Paper short abstract:

Despite developments in HIV research, people living with HIV face challenges navigating reproduction and parenting. Through a lens of reproductive governance, this work focuses on people living with HIV Ireland and how laws, policy, practices and public attitudes stratify these parents from others.

Paper long abstract:

Substantial developments in effective viral suppression and understandings of HIV change the way people live with HIV, and explore possibilities in having children. Despite 20 years of biomedical evidence verifying the untransmissibility of HIV for those with access to antiretrovirals, policies, laws, practices and public attitudes towards parents/prospective parents living with HIV remain at odds. Using ethnographic methods, I give voice to a seldomly represented group: parents and prospective parents living with HIV in Ireland.

Through a lens of reproductive governance, I explore how living with HIV, as well as laws, policies and practices stratify these parents from others, affect their imaginations of the future, and put some in a position of reproductive exile. With a focus on (in)access to assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) for people living with HIV in Ireland, I explore how they are particularly stratified and disempowered from achieving their reproductive desires. Contradictions between biomedical evidence with policies, laws, practices and public attitude may even exclude them from parenthood altogether. This is particularly relevant to PLWHIV facing infertility and/or members of the LGBTQ+ community, for whom ARTs often play a key role in one’s reproductive journey.

With this work I advocate for better collaboration of those in biomedicine and social science with those in law and policy making, to ensure practices and lived realities reflect up-to-date evidence, and are informed by intersectional approaches. This is a crucial step in the striving for reproductive justice for PLWHIV in Ireland and greater Europe.

Paper short abstract:

The paper draws from ethnographic fieldwork conducted among migrant women in two underserved neighbourhoods in India, and their experiences of the varying strategies of birth control and reproductive management that are targeted at them by state, non-state, and private agents.

Paper long abstract:

The central finding that I wish to speak of in this presentation is how participation in assisted reproduction – specifically commercial surrogacy and egg donation – is encouraged among the urban poor, interestingly, as a form of birth control, in order to incorporate working class bodies into an ever-expanding bioeconomy of what some sociologists have called clinical labour (Cooper and Waldby 2014). I am interested in examining how the bodies of these women are seen as productively fecund, but also as risky in its perceived excessiveness. The codes of self-fashioning that play out in these narratives of modernisation are complex, as women are encouraged to become commercial surrogates and egg donors as means of escaping familial and conjugal entrapments, while being persuaded in idioms of relationality and care. I am interested in the ways in which actors and institutions play out these scripts of embedding and disembedding (Biao 2007) as part of the strategies for governing the reproduction of marginalised women, and understanding their own relationship with the hierarchical systems they know they inhabit. Expanding on anthropologist Lawrence Cohen's conceptualisation of 'bioavailable' and ‘operable bodies' (2007), I assert that certain bodies, particularly those belonging to low-caste migrant women, do not become available at one particular clinical juncture but have always been bioavailable, from birth to death, based on the value that sovereign attaches to their lives. The paper further argues how the working-class family becomes a site of surveillance and control, under the guise of caring for marginalised women.

Paper short abstract:

This paper follows the extraction, reproduction, and use of biological samples for research in Huntington's disease (HD). Because HD is inherited, and many researchers are from HD families, this process is a constant (re)negotiation and (re)definition of biological and social kinship relations.

Paper long abstract:

Huntington’s disease (HD) is a rare, hereditary neurodegenerative disease, caused by a mutation to the huntingtin gene which produces a mutant huntingtin protein. HD has neither targeted treatment nor cure, but there is a significant amount of clinical research being undertaken, which largely relies on samples of the mutant huntingtin protein.

HD Clarity is longitudinal study of Huntington’s disease, designed to ‘facilitate therapeutic developments for Huntington’s disease’ (HD) through creating a repository of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma from HD patients and healthy controls, which are provided to researchers upon request. Significantly, many HD researchers are themselves HD-positive, or members of HD families; some researchers have themselves donated biosamples to HD Clarity.

But this repository is a finite resource, as ‘using’ a CSF or plasma sample in the lab effectively destroys it. One HD lab has addressed this issue by reproducing the samples through cell cultures, and distributing these reproduced samples to other labs, in order to ‘make the most of each sample’. This is posited by the lab as a moral imperative to value not just the genetic material itself, but the embodied and affective labour of the donors (who may be family or friends, albeit anonymously).

Based on laboratory ethnography, this paper follows biosamples from extraction from patients, to storage in the repository, to reproduction through cell cultures, and eventually to the laboratory bench. As the biosamples are imbued with affective meaning for researchers, this process is a constant (re)negotiation and (re)definition of biological and social kinship relations.

Paper short abstract:

Extending the focus on female sterilisation beyond fertility control, my research shows how women’s postoperative imaginaries in northwest India are animated much more deeply by processes of social reproduction than by the end or loss of fertility.

Paper long abstract:

Female sterilisation has predominantly been critiqued as a technology of fertility control, but recent feminist scholarship has drawn attention to the “multiple harms” of sterilization across women’s “lifeworlds” (Chaparro-Buitrago 2022). Building on this, my research examines the multiple ‘motivations’ of sterilization-uptake in northwest India to demonstrate that more than the end or loss of fertility, women’s postoperative imaginaries are deeply animated by processes of social reproduction.

During my ethnographic fieldwork at a family planning clinic, women electing sterilisation usually reported to have ‘fulfilled’ their reproductive desires — 2-3 children, with at least one male child — and were instead concerned about recurring forms of reproductive suffering (Lukasite 2022): unwanted pregnancies, contraceptive side-effects, limited abortion care, poor menstrual health. Decision-making around sterilisation often centred around the desire to be “mukt” (freedom) from these “tensions”. Despite known postoperative risks and vulnerabilities, women talked of this freedom as necessary for effectively navigating the mounting domestic chores, caring responsibilities and kinship obligations.

Examining the long-standing sterilisation “bias” in India (Unnithan 2022), this paper argues that the operative logics of this contraceptive technology extends from governing biological fertility to ensuring women’s continued labour and participation in social reproduction processes as mothers, wives, care-givers and homemakers.