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Embodied Subjects and Fragmented Objects: Women’s Bodies, Assisted Reproduction Technologies and the Right to Self-Determination
Abstract
This article focuses on the transformation of the female reproductive body with the use of assisted reproduction technologies
under neo-liberal economic globalisation, wherein the ideology of trade without borders is central, as well as under liberal
feminist ideals, wherein the right to self-determination is central. Two aspects of the body in western medicine—the fragmented
body and the commodified body, and the integral relation between these two—are highlighted. This is done in order to analyse
the implications of local and global transactions in women’s reproductive body parts for their right to self-determination
and individual agency and what this means for their embodiment. We conclude by exploring whether women can become embodied
subjects by exercising their proprietary right to their bodies through directing technology to achieve their own goals, while
at the same time being fragmented into parts and losing their personhood and bodily integrity.
... Whereas social scientific scholarship has foregrounded patient experiences, concerning transnational reproductive care, the reproductive body has long been a focal point in feminist scholarship. Notably, the alienation of the female body has previously been discussed by feminists, especially in the case of ART (Gupta and Richters, 2008;Kroløkke and Foss, 2011;Markens, 2007) À the fragmentation of the whole body into the substances of ovaries, eggs and wombs that can be transferred to another body. Thus, in the case of gestational surrogacy, the 'gift of life' comes from another woman who offers her reproductive organ and often feels estranged from the pregnancy (Gupta and Richters, 2008;Pande, 2014). ...
... Notably, the alienation of the female body has previously been discussed by feminists, especially in the case of ART (Gupta and Richters, 2008;Kroløkke and Foss, 2011;Markens, 2007) À the fragmentation of the whole body into the substances of ovaries, eggs and wombs that can be transferred to another body. Thus, in the case of gestational surrogacy, the 'gift of life' comes from another woman who offers her reproductive organ and often feels estranged from the pregnancy (Gupta and Richters, 2008;Pande, 2014). It is, accordingly, both the intended mother and the gestational carrier who can be framed as experiencing a bodily exile. ...
... The responses of the permanently infertile women highlighted the feeling of being amputated, half a woman or not a woman at all. This suggests that the reproductive body in exile can cover both the notion of the gestational carrier who becomes alienated from her pregnancy, as shown in previous studies (Gupta and Richters, 2008;Pande, 2014), and the distance the intended mother experiences due to her lack of a reproductive body. In this way, Inhorn's phrase of reproductive exile is useful and, as illustrated in this work, is applicable across various elements of the transnational surrogacy process. ...
Research question:
How did permanently infertile couples Danish experience surrogacy when going abroad and what impact did the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic have on this?
Design:
A qualitative study was performed between May and September 2022. The in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 permanently infertile couples across Denmark who were in different stages of using surrogacy. The interviews were transcribed and analysed using systematic text condensation.
Results:
All except one couple went abroad, mainly to Ukraine, to have an enforceable transparent contract, professionals to advise them and the possibility of using the eggs of the intended mother. They did not feel that this was a 'choice' but rather the only option they had to have the longed-for child. According to current Danish legislation, the intended mother could not obtain legal motherhood over the child, not even through stepchild adoption, and this increased the feeling of not being a 'worthy mother'. This study expanded on the term 'reproductive exile' by identifying four different forms of exile: the exiled Danish couple, the gestational carrier in exile, exile at home and, finally, the reproductive body in exile.
Conclusions:
Understanding infertile couples' experiences when crossing borders is important for several reasons. It may, among others, assist politicians and authorities in developing a sound Danish legal policy on surrogacy to address the current issues of legal parenthood and avoid missing reproductive opportunities for permanently infertile couples.
... Some discourses on ARTs cast them as 'antithetical' to or a 'perversion' of 'natural' reproduction (Storrow, 2011;Takhar & Houston, 2021). Cis-feminist framings of these technologies construct them as medico-patriarchal control over cisgender women's reproduction (Hammons, 2008;Parks, 2009) and as reproducing oppressive regimes in transnational reproductive economies (Fixmer-Oraiz, 2013;Gupta & Richters, 2008;Vertommen et al., 2022) on the one hand, and as enabling cisgender women's reproductive autonomy on the other (Hammons, 2008;Parks, 2009). The queering of ARTs frames them as a challenge to cisheteronormativity, including heteronuclearity, by enabling some queer people to have bio-genetically related children and families, in ways that challenge normative family-making and normative understandings of what constitutes a family, even as queer access is limited due to cisheteronormativity and the legal, financial, and social barriers it creates for queer bio-family-making (Fixmer-Oraiz & Yam, 2021;Ho, 2019). ...
... In doing so, he collapses the socially constructed boundary between humans and technology (Archibald & Barnard, 2018) with the use of the word "install", framing wombs and their recipients as part of and indistinguishable from technology itself. Through a mechanical discourse, Mambane frames bodies as transformable and enhanceable and akin to machines; bodies have dividable parts that can be added and "installed" (Gupta & Richters, 2008). ...
... This absence may owe to the fact that during interviews, I did not ask participants to discursively navigate donors' role in the process; my goal was to focus singularly on and attempt to isolate meanings around pregnancy/pregnant embodiment, reproduction, and gender/sex that would inform cis men's desire to (not) become pregnant via a womb transplant. However, the effect of this silence (my own and participants) around donors' participation is that it reproduces repronormative and capitalist patterns in assisted reproduction specifically and organ transplantation more broadly (Gupta & Richters, 2008) where donors' biomaterial contributions are minimised, their labour and personhood are invisibilised, and their well-being and dignity overlooked (Gupta & Richters, 2008;Mamo & Alston-Stepnitz, 2015;Vertommen et al., 2022). Underscored, then, is the need for accountable ART and organ transplantation practices where accountability means recognising and supporting the labour, agency, freedom, well-being, and desires of donors and recipients alike, in all their diversity (Mamo & Alston-Stepnitz, 2015). ...
Much reproductive scholarship presumes that cisgender men do not wish to become pregnant. And within scholarly discussions on womb transplant technology in particular, cis men's desires to be pregnant are constructed as ‘insubstantial’, and cis men are positioned as neither desiring nor requiring womb transplant technology. Repronormativity, including the assumption that pregnancy and gestational desire are antithetical to cis masculinity/manhood, underpins both bodies of work. As part of a study that sought to visibilise, and analyse narratives of, cis men's desires to be pregnant and/or gestational parents, six cis men were asked whether they would use womb transplant technology to enable their pregnancy if womb transplant technology included men as recipients. The majority of participants said they would not do so, giving different reasons. Using a narrative‐discursive approach to analyse their responses, I argue that their varied responses disrupt and re‐circulate normative discourses on sex/gender, pregnancy, parenthood, and (assisted) reproduction. Ultimately, their varied reasons trouble the normative assumption that cis men do not want to be pregnant and would not take up the opportunity to do so, because they are men.
... En la aplicación de las técnicas de reproducción asistida, existe una tendencia creciente a ver a las mujeres como vientres y máquinas para tener bebés, en lugar de verlas como personas integrales (Gupta & Richters, 2008); podríamos decir que son como "calderos" donde se prepara una receta de cocina muy bien parametrizada. En este tipo de procedimiento, el cuerpo de la mujer es una fábrica donde las mujeres son los trabajadores bajo la supervisión de médicos mánagers, cocineros que meten y sacan ingredientes dentro y fuera del "caldero". ...
... Dentro de este modelo de fábrica de reproducción, es el médico y no la "mujer en el cuerpo" la que tiene el control. Las mujeres como productoras de óvulos, el material para la investigación embrionaria, y de los hijos cae dentro de esta supervisión (Gupta & Richters, 2008). Ellas ponen sus cuerpos a disposición de la tecnología y de los científicos reproductivos. ...
... Esto se ve mucho más claramente en la maternidad subrogada, pues la pareja contratante y los especialistas en infertilidad temporalmente se adueñan del cuerpo de una mujer para que les sirva de incubadora. La mujer es llamada transportador gestacional, no se le llama una mujer, se deja de lado a aquella que tiene un nombre y un rostro, y sus derechos legales quedan subordinados a los de los padres genéticos (Gupta & Richters, 2008). De la misma manera que con los desarrollos en medicina de trasplantes, con los avances en medicina reproductiva, los límites del cuerpo han sido extendidos, teniendo como resultado un cuerpo sin límites, fluido, flexible, con fugas y abierto (Martin, 1992;Gupta & Richters, 2008). ...
Transhumanism is a movement that seeks to transcend certain limitations inherent in the human condition as we know it. But does it justify overriding the dignity of current human beings in order to satisfy the desire to increase human potential and improve human beings as such, in order to obtain other human beings? Does it justify disregarding the dignity of women in order to obtain new human beings through fertilization? To answer these questions, this study made a sweep over the ideas of transhumanism that drive this type of techniques, to later understand the vision that women have in the use of in vitro fertilization, the hidden discrimination under these procedures and the clarification of the true emancipation and restoration of women's rights in relation to the use of in vitro fertilization.
... Globalization of reproduction is driven by three motors in particular: (1) transportation (aviation) technology by which both persons and reproductive body parts can be physically transported over long distances at a fast speed to accomplish "global assemblages"; (2) the proliferation of information and communication technologies (the media, especially the Internet) by which ideas are disseminated at even faster speeds, and their role in bringing individuals and/ or their body parts together as well as their contribution to the commodi cation and ourishing trade in this eld (Gupta and Richters 2008); and (3) a liberalized free market that allows capital ows around the globe without hindrances. Ironically, elements that foster globalization are also those that weaken the ability of national governments to control the industry (Donchin 2011). ...
... Just as in capitalist production women are marginalized from their productive labor, in this form of globalized reproduction women are being marginalized and alienated from their reproductive labor (Andersen 1993;Gupta 2000), implying exploitation as well as literal and emotional detachment. In trying to become embodied subjects, egg donors and surrogates become disembodied objects (Gupta and Richters 2008). As Nahman (2010), says, "the labor of the woman who carries the baby to term and her embodied subjectivity is erased." ...
... As Hester Eisenstein (2009) says, the capitalist system is exploiting and making use of feminist ideas and women's labor. Several authors (McNeil, Varcoe, and Yearley 1990;Franklin 1997;Becker 2000) have written on the "myth of choice" and women's autonomy in relation to new reproductive technologies and ARTs, particularly in India (Gupta 2000(Gupta , 2006Gupta and Richters 2008); they have concluded that women's agency in this respect cannot be isolated from other areas of life that condition women's agency such as education, own income, vulnerable position within marital household, gender discrimination, and violence. ...
A growing number of infertile couples and other individuals desiring children are seeking to fulfill their desire for parenthood transnationally through the use of donor gametes and a surrogate. The number of “fertility tourists” from developed countries to low-income countries is growing phenomenally. Indian women, too, are participating as (re)producers in these “biocrossings,” turning India into the surrogacy outsourcing capital of the world in the globalized bioeconomy of assisted reproduction. I argue for a ban on commercial egg donation and surrogacy and a social-justice approach that would hold the state responsible for providing basic social goods to low-income households. I also argue for a gender-justice approach so that women would not be compelled to adopt surrogacy as a strategy for survival and upward social mobility.
... This appropriate scope of autonomy was considered by Gupta and Richters (2008), in relation to how assisted reproduction technology has transformed the female (potentially) 'reproductive' body into a 'productive' body, with marketable body parts, and they ask whether women 'are "agents" (subjects) in control over their own bodies and owners of its parts or are they "victims" (objects) of the new technologies and the actors and factors which drive their use?'. ...
... It could be argued that one expression of the agency discussed by Gupta and Richters (2008) is the freedom to indulge in so-called 'procreative tourism', a term coined in 1991 to describe individuals who assert their personal reproductive choices by 'travelling from one institution, jurisdiction or country where treatment is not available to another institution, jurisdiction or country where they can obtain the kind of medically assisted reproduction they desire' (Pennings, 2002). The more widespread this phenomenon, the louder the call for international measures to stop these movements, but Pennings (2002) favoured such tourism, contending that reproductive tourism is an expression of tolerance that prevents conflict between 'the majority who imposes its view and the minority who There is debate over the responsibilities of healthcare professionals who aid conception through assistive reproductive technology. ...
George F Winter explores the complicated topic of assisted reproductive technology and the ethical and moral responsibilities that it may confer on those involved in assisted conception
... An integrated account of the body as a whole seems to be missing in favor of a 'fragmented' body representation. Such a description focused on body parts is consistent with previous research (gupta & Richters, 2008), underlining the potential experience of fragmentation of one's body as a critical aspect in Western medicine-particularly in the reproductive field. This excerpt may also be interpreted as due to the lack of integration between body and mind in the context of medicalized infertility, as suggested by Cordella et al. (2018). ...
... The use of medical language appears consistent with the overall clinical gaze through which women are likely to be addressed -in the context of infertility -by referring to their bodies' medical parameters to address their ability to conceive (Johnson & Fledderjohann, 2012;Jutel, 2009). The 'medicalized' descriptions that women reported of their bodies are in agreement with existing research exploring the practices of healthcare providers within MAR clinics, which reflects a shift of the focus from MAR patients as integrated wholes to the parts of their bodies targeted in those contexts (gupta & Richters, 2008). ...
Objective:
In the context of infertility, women's bodies have a central physical, psychological, and social role. Medically assisted reproduction (MAR) treatment includes highly intrusive procedures targeting women's bodies. This study aimed to develop a preliminary understanding of women's core meanings around their bodies within their experiences of medicalized infertility in Italy.
Design:
104 Italian women dealing with infertility and MAR treatments answered open-ended questions, which were part of a broader online survey. A reflexive thematic analysis was performed.
Results:
Three themes were identified: (a) the paradox of the body: 'I feel like I was born for something that my body can't do'; (b) 'Something only mothers can do': meanings attributed to the physical body; (c) Internalized 'clinical gaze': medicalized body representations.
Conclusions:
This work provides insights into the meanings assigned to their bodies by Italian women dealing with MAR. This study outlined women's ambivalence towards their bodies, describing them as 'fragmented' into parts and as 'deposits' of their reproductive hopes. Results suggest that Italian pronatalist culture may have potential fallouts for women's gendered sense of self and the integration between their biological and psychosocial body experiences. Study limitations, future research directions, and clinical implications are presented.
... In this context, exercising the right to self-determination implies that women can choose, free of coercion or pressure, whether and when they will conceive, the number of children they want to have, and the partners they want to engage with (Knight, 2017;Jansen, 2007). Women's demands for self-determination regarding their reproductive decisions implies having control over their own bodies and lives (Gupta & Richters, 2008). Similarly, for states to guarantee the enjoyment of the right to self-determination, other rights should be respected and promoted. ...
... Nevertheless, to understand decision making in southern societies, it is necessary to think of social relationships and to consider how such decisions are taken by a collective. Literature on SRHR connected to the right to self-determination has been based strongly on colonial political and epistemological frameworks, highlighting the experiences by the individuals and universalising these rights based on the experiences from the North (Jansen, 2007;Knight, 2017;Branka et al., 2014;Gupta & Richters, 2008). This affects particularly persons with disabilities living in the South whose rights and local knowledge and experiences have been often overlooked. ...
The chapters in this collection are reflections of the intellectual, emotional and day-to-day experiences of professional staff engaged in academic development. They provide the reader with glimpses of how academic developers at one South African university are continuously shaping their identities through sense-making processes, how they creatively apply different theoretical approaches to both analysing and informing their work and what their views are of the practical and systemic challenges facing higher education. As such this book expands on as well as challenges the dominant ways of thinking about academic development and academic developers in higher education.
... Gupta (2000) reported that prior to the boom of commercial surrogacy, surrogate mothers in India were always related to the couple seeking their services, indicating the possibility of their subjugation at a familial level. Egg donors in Delhi, India, were found to be pressured for egg donation to close relatives experiencing infertility (Gupta and Richters 2008). A study by the Centre for Social Research (2012) covering three towns and two metropolitan areas in India reported that the husbands coerced Indian surrogate mothers for participation in paid surrogacy, though the report did not present empirical data to validate the claim. ...
... In ethnographic research, access is negotiated and renegotiated at multiple levels of the research project (Gobo 2008). Gaining access to the field was a cyclic process at two levels, that of the settings and the individuals. ...
The rise of surrogacy in India over the last decade has helped individuals across the world to realize their parenting aspirations. In the macro-context of poverty in India and the hierarchical and patriarchal family set-up, concerns are expressed about coercion of women to participate in surrogacy. While the ethical issues engulfing surrogacy are widely discussed, not much is known about the role women play in the decision-making to participate in surrogacy. The paper aims to addresses this gap and is based on a part of a larger ethnographic study conducted at a surrogacy clinic in Anand, Gujarat, India. We explored experiences of forty-one surrogate mothers using in-depth interviews and analysed the narratives to identify women’s own perceived role in the decision-making to participate in surrogacy. Narratives describing the decision-making process were identified and treated as a preliminary unit of analysis. We examined the use of singular and plural pronouns like “I,” “me,” and “mine” versus “we,” “us,” and “our,” along with the use of active and passive voice to determine whether women assumed responsibility for the decision to participate in surrogacy or they attributed the decision to others. Findings unravelled the complexities of the decision-making process and indicated that eighty-five percent of the women played an active role in the decision-making to participate in surrogacy, albeit with new avenues of exploitation in the commercial market space and raised serious bioethical concerns.
... Otras posturas, también desde planteamientos feministas, estiman que la capacidad para gestar y traer al mundo un hijo es una capacidad exclusivamente femenina y un símbolo de su "empoderamiento" (Gupta/ Richters, 2008, aludiendo a sociedades como la de India), de modo que prohibir la maternidad subrogada supone una restricción de la libertad de la mujer para decidir sobre el ejercicio de esa específica capacidad y, a la postre, disminuye la autonomía de la mujer para tomar sus propias decisiones (Shapiro, 2014(Shapiro, , p. 1352. Estas mismas posiciones apoyan la admisión de la práctica, sin descartar, e incluso sustentando, que pueda ser remunerada, si bien algunas exigen el reconocimiento legal del vínculo de filiación entre la madre subrogada y el niño, vínculo que no tendría por qué ser excluyente con el de los padres (o padre y madre, de intención), aunque sí podría ser renunciable (Shapiro, 2014(Shapiro, , p. 1363. ...
La maternidad subrogada constituye uno de los temas más controvertidos entre los muchos de esta índole que afectan al uso y disposición del cuerpo de la mujer. Razones de índole ética, sociológica y jurídica convergen para argumentar a favor y en contra de una práctica que, queramos o no, se halla cada vez más extendida. Al igual que sucede en otros temas relacionados con el cuerpo femenino, como el aborto o la prostitución, las diferentes posturas están cada vez más distanciadas y los márgenes para alcanzar puntos de encuentro resultan demasiado estrechos. Estamos convencidas de que el primer deber académico es huir de una neutralidad simple que a todos contente; pronunciarse con argumentos es la tarea que nos corresponde y el que, a sabiendas del riesgo que corremos y de que nuestra postura tampoco puede ser definitiva, este trabajo pretende.
... (McLeod 2009, 33) As Gupta and Richters point out, "these technologies have proliferated under neo-liberal economic glo-balisation…wherein the right to self-determination, choice, and autonomy are ideals to strive for." (Gupta and Richters 2008, 2) Talk of reproductive autonomy, then, captures an ethical ideal of free choice, control, and non-interference, with perhaps additional positive provisions to grant people "a range of life enhancing procreative choices" (Jackson 2001, 8) which a "society ought to strive to respect…as far as it is possible to do so." (O'Donovan 2018, 491). ...
The common liberal understanding of reproductive autonomy – characterized by free choice and a principle of non-interference – serves as a useful way to analyse the normative appeal of having certain choices open to people in the reproductive realm, especially for issues like abortion rights. However, this liberal reading of reproductive autonomy only offers us a limited ethical understanding of what is at stake in many kinds of reproductive choices, particularly when it comes to different uses of reproductive technologies and third-party reproduction. This is because the liberal framework does not fully capture who benefits from which reproductive options, the extent of the risks and harms involved in various reproductive interventions, and the reasons for why people are driven to make certain reproductive choices.
... In our results, this is expressed through abstract self-serving explanations about the value of professional mission or hypervigilant and controlling behaviors in diabetes management. However, some authors suggest that such strategies may reinforce depersonalization and reduce job satisfaction over time [27,31]. The second factor deals with the tendency to repair patients' integrity as "persons" since diabetes is a chronic and disabling condition involving ongoing psychological adjustment due to the impossibility to restore a completely healthy state [32]. ...
Objective
To explore the subjective experience of physicians working in diabetic settings about their care relationships in order to find some unique clues contributing to physician professional health and capacity to manage patients’ adherence.
Research design and methods
An interview-based exploratory study has been carried out involving 18 physicians (77.8% female) with at least 3 years of clinical practice in diabetes care. In-depth interviews about the emotional experience with patients with diabetes were conducted and audio recorded. Interviews transcripts were analyzed through a computer-based text analysis which allowed the identification of thematic domains (Cluster Analysis) and latent factors (Correspondence Analysis) viewed through a psychodynamic and constructivist lens.
Results
Six thematic domains emerged respectively referring to: Concern (8.43%), Control (14.42%), Ambivalence (22.08%), Devotion (22.49%), Guilt (19.29%) and Strive for Achievement (13.30%). Moreover, three latent dimensions were taken into account, which explained 69.20% of data variance: Affect Repression (28.50%), Tendency to Repair (22.70%) and Anxiety Pattern (18.00%).
Conclusions
Overall, the results of the present study confirm the challenging nature of diabetes care. In particular, physicians ongoing effort to restore patients’ psychological integrity in chronic condition constitute the most novel finding above all. In this regard, the need for emotional labor in physicians’ education and training is suggested in order to both prevent burnout symptoms (e.g. depersonalization) and promote shared decision making in care relationships. However, findings should be treated as preliminary given the convenience nature of the sample and its reduced size.
... Trabajos situados en los estudios sociales de la salud y la tecnología han explorado la forma en la cual procesos de objetivación, mercantilización y normalización, asociados a la medicina moderna, no solo producen logros biomédicos (Timmermansa y Almeling, 2009) que conllevan a la sujeción, sino que también suponen novedosas formas de autodeterminación en casos como la reproducción asistida (Agnihotri y Richters, 2008) o en el aborto. ...
Encuentros Latinoamericanos, Sección Estudios de Género:
Dossier «Tecnología y reproducción en América Latina»
Coordinan: Mariana Viera Cherro y Rosana Machin
... However, the highly technical nature of the ART professionals' work may engender the risk of depersonalizing patients looked at as childbearing machines, thus leading to potential burnout and reduced work meaningfulness over time (Fedele et al., 2020;Gupta & Richters, 2008). ...
Objective:
This study described the development and psychometric evaluation of the fertility reparation inventory, providing measures of manic and expiatory reparation as symbolic dynamics of restoring one's procreative and generative identity through Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART).
Methods:
Two cross-sectional studies were conducted on female patients undergoing ART (N = 150) and women from the general population (N = 250), respectively. Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis assessed construct validity and reliability. Pearson's bivariate correlations were used to provide convergent evidence of validity with omnipotence, perceived infertility-related stress, anxiety, depression, need for reparation, fear of punishment, and hope.
Results:
The results confirmed a two-factor solution of the 12-item instrument, with adequate fit, a very good internal consistency, and well-supported forms of convergent validity.
Conclusion:
This study provides a meaningful psychodynamic contribution, in both theoretical and empirical terms, for the understanding of emotional dynamics and psychological issues underlying the demand for ART.
... Such processes, they argue, reduce women to fragmented parts as their bodies are manipulated by medical experts and technologies (cf. Gupta and Richters, 2008;Perrotta, 2008;Sharp, 2000). Contrary to this depiction of the docile, fragmented woman devoid of subjectivity, Thompson (2005; see also Cussins, 1998) has argued that objectification is not antithetical to agency and personhood. ...
Analyses of assisted reproductive technologies have demonstrated how objectification and agency can coexist in infertility centers. How objectification creates opportunities for empowerment, however, has not yet been explored. In analyzing 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.
... Bharadwaj, , 2003A. Bharadwaj, , 2016Gupta, 2005Gupta, , 2006Gupta, , 2012Pennings et al., 2009;Farouk, 2010;Gerrits and Shaw, 2010;Simpson, 2000Simpson, , 2004Simpson, , 2009Widge and Cleland, 2009b;Gupta and Richters, 2008;Widge, 2005;Mukherjee and Nadimipally, 2006;Chakravarty and Dastidar, 1986). Some recent additions to gender, technology, and infertility issues are studies on infertility among immigrants, cross-border reproductive care, and cross-border studies on ARTs among the diaspora (Culley et al., 2009;Inhorn and Birenbaum-Carmeli, 2008;Inhorn and Fakih, 2006;Hudson and Culley, 2005;Naanyu, 2001). ...
This book examines the intersectionality and stratified lived experience of rural poor and urban middle-class childless women in Bangladesh.
Childless women in Bangladesh, an over-populated country where fertility control is the primary focus of health policy, are all but non-existent. Papreen Nahar offers an alarming account of stigma, abuse, ostracism and violence against these women, sharing their experiences of marginalisation in a culture that idealises motherhood. In such a reality, the experience of childlessness, particularly for women, can be much more severe than what is defined as ‘infertility’ in the biomedical sense. As childlessness is a complex interaction between biology, society and culture, the book illustrates the ways in which infertility transforms a health problem into social suffering. Although Bangladeshi childless women are systematically excluded by various structural forces, it appears they do not succumb to their circumstances; rather, they develop resilience and agency to become survivors of their new, albeit bleak, lives.
The volume will be of interest to scholars working in anthropology, reproductive and women’s health, global health, gender studies, development studies and Asian studies.
... 630 within the routine of repetitive and fragmented work procedures across the several steps of the ART treatment like in an assembly line. The central role of the technical nature of the job and of the high accuracy required may trigger depersonalization, contributing to shift the focus from the whole person to his/her bodily parts (e.g., uterus, eggs, embryos, sperm), thus looking at patients as childbearing machines (Gupta & Richters, 2008). ...
Infertility-related psychological research is traditionally oriented to analyze the wellbeing of couples undergoing Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART), than to study the job-related effects on the healthcare fertility staff. This piece of research aims at understanding the subjective perspective of the fertility professionals and contribute to identify their emotional dynamics in their work environment. An in-depth explorative research study was conducted on 12 healthcare professionals of an Italian ART hospital clinic. Structured interviews with open-ended questions were administered to explore their deep feelings about their professional experience. Emotional text analysis was then conducted to analyze the textual corpus of their narratives to grasp their affective symbolizations. Statistical multidimensional techniques were used to detect some thematic domains (cluster analysis) and latent factors organizing the contraposition between them (multiple correspondence analysis). Five thematic domains were detected which refer to different emotional dimensions, as follows: performance anxiety (Cluster 1), ambivalence between omnipotence and powerlessness (Cluster 2), care burden (Cluster 3), feeling of duty (Cluster 4), and sense of interdependence (Cluster 5). Then, four latent factors were identified dealing with the laborious attempt to remedy, the realistic sense of limitation, the incumbent feeling of pressure and the restorative sense of justice, respectively. The results are discussed based on the existing literature and some useful recommendations for staff education, training and clinical supervision are provided accordingly.
... [48] Studies also draw attention to the "highly objectionable and questionable" nature of TDI practices in our country that outrageously neglect the ethical principles, cross-genetic implications, and kinship dilemma around the use of the word illegitimate. [49,50] Practices such as the use of donor sperms without the couple's knowledge, sperm mixing, transportation, and discarding of gametes without consent have also been reported. [48,51] Subsequently, stringent legal guidelines have been laid out at a national level, to monitor the functionality of ART clinics, their services and protect the rights of recipients, donors, and donor offsprings. ...
... [48] Studies also draw attention to the "highly objectionable and questionable" nature of TDI practices in our country that outrageously neglect the ethical principles, cross-genetic implications, and kinship dilemma around the use of the word illegitimate. [49,50] Practices such as the use of donor sperms without the couple's knowledge, sperm mixing, transportation, and discarding of gametes without consent have also been reported. [48,51] Subsequently, stringent legal guidelines have been laid out at a national level, to monitor the functionality of ART clinics, their services and protect the rights of recipients, donors, and donor offsprings. ...
The experience of delays in conception or possibility of remaining childless has the potential to create considerable psychological discomfort. In couples with severe male factor infertility, therapeutic intrauterine insemination using donor sperms (TDI) is offered as a treatment, second to in vitro fertilization using donor sperms. TDI is lucrative, less invasive, and a hopeful treatment. However, there are intricacies associated with it. Its immediate outcomes involve limited success rates, nonresponse, and chances of implantation failures, miscarriages, and multifetal pregnancies. Due to this, couples experience distress when they are advised to undergo three to six cycles of TDI in order to meet the expectations of having a baby. TDI has long-term issues on the triad comprising the “recipients,” the “donors,” and the “the children born out of TDI.” Nevertheless, managing psychosocial needs for couples undergoing TDI and other treatments in Indian clinics are grey areas of the conventional treatment pathway. The present review expands on the psychological issues and needs in couples opting for TDI.
... This ethical issue connects with Gupta and Richters description of the paradoxical ethical implications of the fragmentation of body parts, their globalisation and commodification. 40 Following their line of thought, the issue of reproductive outsourcing shows that the question of the trade in human body parts could also be related to political decisions with local and global consequences. Reproductive outsourcing asks numerous questions. ...
Cross-border reproductive care (CBRC) can be defined as the movement from one jurisdiction to another for medically assisted reproduction (MAR). CBRC raises many ethical concerns that have been addressed extensively. However, the conclusions are still based on scarce evidence even considering the global scale of CBRC. Empirical ethics appears as a way to foster this ethical reflection on CBRC while attuning it with the experiences of its main actors. To better understand the ‘in and out’ situation of CBRC in Canada, we conducted an ethnographic study taking a ‘critically applied ethics’ approach. This article presents a part of the findings of this research, obtained by data triangulation from qualitative analysis of pertinent literature, participant observation in two Canadian fertility clinics and 40 semidirected interviews. Based on participants’ perceptions, four themes emerged: (1) inconsistencies of the Canadian legal framework; (2) autonomy and the necessity to resort to CBRC; (3) safety and the management of CBRC individual risks; and (4) justice and solidarity. The interaction between these four themes highlights the problematic of ‘reproductive outsourcing’ that characterised the Canadian situation, a system where the controversial aspects of MAR are knowingly pushed outside the borders.
... As today, a Foucauldian bent influenced early studies of reproductive technologies, with much of the feminist studies literature viewing it in overwhelmingly negative terms (Bordo 1993;Corea 1985;Klein 1987;Menzies 2000). A large proportion of studies that deal with the gendered dimensions of reproductive discourses, while increasingly intersectional in its consideration of dimensions of race and class (Bell 2009;Gupta and Richters 2008;Valerius 1997), views ARTs primarily as an embodiment, representation, or manifestation of gendered relations of dominance and subordination. These authors maintain that women's bodies are controlled by a medical establishment whose technologies are overwhelmingly developed by affluent white men who reinforce conservative cultural norms, and urge "traditional" choices upon women (Negra 2009;Valerius 1997). ...
This article addresses the gap in research on visual and narrative persuasion in online fertility marketing contexts and reveals their reliance on rhetorical ruses embedded in the language of “choice” and “empowerment”. We assess four websites targeting women and men who have experienced infertility and expose their “digirhetrickery”, or use of deceptive rhetoric in digital space which exploits gendered stereotypes of the female body in ways that ultimately mislead their target markets about assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and the “liberatory” potential they offer. We advance digital rhetoric as an analytical method to the field of consumer research in order to engage in a reflexive analysis that reveals these underhand ideological operations. As “authorial voices” and narrative agents in digital advertising discourse are more cunningly subterranean, this study shows how the instrumentalization of “consumer empowerment” has become increasingly hyperbolic with particularly problematic consequences for infertile women consumers.
... Si bien se entiende que el control del embarazo y del parto ha supuesto un cambio revolucionario en la forma de vida humana que es fundamental para comprender el mundo contemporáneo ( Boltanski, 2004), en general también se suele criticar la patologización excesiva de la reproducción, así como el sometimiento de las mujeres gestantes al dictado de los protocolos de la clínica con relación al modo adecuado de traer bebés al mundo. Igualmente, se ha puesto de relieve que la medicina no tiene límite a la hora de ampliar sus competencias, que se han extendido a la planificación familiar, haciéndose con el control de los medios de anticoncepción, el control de la natalidad, la preservación de la fertilidad, la interrupción del embarazo, etc. Dado que en pocos años las TRA han adquirido el estatus de recursos decisivos de la configuración de individuos y familias, también se han convertido en objeto de análisis desde la crítica de género y los estudios en biopolítica, que han detectado en la tecnificación de la procreación un instrumento poderoso para intervenir y hacer política sobre los cuerpos, que los somete a ciertas expectativas culturales y se ensaña particularmente con los cuerpos femeninos (entre otros, Gupta y Richters, 2008;Perrotta, 2008;Showden, 2011: 93-134). Pese a que hay mucho de verdad en tales apreciaciones, es innegable también que las TRA brindan una posibilidad de reconsiderar la naturaleza de la especie humana que no debemos desestimar. ...
Resumen: Este artículo comienza abordando el discurso producido en torno a la tecnología de la reproducción asistida. A partir de los textos emitidos por la clínica de fertilidad, se pretende comprender el papel actual de los tratamientos reproductivos y plantear, yendo más allá de las críticas que generan, en qué han ayudado a derribar estereotipos muy establecidos. En primer lugar, la generalización de las tecnologías de reproducción asistida ha acabado con el relato hegemónico sobre la concepción humana (en el que un espermatozoide poderoso logra conquistar un óvulo e iniciar una vida nueva). En segundo lugar, la clínica de fertilidad obliga a entender la reproducción humana como una tarea colectiva, en la que se generan relaciones fructíferas. En tercer lugar, también hace emerger nuevas subjetividades ligadas a la maternidad/paternidad y la filiación, que consiguen desestabilizar ciertas identidades de género y de familia que han sido privilegiadas hasta ahora. A modo de ejemplo de nueva subjetividad, se propone la maternidad jubilea, en cuya fusión de cuerpo y tecnología queda cuestionada con éxito la construcción social de la esterilidad. Palabras clave: clínica de fertilidad, tecnología de reproducción asistida, maternidad, filiación, subjetividad, discurso de la medicina. Abstract: This article addresses the discourse of assisted reproduction technology. By analyzing texts produced by fertility clinics, the aim is to describe the current role of reproductive treatments and to consider their benefits in undermining well-established stereotypes. First, the increase in the use of assisted reproductive technologies breaks down the hegemonic narrative of human conception (in which the powerful sperm conquers the egg to start a new life). Second, in fertility clinic human reproduction should be considered a collective task, in which fruitful relationships are developed. Third, assisted reproductive technology fosters the emergence of new subjectivities linked to motherhood/fatherhood and filiation, which destabilize prevailing gender and family identities. As an example of a new subjectivity, jubilee motherhood is proposed. The fusion of body and technology in it challenges the social construction of infertility. Keywords: fertility clinic, assisted reproductive technology, motherhood, filiation, subjectivity, medical discourse.
... For the purpose of this research, we define the virtual worlds as the user-created life spheres formed through computer systems where a simulation of an alternative "reality" is experienced by its users. Today, through these virtual worlds, we are speaking of human bodies and lives unbounded not only physically but also mentally and fictionally, having the freedom to choose from endless options to create a new identity, a new life and a new body form (Gupta and Richters, 2008). Venkatesh et al. (1998) argue that the virtual world is an "as if" environment just like a simulator, which provides us with the opportunity to have a real-life experience without bearing the cost of our mistakes. ...
The article scrutinises Rohini S. Rajagopal’s work, what’s a lemon squeezer doing in my vagina (2021), to illustrate the escalating medicalisation of infertile bodies. In a cultural context where reproductive concerns are construed as medical disorders demanding treatment and surveillance, medical professionals and pharmaceutical companies exploit these sociocultural dynamics to provide infertile couples with immediate solutions through Assisted Reproductive Technologies. Consequently, the study contributes a critical perspective to the field of medical humanities, initiating a nuanced discourse that interrogates the impact of terms such as ‘living laboratories’, ‘baby machine’, ‘mother machine’ and ‘hope technology’ on our comprehension of future motherhood. Drawing on feminist critiques of medicalisation, the article argues that biotechnology perpetuates the eighteenth-century biomedical metaphor of the body as a machine with replaceable parts. Notably, contemporary advancements in reproductive medicine allow for the replacement of perceived ‘flawed’ body parts, further objectifying them within this framework.
Our paper investigates the fictional representations of ‘biotechnological othering’ and biological precarity as experienced by underprivileged Indian women with particular emphasis on the commodification of their wombs. Foregrounding the exploitation of their reproductive rights via surrogacy at the hands of the glocal capitalist elite, we rout our argument through the representational practices of The House of Hidden Mothers by Meera Syal and Origins of Love by Kishwar Desai to explore the disavowal of the reproductive rights of socio-economically vulnerable Indian women and the re-perpetuation of capitalist modes of inferiorization that target them. Contesting the egalitarian tilt of posthuman discourses, our main contention is that the biotechnological commodification of the wombs of indigent women does not merely confine them within structural inequalities, it also ensures that they remain confined within a biological precarity. Taking theoretical support from pertinent voices in the field including Deepika Bahri, Laura Harrison, Anureet Lotay, Katerina Kolarova and Eva-Sabine Zehelein, we unpick the multi-dimensional ramifications of biotechnological othering depicted in these novels to foreground the threat of biological precarity embedded within transnational surrogacy and the continuation of the dehumanization of Women of Colour in today’s world.
This article explores the interactions and digital practices of people involved in an online community dedicated to surrogacy and egg donation in the province of Québec, Canada. Sociodigital networks, with the emergence of platforms such as Facebook groups, provide a space to discuss assisted reproduction, seek advice, offer support, and connect with other Internet users to negotiate and establish a third‐party reproduction agreement. This study is based on a long‐term ethnographic field within a Facebook group, and individual interviews conducted with 22 members of this community. The data collected were analyzed inductively according to the principles of grounded theory. Three themes emerged from the online interactions and stories of the women we met. First, the publication of intended parents' testimonies is the preferred method of finding a surrogate or egg donor match and is reminiscent of the language and rituals associated with dating sites. Second, the expression of legal and financial concerns occupies a prominent place in the group discussions, given the lack of a legislative framework in this Canadian province and the variability of interpretations of the current legal framework. Third, the choice made by surrogates and donors to be involved in an online community is not random and sometimes indicates of a desire to establish a sense of control over the process and to negotiate the modalities without the presence of an intermediary. Facebook groups dedicated to infertility and assisted reproduction appear to be more than simply matchmakers, as the interactions that occur there perform various functions. In the absence of a formal organization dedicated to parents, surrogates, and donors in Québec, the online community becomes a place for information sharing, support, and networking. This offers avenues of intervention for professionals who need to reflect on and consider how online communities dedicated to third‐party reproduction may influence their practice.
Donor eggs have become commercialized and egg agencies mediate between egg consumers and donors. Despite the rapid growth of this industry, there is a paucity of research focusing on the imaginary aspects of the marketing strategies employed in the egg donation commerce. This article is based on a content analysis of American egg donor profiles. Inspired by Baudrillardian theory, I analyze the marketing strategy and show how egg donors are perfectionized using cultural notions of hegemonic femininity, in order to attract egg consumers by tacitly encouraging them to create an imagined hyperreal ideal self. This marketing strategy aims to de-commodify genetic substance in order to facilitate the exploitation of consumers’ self-concept for business goals. The identity of the donor is imbued with greater meaning for consumers than merely her genetic material, hence offers possibilities for the imaginary actualization of consumers’ ideal selves. Consumers are invited to exercise their agency and form a simulacrum of their desired self and materialize their utmost psychological identity aspirations.
In this article, we look at the predicament of Indian commercial surrogates and how they cope with the knowledge that the child they are carrying must be relinquished by them soon after delivery. How can a surrogate distance herself emotionally from the baby she is carrying? And to what extent is she supported by other surrogates, her family members and the social environment? Much has been written about the economic and social vulnerability of Indian surrogates. We would like to focus in particular on their emotional vulnerability. Following Rogers et al. (2012a), we ask what are the sources of these women’s vulnerability? How do they handle it? Our observations are based on literature review, and empirical research, the latter conducted by the second author in a clinic in South India. To conclude we suggest that the regulation in the making on surrogacy needs to be context and individual sensitive in order to address this aspect of their vulnerability.
In this paper, we explore how women who are unable to conform to age-specific conventions of marriage and childbearing construct their adult identities in socio-cultural contexts that valorize fertility and mandate compulsory marriage and motherhood. Through a detailed ethnography of women’s experiences with menstrual anomalies and reproductive aging, this study examines Odia women’s negotiations with their seemingly “incomplete bodies” and “disrupted identities” in the backdrop of experiencing infertility or anticipating it.
Feminist analysis of surrogacy remains caught between calls for abolition on the one hand, and regulation, on the other. Within this dualistic discourse, the question of recognizing commercial gestational surrogacy as a new form of work–labor remains undermined. This paper brings together the abolition-regulation conceptual framework to examine surrogacy as work–labor. Based on ethnographic research conducted in two surrogacy hotspots in India, it illustrates how women understand and construct meaning from their labor as surrogates. In doing so, the study extends the existing feminist framework, using ethnographic research, to open up a space where the labor of surrogacy can be looked upon as both empowering and subjugating at the same time and in differing ways.
In contemporary pronatalist societies, motherhood and childbearing are constructed as inevitable fulfilments of the female identity, resulting in the stigmatisation of women who do not conform to these feminine ‘ideals’. This article reports on the findings of a scoping review, which explored constructions of women and motherhood in Western societies, and how they influence women’s experiences of infertility. Three key themes were identified: (i) the ‘women as mothers’ discourse; (ii) medicalisation and the ‘female biological fault’; and (iii) ‘deviant’ mothers and infertility. While these themes facilitate a deeper understanding of the ways social ideologies can influence the identity and life-course of infertile women, the current literature was found to be overwhelmingly medical in focus, centred on the concept of Assisted Reproductive Technologies. This article aims to expand narrow discourses on female infertility by exploring women’s support needs and the socio-political impacts on their experience. It extends the interdisciplinary knowledge base in this area by considering the contributions social work can make in addressing these systemic factors.
This paper explores the micro-dynamics of medicalization and unequal patient statuses across donors and intended parents in assisted fertility practices. Based on twelve months of fieldwork in a fertility clinic, including direct observations of 108 patient-medical expert consultations and interviews with donors, I develop an "epistemic-orientation (EO) continuum" to examine the emergence and differing consequences of unequal patient status. Patients who experience practices closer to the "participatory" epistemic orientation end of the continuum enjoy joint decision-making, personal and emotional recognition, and incorporation of their personal values in interactions with medical experts in the clinic. Patients whose experiences align more closely to the "imposed" epistemic orientation end of the continuum experience top-down instruction, neglected personhood, and medical objectification. I find that medical experts rely upon their professional authority to enroll intended parents in participatory epistemic orientations, while donors more likely experience imposed epistemic orientations. Blended orientations also occur within each patient group, often based on individuals' prior fertility experiences. The EO continuum approach carries implications for future research to note how patients of various social identities (i.e. race, class, gender) and patient groups are positioned along the continuum, as well as practical interventions into micro-dynamics of social inequalities in healthcare.
This introductory chapter explores the importance of TV on popular culture in relation to evolving media platforms, consumer practices and its interaction with modern politics—in specific relation to how normative ideologies of family and motherhood are being continually perpetuated. Here, it is made clear that this book sets out to show that such recycling of norms through TV storylines are an anxious response to increasing infertility and alternative family structures enabled through reproductive technologies. Also mentioned here is why this project focusses on the reception rather than the production of the texts. The author will give an overview of the methods used (textual analysis and audience work) why they have been used in relation to the analytical methods (queer theory, genre analysis), and how the combination of these methods and analytical approaches offer a unique feminist perspective for TV studies, specifically in the exploration of how ideologies of motherhood, normative family and sexuality are articulated through these contemporary and popular TV storylines. In addition, this foundational chapter also explores how nineteenth-century notions of family and motherhood resurface through the narratives of these modern TV shows. The author will argue here the importance of exposing what these texts ‘speak’ about the historical and political context of the time. The focus here will be on the reproductive politics in America and Australia, in relation to the texts under analysis. As a lead into the analytical chapters, the author will set out an overview of the texts that have selected for analysis. Here it will be made clear that both The Handmaid’s Tale and Top of the Lake: China Girl are shows that came out after the ethnographic research had been completed and explain why it was decided drama as a genre category was omitted for analysis. These two texts will be explored fully in Chapter 6, in the context of the core of the themes that have emerged through the research.
India stood as a ‘baby cradle’ for the world, and a preferred destination for IVF and surrogacy. Based on the empirical research in different cities in India, and secondary sources, the authors address the policy shifts and the process in which surrogacy became a debatable issue. From unregulated commercial gestational surrogacy, the policy shifted to proposing a complete ban on commercial surrogacy allowing only altruistic surrogacy for Indian couples. The law on surrogacy is still in its making and various stakeholders are advocating towards reversal of the proposed ban, as it will incur financial huge losses for the IVF clinics and surrogates. It is yet to be seen when the law will be passed and what will be the final decision, who will monitor and regulate it.
The recent spectacular progress in assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) has resulted in new ethical dilemmas. Though women occupy a central role in the reproductive process, within the ART paradigm, the importance accorded to the embryo commonly surpasses that given to the mother. This commentary questions the increasing tendency to position the embryonic subject in an antagonistic relation with the mother. I examine how the mother’s reproductive autonomy is compromised in relation to that of her embryo and argue in favour of doing away with the subject-object dyad between them, particularly in the contexts of surrogacy and abortion. I also engage with the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016. A critical discussion of the privacy judgment passed by the Supreme Court of India helps examine how personal autonomy of the body and mind extends to include the reproductive autonomy of women as well.
The paper is devoted to consideration of social consequences of assisted reproductive technologies (ART). ART has become common practice in many countries today and raise many medical, social, ethical, political questions, often leading to controversial and sometimes inaccurate opinions about the outcomes of pregnancies resulting from these techniques. Even though initially, these medical technologies were designed to smooth out natural, biological inequality, their implementation and using have led to the emergence of new forms of social inequality. Using statistics data from both Russian Federal state statistics service and the Russian Association of human reproduction, as well as conducting secondary data analysis, we analyze the emerging of new forms of social inequality. The main criterion to produce inequality is affordability of ART. Despite the existing of legislative regulation of the availability of ART in many countries, including Russia, the implementation of reproductive rights and the possibility of using these methods of human reproduction are determined by socio-economic and financial status of the person. In some cases, gender, ethnicity also are of importance. In Russia, it is possible to highlight the regional disparities, because significant proportion of the ART centers are concentrated in major cities, particularly in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Differences in access to ART induce new forms of social mobility, both at global and regional levels. Not only people, but also genetic materials, values etc. become mobile. «Reproductive tourism» develops. ART also contribute to emergence of new biological inequality and genetic discrimination, thanks to such a method as preimplantation genetic diagnosis. This method contributes to symbolic discrimination against people with disabilities and their families in the present. You can also speak about reproductive bioeconomics, where the reproductive labor e.g. surrogate motherhood is a central element and reproductive material (donorship) are main objects to be exchanged. In the most cases customers of the reproductive market are from developed countries and suppliers accordingly are from developing economies, so we can suggest a new form of colonialism and exploitation. Assisted reproductive technologies are a great example of how modern medical technologies influence social practices and social structure.
In this chapter, I return to re-evaluate Eyerman and Jamison’s cognitive praxis paradigm through the lens of shifting political consciousnesses, using its cosmological, organisational and technical categories to more deeply explore FINRRAGE’s knowledge practices and the ways in which this produced the shape of the organisation, their approach to the technologies, and the arguments and strategies they chose as ‘resistance’. I discuss some limitations to using the cognitive praxis paradigm but conclude that it has revealed the ‘FINRRAGE position’ as something more complex than ‘no’—a unique combination of underlying consciencenesses, technological focus and organisational strategies for creating knowledge for resistance, which gave the network its unique character and purpose.
In Danish and Swedish ethical and media debates, uterine transplants, in sharp contrast to commercial surrogacy, get positioned as a maternal gift-giving act. We argue that uterine transplants become (unlike commercial surrogacy arrangements) positioned in the private, intimate sphere of an individual known living donor (frequently the woman’s mother, a sibling, mother-in-law, or a friend) donating her viable but no longer individually needed uterus to help a known recipient (daughter, sister, daughter-in-law, or friend) experience pregnancy and birth. We propose the concept of bio-intimacy to help make sense of the ways that the uterus, upon separation from the older woman’s body, achieves discursive and material agency while it, in commercial surrogacy cases, is reframed as the exploitation of a less empowered, non-intimate other woman.
This chapter offers an account of the historical emergence of the ‘Janus face’ of infertility in the global North and South, focusing on the period from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s as a particularly active time of development in infertility policy, practice, and debate. It details feminist contributions to discussions on gender development in the Third World that focus on fertility rates, reproductive health services, and population control, and explores feminist contributions to understanding the role of medical technologies in overcoming infertility, and the consequent revolution in understandings of kinship and conception, particularly in the First World. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s thesis that the movement for women’s liberation has become entangled with neoliberal efforts that encourage ‘disorganized’ globalizing effects, this chapter explores the contribution of gender development and gender justice approaches to differential understandings about the provision of, and access to, infertility treatments in local and global contexts.
While studies of ‘parenting culture’ and ‘assisted reproductive technologies’ are now well-established areas of social science scholarship, so far, the potential connections between the two fields have not been significantly explored. Responding to calls for a more ‘processual’ approach to studying reproduction in order to make clearer contributions to sociological theory more broadly, we begin a dialogue between these mutually relevant bodies of literature, highlighting connections and crosscutting findings. We focus on four interlinked themes – Reflexivity, Gender, Expertise and Stratification – and promote a more holistic approach to understanding how children are conceived and cared for within the current ‘Euro-American’ reproductive landscape. By way of conclusion, we draw attention to the contemporary context of ‘anxious reproduction’ and propose directions for future research.
This article examines the human placenta not only as a scientific, medical and biological entity but as a consumer bio-product. In the emergent placenta economy, the human placenta is exchanged and gains potentiality as food, medicine and cosmetics. Drawing on empirical research from the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark and Japan, the authors use feminist cultural analysis and consumer theories to discuss how the placenta is exchanged and gains commodity status as a medical supplement, smoothie, pill and anti-ageing lotion. Placenta preparers and new mothers cite medical properties and spirituality as reasons for eating or encapsulating the placenta, reinstating ideas of the liberated good mother. Meanwhile, the cosmetics industry situates the placenta as an extract and hence a commodity, re-naturalizing it as an anti-ageing, rejuvenating and whitening bio-product. The authors conclude that, in the emergent bio-economy, the dichotomy between the inner and the outer body is deconstructed, while the placenta gains clinical and industrial as well as affective value.
Feminism offers three separate but equally important insights about human genetics and the new reproductive technologies. First, feminism is concerned with ways in which these new technologies have the potential to exploit women, particularly in the treatment of their reproductive tissue, while seeming to offer both sexes greater reproductive freedom. This risk has been largely ignored by much bioethics, which has concentrated on choice and autonomy at the expense of justice, giving it little to say about the concept of exploitation. Second, feminist scholars have developed complex and subtle analyses of how women's labour is incorporated into the global bioeconomy in a gendered manner. Although feminist perspectives vary on such issues as surrogate motherhood, they have provided important studies of how women's labour is commodified in the new reproductive technologies. Finally, feminist analysts and activists have been among the leaders in identifying and resisting the threats from commodification and commercialisation in genetic research and patenting, which often affect women disproportionately. In all three areas, feminist writers have drawn specific attention to medical, economic and political impacts on women that had not been adequately considered.
Key Concepts
Conventional bioethics frequently lacks a political dimension, which feminism corrects by focusing on power and justice issues in the new biotechnologies, including reproductive technologies and human genetics.
According to a feminist analysis, genetics and new reproductive technologies (NRTs) pose a risk when they ignore or even worsen those differences in burdens between men and women that actually could be alleviated by modern biotechnology.
A key insight of feminism is that neither genetics nor NRT is gender neutral.
For example, if there were to be a general movement towards either ‘producing the best children we can’ or ‘three‐parent IVF’ for the purpose of minimising hereditary genetic disorders, women would be asked routinely to undergo superovulation and egg extraction, processes which carry serious medical risks.
This reality is ignored by proponents of ‘procreative beneficence’ and ‘enhancement’, who argue that we should produce ‘the best children we can’ but ignore the burdens on women that would result.
Other common practices in reproductive technologies, including egg sale and commercial surrogate motherhood, have also been contested by feminists, with a particular reaction against cross‐border surrogacy in the Third World.
Women have also been disproportionately affected by the trend towards private firms taking out patents on human genes, such as levied for diagnostic tests on two genes implicated in some breast cancers, BRCA1 and BRCA2 .
A major US legal case, brought by a coalition of women patients and professional bodies, succeeded in overturning many of these patents, demonstrating that it is possible to resist harmful aspects of the new biotechnologies if their inescapably political nature is recognised, as feminists have argued.
Global demand for human ova in in vitro fertilization has led to its expansion in countries with falling average incomes and rising female unemployment. Paid egg donation in the context of national, regional, and global inequalities has the potential to exploit women who are socioeconomically vulnerable, and indeed there is ample evidence that it does. Structural injustices that render women in middle-income countries – and even some high-income countries – economically vulnerable contribute to a context of ‘omissive coercion’ (Wilkinson 200377.
Wilkinson, S. 2003. “The Exploitation Argument Against Commercial Surrogacy.” Bioethics 17 (2): 169–187. doi: 10.1111/1467-8519.00331View all references) that is morally troubling. When egg brokers or fertility clinics take advantage of these background structural injustices and prospective ova providers’ vulnerability in order to pay them less than they need to meet their livelihood needs, they engage in exploitation. Analyzing paid egg donation as a form of reproductive labor, however, can direct our attention to reforms that would reduce exploitative instances of this practice. In contrast to those who see egg provision as inescapably commodifying and harmful, I argue that compensated egg provision can be made less exploitative. I defend my approach against commodification-driven analyses of egg donation and concerns about undue inducement, and conclude by discussing some of the ways in which policy-makers and medical practitioners might reduce the harms that may result from this global practice.
This thesis explores transnational commercial surrogacy in the context of Thailand, with the specific purpose to examine Thai women’s motives and experiences of being a surrogate mother. The study is based on two months of fieldwork in Bangkok between June and August 2014 during which interviews were conducted with eleven former, current or future surrogate mothers. The analysis take a postcolonial feminist approach, and draw upon theory of motherhood, intimate labor and stratified reproduction.
The study shows how the women’s account of why they want to become a surrogate mother is influenced by contemporary cultural and moral values regarding motherhood and womanhood. By being a surrogate mother they live up to the ideal role of the nurturing mother and the dutiful daughter. Furthermore, the women’s experiences of the pregnancy and their position in the arrangement is characterized by worry, uncertainty, and mistrust. This is partly due to how their rights and opinions are deemed less significant than those of the intended parents. The women are also severely limited in their say over various aspects of the pregnancy. Even though the surrogate mothers have made conscious decisions without being persuaded by family or friends, the study shows that they are still in an exposed position within an arrangement that is characterized by uneven power relations. This is further shown by locating the surrogate mothers’ stories and experiences in relation to other stakeholders and within the larger context of commercial surrogacy in Thailand, as well as on a global level.
Technologies to assist reproduction are deconstructing conventional scripts regarding age, parenting and sexuality. Helping individuals and infertile couples with a child wish has become a thriving global business. Women's reproductive bodies and their reproductive body parts have been turned into commodities that are donated or traded. Several centers all over the world are dealing in reproductive body parts, and functioning as global assembly points. Advocates of surrogacy point out the advantages for both intending parents and surrogates, arguing for its regulation. Women's health and rights advocates on the other hand argue that the practice commodifies women and should be legally banned. Feminists are divided in their response to these technologies, particularly over whether they enhance women's agency and subjectivity or not. These developments and competing frameworks of analysis pose new challenges not only for women's rights advocates, but also for sociologists researching on the family, health policy makers, legislators and bioethicists.
Although many feminist authors have pointed out the ways in which women have been property, they have been less successful in suggesting how women might become the subjects rather than the objects of property holding. Property, Women and Politics draws on a series of historical and anthropological studies including the property position of women in classical Greece, the Angle-American legal doctrine of coverture, nineteenth-century prostitution and structural adjustment programmes in sub-Saharan Africa. It provides a comprehensive critique of the treatment of property by both mainstream political theorists and important second-wave feminists. While most canonical theories of property are guilty of excluding the experience and condition of women, thereby ruling out full subjecthood for them, this book argues that the relationship between holding property and becoming a subject is not sex-specific. It deconstructs and contests the concept of property, drawing on recent feminist thought to suggest productive directions for a reconstructed theory of property: one in which women's work counts. This reconstructed model is then applied to such pressing areas of medical ethics as egg and sperm donation, surrogacy, abortion and the sale of fetal tissue.
This article examines how perceptions of what semen is thought to contain affect its value as a marketable product. I explore how donor altruism, intelligence and ethnicity traits thought to be transmitted in sperm are perceived and transacted among representatives of the sperm banking industry, as well as among women who purchase semen for insemination and show how the linkages between the reproductive industry and the sex industry further heighten the commodity-quality of semen donation. I argue that the emphasis placed on altruism, is an attempt to redefine the commodity quality of semen as gift, in order to imbue it with higher emotional and moral value.
Time and Commodity Culture is a set of four linked essays on the cultural systems of postmodernity. Rather than taking modernity and postmodernity as real historical epochs, however, it understands them as strategies for organizing time and social order by means of a `nostalgic' division within them. Each essay explores a particular dimension of this organization of time, especially in relation to the anxieties and the possibilities created by the commodification of culture. The central essay, `Gift and Commodity', studies two areas in which the speed of commodification has increased markedly in recent years: That of the person, and that of information. Using a mix of anthropological, legal, economic, and historical materials, it investigates the privatization of the commons in information by way of such things as the development of markets in human DNA, the trade in human organs, and the creation of property rights in `personality'. `What Was Postmodernism?' analyses the structured anxiety about the commodification of culture that is called `postmodern theory'. A further essay explores tourism as a figure of modernity, and a final essay on memory explores the phenomena of `recovered memory' and of Holocaust remembrance as ways of constructing temporally ordered forms of the real.
This book brings together the work of writers from a range of disciplines and cultural traditions to explore the social and political dimensions of sexuality and sexual experience. The chapters reconfigure existing notions of gender and sexuality, linking them to deeper understandings of power, resistance, and emancipation around the globe. They map areas that are currently at the cutting edge of social science writing on sexuality, as well as the complex interface between theory and practice. The book highlights the extent to which populations and communities that once were the object of scientific scrutiny have increasingly demanded the right to speak on their own behalf, as subjects of their own sexualities and agents of their own sexual histories.
Inspired by Sweetness and Power, in which Sidney Mintz traces the colonial and mercantilist routes of enslaving tastes and artificial needs, this paper maps a late‐20th‐century global trade in bodies, body parts, desires, and invented scarcities. Organ transplant takes place today in a transnational space with surgeons, patients, organ donors, recipients, brokers, and intermediaries—some with criminal connections—following new paths of capital and technology in the global economy. The stakes are high, for the technologies and practices of transplant surgery have demonstrated their power to reconceptualize the human body and the relations of body parts to the whole and to the person and of people and bodies to each other. The phenomenal spread of these technologies and the artificial needs, scarcities, and new commodities (i.e., fresh organs) that they inspire—especially within the context of a triumphant neoliberalism—raise many issues central to anthropology's concern with global dominations and local resistances, including the reordering of relations between individual bodies and the state, between gifts and commodities, between fact and rumor, and between medicine and magic in postmodernity.
More and more areas of medicine involve subjects donating tissues to another — blood, organs, bone marrow, sperm, ova and embryos can all be transferred from one person to another. Within the technical frameworks of biomedicine, such fragments are generally treated as detachable things, severed from social identity once they are removed from a particular body. However an abundant anthropological and sociological literature has found that, for donors and patients, human tissues are not impersonal. They retain some of the values of personhood and identity, and their incorporation often has complex effects on embodied identity. This article draws on feminist philosophy of the body to think through the implications of some of these practices. Specifically, it draws on the idea of intercorporeality, wherein the body image is always the effect of embodied social relations. While this approach is highly productive for considering the stakes involved in tissue transfer, it is argued that the concept of body image has been too preoccupied with the register of the visual at the expense of introceptive data and health/illness events. Empirical data around organ transplant and sperm donation are used to demonstrate that the transfer of biological fragments involves a profound kind of intercorporeality, producing identifications and disidentifications between donors and recipients that play out simultaneously at the immunological, psychic and social levels.
The alienation of body parts and their transformation into commodities raises questions about ownership, property rights, and about possible violation of the moral order. This article focuses on the `social life' of objects, including body parts, and the multiple meanings attached to them that are made visible in systems of exchange. The transformation of DNA obtained in blood samples into immortalized cell lines for use in the Human Genome Diversity Project is introduced as an illustration of contested commodification. The meanings attached to the blood samples by those from whom they are procured and their worth to the scientists who create the cell lines are of an entirely different order. Disputes about the HGDP that have erupted since it was first planned are presented in detail, followed by a discussion of the ethics of gene prospecting and the associated politics of biocapitalism currently proliferating in the private sector.
This article draws on a five-year, multi-sited transnational research project on the global traffic in human organs, tissues, and body parts from the living as well as from the dead as a misrecognized form of human sacrifice. Capitalist expansion and the spread of advanced medical and surgical techniques and developments in biotechnology have incited new tastes and traffic in the skin, bones, blood, organs, tissues, marrow and reproductive and genetic marginalized other. Examples drawn from recent ethnographic research in Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Turkey serve to cast light on the dark side of organs harvesting and transplantation. The article focuses on the dangers of the `fetishized kidney' for both sellers and buyers, for whom this new commodity has become an organ of opportunity and an organ of last resort. The bodily sacrifice is disguised as a donation, rendered invisible by its anonymity, and hidden under the medical rhetoric of `life saving' and `gift giving'. It suggests that the ultimate fetish as recognized long ago by Ivan Illich is the idea of `life' as object of manipulation.
The Elusive Embryo: How Women and Men Approach New Reproductive Technologies. Gay Becker. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 320 pp.
Feminists debate the nature of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and women's choice in relation to it. In this article, we focus on the process of becoming and being an IVF user without questioning women's choices. This process is empirically examined within a feminist body approach. Based on interviews with 22 Israeli Jewish women who went through IVF treatments in two infertility clinics where one of the authors has herself undergone IVF treatment, the article focuses on women's pain. We ask how IVF users learn about, and manage pain, and whether the pain they experience drove them to abandon the treatment. The analysis we present reveals a process, based and shaped by the women's trust in IVF and by an inner struggle. Attempting to cope with pain, the women relied on an image of their bodies as detached from their souls, and they initiated exit points from IVF treatment once their emotional experience became powerful to the extent that such detachment could no longer be sustained.
This article discusses the emergence of the concept of ‘transnational feminisms’ as a differentiated notion from ‘global sisterhood’ within feminist postcolonial criticism. This is done in order to examine its usefulness for interrogating the globalization of reproductive technologies and women’s right to selfdetermination over their own bodies by using these technologies. In particular, women’s use of technologies for assisted conception, and the local and global transactions in reproductive body parts form a testing ground for transnational feminisms. Does the construction of individual reproductive rights still leave some ground for women’s collective struggles? It is proposed that, if at all, transnational solidarity on this issue is possible, it will have to be built on the concept of universal ethical norms regarding human dignity
Inspired by Sweetness and Power, in which Sidney Mintz traces the colonial and mercantilist routes of enslaving tastes and artificial needs, this paper maps a late-20th-century global trade in bodies, body parts, desires, and invented scarcities. Organ transplant takes place today in a transnational space with surgeons, patients, organ donors, recipients, brokers, and intermediaries-some with criminal connections-following new paths of capital and technology in the global economy. The stakes are high, for the technologies and practices of transplant surgery have demonstrated their power to reconceptualize the human body and the relations of body parts to the whole and to the person and of people and bodies to each other. The phenomenal spread of these technologies and the artificial needs, scarcities, and new commodities (i.e., fresh organs) that they inspire-especially within the context of a triumphant neoliberalism-raise many issues central to anthropology's concern with global dominations and local resistances, including the reordering of relations between individual bodies and the state, between gifts and commodities, between fact and rumor, and between medicine and magic in postmodernity.
Synopsis—This article is a critique of papers issued by the Working Group of the project "Reproductive Laws for the 1990's" at Rutgers University, USA and of two articles by Lori Andrews. My critique, in general, is that the women involved in this project consider the new reproductive technologies as potentially beneficial for women's reproductive autonomy. The main focus of my argument, however, is directed against Andrews' position. She argues for a liberalisation of almost all laws which still stand in the way of full-fledged commercialisation of reproduction, including those concerning the human body and its parts and substances. Andrews' views in favour of "reproductive alternatives" and the "body as property" constitute, in my view, the necessary ideological legitimation for the new reproduction industry, which in its greed for profit has to do away with the integrity of the individual, the human person. Instead, it favours the logic of the "dividual": a person's wholeness reduced to saleable and disposable bits and pieces. To me, this so-called liberal feminism is a perversion of everything the ideology of women's liberation stands for. In addition, I argue that Andrews' liberalism, which apparently is directed against the "right to life" movement, is in fact not so far removed from it, since both will lead to more state intervention in reproductive processes. Synopsis — Dieser Artikel stellt eine Kritik der Position der Juristin Lori B. Andrews und anderer Feministinnen dar, die an dem Projekt "Reproductive Laws for the 1990s" der Rutgers University mitwirken. Meine Kritik richtet sich im allgemeinen dagegen, dass die an diesem Projekt beteiligten Frauen die neuen Reproduktionstechniken als einen Beitrag zur Förderung der "reproduktiven Autonomie" der Frauen ansehen und lediglich fordern, dass sie alien Frauen ohne Zwang zu-ganglich gemacht werden sollen. Besonders Lori B. Andrews argumentiert, dass alle Gesetze, die bisher noch einer Kommerzialiserung und Industrialisierung der Fortpflanzung im Wege stehen, beseitigt werden sollen. Sie plädiert dafür, den menschlichen Körper und seine Teile als verkäufliches Eigentum zu betrachten. Nach dieser Position besteht die "reproduktive Autonomie" einer Frau darin, zwischen den verschiedenen technisch machbaren "Reproduktionsalternativen" zu wählen und Teile des eigenen Körpers verkaufen zu können. M.E. bereitet diese Position den Boden für die ideologische Legitimation der neuen Reproduktions industrie, die aus Profitsucht die Integrität der weiblichen Person auflöst, aus dem Individuum ein Dividuum macht, ein Teilbares und Aufgeteiltes. Dieser liberale — genauer libertinäre —Feminismus pervertiert die Ziele, für diè Frauenbewegung gekämpft hat. Ausserdem führt er notwendigerweise zu mehr und nicht zu weniger staatlicher Kontrolle und Verrechtlichung der Fortpflanzungsvorgänge. Er ist M.E. damit nicht so weit von der Position der Right-to-Life- Bewegung entfernt, wie es zunächst erscheinen mag.
Central to the assumption of men's superiority over women in patriarchy is the social construct of passivity/materiality as female and animal, and activity/spirtuality as male and distinctly human. By focusing on seeds and women's bodies as sites of regeneration this contribution attempts to look at how the new biotechnologies are reproducing these old patriarchal divisions of activity/passivity, culture/nature. It also examines how these dichotomies are then used as instruments of capitalist patriarchy to colonise the regeneration of plants and human beings. -from Author
The human body--and its parts--has long been a target for commodification within myriad cultural settings. A discussion of commodification requires that one consider, first, the significance of the body within anthropology and, second, what defines a body "part." After exploring these initial questions, this article outlines dominant theoretical approaches to commodification within anthropology, with Mauss and Marx figuring prominently. The discussion then turns to historically well-documented forms of body commodification: These include slavery and other oppressive labor practices; female reproduction; and the realms of sorcery and endocannibalism. An analysis here uncovers dominant established approaches that continue to drive current studies. The remainder of this article concerns emergent biotechnologies, whose application in clinical and other related scientific arenas marks a paradigmatic shift in anthropological understandings of the commodified, fragmented body. The following contexts are explored with care: reproductive technologies; organ transplantation; cosmetic and transsexual surgeries; genetics and immunology; and, finally, the category of the cyborg. The article concludes with suggestions for an integrated theoretical vision, advocating greater cross-fertilization of analytical approaches and the inclusion of an ethics of body commodification within anthropology.
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