-child, while also envisioning the pregnant person’s body as an occupied, resonant space. Cohering with a fidelity discourse that posits the reproductive medium as passive container and a source of noise that is to be overcome, uterine audiophilia relies upon politically regressive conceptualisations of pregnancy. I thus argue that these devices mark the hitherto under-theorised convergence of auditory culture, technology and reproductive politics. (shrink)

Catholicism is the most restrictive world religion in its position on assisted reproductive technologies. The opposition of the Church, combined with the widespread acceptability of ARTs in the United States, creates a profound moral dilemma for those who adhere to Church doctrine. Drawing on interviews from 33 Catholic women, this study shows that devout women have different understandings of these technologies than women from treatment-based studies. These differences are rooted in devout women’s position of navigating two contradictory cultural schemas—“religious” and (...) “secular”—regarding the meaning of reproductive technologies. Religious schemas provide devout women with different cultural resources that help them to avoid using ARTs while still reckoning with the ideal of biological parenthood. I show how devout women draw on religion to find value and meaning in their suffering, move beyond biological motherhood, and achieve a moral femininity. While religion increases the burden of reproduction for devout women, it also provides the cultural resources to resist the financial, emotional, and physical difficulties experienced by women who use ARTs. (shrink)

This article provides an analysis of the relationships between IVF and therapeutic cloning, as they played out in the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority consultation of 2006: Donating Eggs for Research: Safeguarding Donors. We develop an account of current developments in IVF and cloning which foregrounds the role of mediation in structuring the discursive context in which they are constituted. We foreground the imperative of choice and the promise of cures as key features of this context. We also argue (...) that the intercorporeal exchanges of IVF are materially restructured in relation to cloning research, despite their represented similitude in the consultation document. The discourse of choice in relation to reproductive technologies has become entrenched over the last twenty years. In relation to therapeutic cloning, it has been coupled with, and strengthened by, the discourse of cures. In examining relations between IVF and cloning with specific attention to both mediating imaginaries, and intercorporeal exchanges, we develop an analysis that displaces the rhetoric of choice and cures. This makes visible the limited subject positions available, and the limited possibilities for responding critically to the consultation. Identifying women as the gendered subjects of this consultation and placing intercorporeality at the centre of our analysis illuminates the interdependency of women undergoing IVF, cloning science and the governance of embryo research in the UK. (shrink)

This article explores the processes through which Australian recipients select unknown donors for use in assisted reproductive technologies and speculates on how those processes may affect the future life of the donor-conceived person. I will suggest that trust is an integral part of the exchange between donors, recipients, and gamete agencies in donor conception and heavily informs concepts of relatedness, race, ethnicity, kinship, class, and visibility. The decision to be transparent about a child’s genetic parentage affects recipient parents’ choices of (...) donor, about who is allowed to “know” children’s genetic backgrounds, and how important it is to be able to “pass” as an unassisted conception. In this way, recipients must trust the process, institutions, and individuals involved in their treatment, as well as place trust in the future they imagine for their child. The current market for donor gametes reproduces normative conceptions of the nuclear family, kinship, and relatedness by facilitating “matching” donors to recipients by phenotype and cultural affinities. Recipient parents who choose not to prioritize “matching,” and actively disclose the process of children’s conceptions, may embark on a project of queering heteronormative family structures and place great trust in both their own children and changing social attitudes to reduce stigma and generate acceptance for non-traditional families. (shrink)

It is useful on the occasion of the 21st anniversary of the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ not only to reconsider its lessons in the context of what is frequently described as the re-engineering of ‘life itself’, but to look at Haraway’s earlier work on embryos. In this article I begin with Haraway’s analysis of embryology in the 1970s to suggest her cyborg embryo was already there, and has, if anything, gained relevance in today’s embryo-strewn society. I argue further, as the title suggests, (...) that the cyborg embryo has been crucial in defining our path to what I am calling here, building on Haraway’s notion of trans from Modest_Witness, ‘transbiology’ - broadly meaning stem cell research, cloning, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. To illustrate this argument I draw on recent ethnographic fieldwork in a new stem cell derivation facility in the UK built adjacent to an IVF surgery. Using this example, I explore the important and paradoxical role of IVF in the emergence of stem cell science, cloning and transbiology, suggesting that Haraway’s analysis remains crucial to understanding the ironic and contradictory, and unexpectedly generative, circumstances through which the IVF-stem cell interface - the door to transbiology - came into being. (shrink)

Transgender individuals and families throw existing taxonomic classification systems of identity into perplexing disarray, illuminating sociolegal dilemmas long overdue for critical sociological inquiry. Using interview data collected from 50 cisgender women from across the United States and Canada, who detail 61 unique partnerships with transgender and transsexual men, this work considers the pragmatic choices and choice-making capacities of this social group as embedded within social systems, structures, and institutions. Proposing the analytic constructs of “normative resistance” and “inventive pragmatism” to situate (...) the interactional processes between agency and structure in the everyday lives of this understudied group of cisgender women, this work theorizes the liminal sociolegal status of an understudied family form. In so doing, it exposes the increasingly paradoxical consolidation and destabilization of sociolegal notions of identity, marriage, normativity, and parenthood—challenging, contributing to, and extending current theoretical and empirical understandings of agency and structure in twenty-first-century families. (shrink)

Early onset puberty is increasingly prevalent among girls globally according to many scientists and clinicians. In the medical and scientific literature early sexual development is described as a problem for girls and as a frightening prospect for parents. News media and popular environmentalist accounts amplify these figurations, raising powerful concerns about the sexual predation of early developing girls by men and boys and the loss of childhood innocence. In this article the author frames one feminist approach to early puberty, arguing (...) that feminist theorists should both take scientific work around population changes in sexual development seriously and use their critical skills to unpick and challenge the discourses constituting early development as a matter of concern. The author suggests that contemporary academic and policy debates on the ‘sexualization’ of girls have important resonance for critical explorations of early puberty. These debates currently pay little attention to the physiological aspects of sexual development and could be enriched by so doing. As in the case of ‘sexualization’, issues of class, racialization and agency are central to understanding and challenging normative concerns about girls’ early sexual development. (shrink)

Smartphones are increasingly entangled with the most intimate areas of everyday life, providing possibilities for the continued expansion of digital self-tracking technologies. Within this context, the development of smartphone applications targeted at female reproductive health are offering novel forms and practices of knowledge production about reproductive bodies and processes. This article presents empirical research from the United Kingdom on women’s use of fertility tracking applications, known more generally as fertility apps, while trying to conceive. Drawing on material from interviews with (...) women who had experience of using fertility apps, I demonstrate the significance of this particular form of fertility tracking for the embodied shift from pregnancy prevention to actively facilitating pregnancy, participants’ sense of self and identity and how they perceived the reproductive potentiality of their bodies. I argue that fertility apps are significantly involved in making fertility cycles known and thus configuring the pre-pregnant reproductive body. (shrink)

Assessing what counts as infertility has practical implications: access to (state-funded) fertility treatment is usually premised on meeting the criteria that constitute the chosen definition of infertility. In this paper, I argue that we should adopt the expression “involuntary childlessness” to discuss the normative dimensions of people’s inability to conceive. Once this conceptualization is adopted, it becomes clear that there exists a mismatch between those who experience involuntary childlessness and those that are currently able to access fertility treatment. My concern (...) in this article is explaining why such a mismatch deserves attention and what reasons can be advanced to justify addressing it. My case rests on a three-part argument: that there are good reasons to address the suffering associated with involuntary childlessness; that people would decide to insure against it; and that involuntary childlessness is characterized by a prima facie exceptional kind of desire. (shrink)

Contemporary medical imaging technologies produce images on the level of human cells. As a result of such images, egg and sperm cells have become well-known artefacts of popular culture. Medical imaging technology has transformed these gametes from invisible matter integrated in biological processes within the body to identifiable objects. The visualisation of egg and sperm cells has literally lifted the process of human reproduction out of the female body and made the gametes appear as protagonists in the story of human (...) reproduction. The article argues that visualisation of the gametes and the central role they play in contemporary imaginations of reproduction may offer vital contributions to the rather rapid acceptance and normalisation of assisted reproduction. (shrink)

This thesis is a contribution to feminist laboratory studies and a critical engagement with the natural sciences, or more precisely research on the biochemical workings and deadly relations of Alzheimer’s disease emanating from a year of field work in a Drosophila fly lab. The natural sciences have been a point of fascination within the field of gender studies for decades. Such sciences produce knowledge on what gets to count as nature and natural, healthy or sick, normal or not, and they (...) have done it with great societal authority and impact throughout European modernity. However, feminist technoscience scholars argue that science and knowledge is socially produced, and political too. Concepts such as nature, animal, human, body, sex, and life itself are not simply given natural realities but phenomena processed through the naturecultures of the laboratory. Situated within such theoretical and methodological approaches, this thesis wonders how scientific facts about Alzheimer’s disease are made in the lab today. What kinds of realities, bodies and ethico-political concerns are enacted? Who gets to live and who gets to die in everyday laboratory practices? Theoretically, the thesis is grounded, particularly, within Karen Barad’s agential realism and posthumanist performativity, and as such it accounts for human and nonhuman entanglements through which AD is performed in the lab in relational ways. In other words, the thesis explores how AD is enacted in the bodies of transgenic fruit flies, as these flies embody the disease, live and die with it. Last but not least, the thesis explores the materialities of death, dying, embodiment and biological waste in a biochemistry lab as constitutive parts of the produced knowledge about AD. (shrink)

The growing abundance of medical technologies has led to laments over doctors’ sensory de-skilling, technologies viewed as replacing diagnosis based on sensory acumen. The technique of percussion has become emblematic of the kinds of skills considered lost. While disappearing from wards, percussion is still taught in medical schools. By ethnographically following how percussion is taught to and learned by students, this article considers the kinds of bodies configured through this multisensory practice. I suggest that three kinds of bodies arise: skilled (...) bodies; affected bodies; and resonating bodies. As these bodies are crafted, I argue that boundaries between bodies of novices and bodies they learn from blur. Attending to an overlooked dimension of bodily configurations in medicine, self-perception, I show that learning percussion functions not only to perpetuate diagnostic craft skills but also as a way of knowing of, and through, the resource always at hand; one’s own living breathing body. (shrink)

Selection in reproductive medicine today relies on normative assessments of what ‘good life’ consists of. This paper explores the terms under which such assessments are made by focusing on three particular concepts of ‘quality’: quality of life, biological quality and population quality. It is suggested that the apparently conflicting hypes, hopes and fears that surround reproductive medicine can co-circulate because of the different forms of normative assessment that these concepts allow. To ensure clarity in bioethical deliberations about selection, it is (...) necessary to highlight how these differing forms of assessment are mobilized and invoked in practices of and debates about reproductive medicine. (shrink)

In 1984, eight-year-old Paula Logares was called into a judge’s chambers and was told the man and woman she lived with were not her parents. Her parents had been disappeared during the dirty war, and now, through her blood, scientists would be able to return her to her birth family. Paula, thus, became the first “stolen” child in Argentina to be identified via the incipient technology of DNA identification. With this forensic first, DNA identification has emerged as a central tool (...) of good governance the world round. From routine crime fighting to international criminal tribunals, DNA plays a crucial role in attempts to reckon with crimes of the body. As an alternative origin for forensic DNA, Argentina offers an early example of science emerging from social movements in the Global South. Drawing on twenty-seven months of fieldwork with family members, activists, and scientists, this article documents the ways in which DNA has emerged as a core site of subject formation for individuals and families affected by the terror of the dictatorship and for the Argentine nation-state, as it reckons with the legacies of repression. Through a feminist, postcolonial frame, I offer the concept of restitution as a way of attending to the forms of biocitizenship that emerge during times of humanitarian crisis and transitional justice. As a tool of reproductive governance, forensic DNA acts not only as a powerful disciplinary site of biocitizenship but also as a potential space to reimagine the social contract between the body, the public, and the state. (shrink)

Rather than focus on effects, the isolatable and measureable outcomes of events and interventions, the papers assembled here offer different perspectives on the affective dimension of the meaning and politics of human/non-human relations. The authors begin by drawing attention to the constructed discontinuity between humans and non-humans, and to the kinds of knowledge and socialities that this discontinuity sustains, including those underpinned by nature-culture, subject-object, body-mind, individual-society polarities. The articles presented track human/non-human relations through different domains, including: humans/non-humans in history (...) and animal welfare science (Fudge and Buller); the relationship between the way we live, the effects on our natural environment and contested knowledges about ‘nature’ (Whatmore); choreographies of everyday life and everyday science practices with non-human animals such as horses, meerkats, mice, and wolves (Latimer, Candea, Davies, Despret). Each paper also goes on to offer different perspectives on the human/non-human not just as division, or even as an asymmetrical relation, but as relations that are mutually affective, however invisible and inexpressible in the domain of science. Thus the collection contributes to new epistemologies/ontologies that undercut the usual ordering of relations and their dichotomies, particularly in that dominant domain of contemporary culture that we call science. Indeed, in their impetus to capture ‘affect’, the collection goes beyond the usual turn towards a more inclusive ontology, and contributes to the radical shift in the epistemology and philosophy of science’s terms of engagement. (shrink)

This interview reconsiders Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto 21 years after it was first published. It asks what has become of the three boundary breakdowns around which the Manifesto was structured - those between animals and humans, animal-humans (organisms) and machines, and the ‘physical and non-physical’. Against this backdrop, this interview examines the connection between the Cyborg Manifesto and Haraway’s more recent writings on companion species, along with what it means to read or write a ‘manifesto’ today. Recent notions of the (...) ‘posthuman’ are also placed into question. (shrink)