Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs)

Is Man to Father as Woman is to Father? Fertile Ground: Feminist Theorize Reproductive

Technologies

as featured in Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography Of Reproductive

Technologies(Charis Thompson 2005)

By: Sarah Lee, Sarah Luca and Jess Li

Fertile Ground: Introduction

• “Paradoxical tension” between ARTs and ART advocates and feminists

• The evolution of feminist work regarding infertility in the age of ARTs and analogous feminist “waves”

Fertile Ground: Phase 1 (1984-1991)

• Medicalization of Infertility a point of interest for various feminist groups (uniting source)

• Medical Dangers & the Experimental Nature of early ARTs (IVF, artificial insemination, hormonal therapies, etc.) for the woman’s body and patriarchal maternal imperative (Radical Feminist Critiques)

Fertile Ground: Phase 1 (cont’d)

• Social stratification, commodification of reproduction (Socialist Feminist Critique)

• Complicity/Connection of ARTs with Eugenics and Patriarchal Regimes of Biomedicine (?)

• The Mainstream/Liberal Response

• Conceptualization of Infertility itself

Fertile Ground: Phase 2 (1992-2000)

• After the mid-1990s, access to ARTs are not so dependent on social identities

• The Post-Structuralist shift in third wave feminism (from moral certainty to ambivalence)

• Science & Technology Studies and Technofeminism

Visibility Technologies and Fetal Personhood?

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Mr1MwHpZXA

• How did visibility technologies such as the Ultrasound impact the conceptualization of the fetus and the moral debate on abortion?

Fertile Ground Phase 2 (Cont’d)

• ARTs now characterized as having agency in mediating embodiments of reproduction

• Less focus on “vertical” stratification (class/economics) and more focus on “horizontal” stratification

• Transnational Politics of Reproduction

Man to Father as Woman is to Mother

• Assertion that biological categories of sex are socially constructed and maintained (Fausto-Sterling and Judith Butler)

• Masculinity in ART clinics examined through perfomativity theory (Butler) and Biomedical ontology of gender (Fausto-Sterling)

• Scripted Gender identities are repaired and maintained through ontological/biological and experiential performative processes

Male-Factor Infertility

• Male Factor Infertility and Social Stigma

• Increased Diagnosis of Male-Factor Infertility since the 1990s and technological responses

• Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection ICSI

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGbIL9QWSsM

Ethnographic Vignettes

• The Virility Trope (biological reductionism of masculinity)

• The Good Father Trope (social reductionism of masculinity)

Norming and Performing Gender

• Structuralist Ideological Theory of Masculinity as “Positional” (Culture) and Femininity as “Relational” (Nature)

• Thompson argues that her ethnography of fertility clinics reveals both a relational and positional prescription of masculinity, thereby revealing its constructedness

Critique on the Social Constructednessof Biological Sex

• Is gender dimorphism in the binary sense then really constituted by social processes (such as normalization) as asserted by Thompson, Butler, Fauster-Stirling and others?

• Do you see any problems with this theory and its applicability to material reality and scientific knowledge?