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- Convenors:
-
Kelsey Marr
(University of British Columbia Okanagan)
Sophya Yumakulov (York University)
- Stream:
- Moving bodies: Medical Travels/Corps mouvants: Trajets médicaux
- Location:
- TBT 0019
- Start time:
- 2 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to explore reproduction in all of its diverse forms, and the space it opens up between defined bodies, relationships, and ideas which trouble normative understandings of biological/physiological reproduction.
Long Abstract:
This panel seeks to explore reproduction in all of its diverse forms, and the space it opens up between defined bodies, relationships, and ideas which trouble normative understandings of biological/physiological reproduction. In an increasingly global world, reproduction is nested within articulations of different social worlds - politics, technology, culture, economies, law - which problematize normative and localized understandings of reproduction. Increasing use of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and acceptance of variable familial structures, for instance, inherently trouble normative boundaries of bodies and parenthood. Diverse reproductive forms give rise to spaces of fluidity and motion, where definitions become ambiguous, and embodied experiences become central to ways knowing. Within these spaces, the cultural work of normalizing and making sense of the uncertainty created by diverse reproductive forms is simultaneously difficult and productive, as we attempt to normalize novel experiences and ways of relating. It is creative but at the same time constraining, an attempt to solidify and slow down the fluidity of bodies and definitions. Thus, among other things, this panel seeks to explore: How can we come to describe and understand diverse forms of reproduction and their entanglements with bodies, technologies, and ontologies? How can we access spaces of motion and uncertainty in reproduction without inevitably bounding them? How does examining the fluid spaces of reproduction inform an anthropological understanding of culture and experience? How do individuals and communities negotiate and make sense of moving reproductions among expectations of normality and stability?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper explores gestational surrogacy through Massumi's framework of movement, grids and gaps. I argue that surrogate bodies occupy a gap between "parent" and "non-parent" and in fact close the gaps for individuals wishing to be parents in a system of continuous motion, creation and recreation.
Paper long abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to explore gestational surrogacy through the theoretical framework of movement as presented by Brian Massumi (2002). Massumi asks us to view the world (including the social world) not as a static array of categories and discrete events, but as dynamic, every-moving entities, bodies, feelings, and experiences. He urges us to refrain from placing our study subjects into a "grid" which orders them into static categories, and instead, to think about how those objects, bodies, and phenomena occupy the in-between spaces of the "grid". Thus, the proposed paper explores how this theoretical framework can help us to "open up" our understanding of surrogacy, by asking what gaps of the "grid" surrogacy occupies, and subsequently, where the real movement and action of surrogacy takes place. I present the argument that gestational surrogates themselves occupy a space that is in-between, in a gap between two states of being: parent and non-parent. In fact, surrogates close the gap for individuals wishing to become parents. In between parent and non-parent, (and child and non-child), is the surrogate body, and it is a body perpetually flowing between these states. I demonstrate how this approach can help us to think about motion and the entire progression of events that have to take place in order for a child to be produced through surrogacy. It is a system that is never static, irreducible to a series of discrete points in space and time, a continuum of motion, creation and recreation.
Paper short abstract:
Using the lens of reproductive governance, this paper explores shifting discourses of normative family planning in northern Ghana, and their link with moral responsibility and new idealized forms of care and intimate relationships.
Paper long abstract:
This article explores shifting discourses of normative family planning in northern Ghana. I draw on 8 months of ethnographic research undertaken between 2013 and 2014 with 25 families and six health workers in Kassena Nankana West district of the Upper East Region of Ghana, where fertility has recently declined. Considering the technology of family planning as a mode of reproductive governance, this paper suggests that family planning rhetoric, entangled with changing political-economic logics, creates new idealized forms of parenthood and families. I argue that the technology of family planning shifts moral responsibilities of care for children, producing new types of intimate relationships and families while obviating others. I show that young men and women strategically deploy "reproductive rights and wrongs" discursively to present themselves as good parents and citizens in the context of shifting economic obligations and family relationships. These discourses are intergenerationally-patterned and gendered; they work through the docile bodies of health workers and citizens to position smaller, well-cared for families as the only possible outcome of moral action. I argue that the new logics of family planning, which embody neo-Malthusian sentiments, enhance existing inequality by distributing moral responsibility for development away from the state.
Paper short abstract:
This article analyses how Roman Catholicism permeates different governments and medical practices in Spain, explicitly during the Francoist dictatorship and implicitly in the current democracy. This affects the field of assisted reproduction, where its biases discriminate against women.
Paper long abstract:
The Francoist and Catholic State created a patriarchal legislation, based on the authority of the husband and the father. The Francoist laws equated the family to legally constituted matrimony according to Canon Law; children produced outside of marriage were considered illegitimate. The family was the natural destination for women and the State recognised the husband as the only valid interlocutor between family and society. The ideological essence of the Franco regime was that Spain represented the spiritual haven of the West, making women the guardians of the home and tradition. In the current democracy, the 2006 law for assisted reproduction signified a change in the human procreative process and in the conception of the family, since it meant giving prominence to the will of the person to freely make their life choices. However, according to data from 2010, Spain led Europe in multiple births due to assisted reproduction, with the associated risks these types of births imply. Faced with the avalanche of multiple pregnancies, ARTs have been developed, thus creating ethical conflicts and situations lacking clarification in law. This has meant that doctors, despite their oath to serve their patients, allow their religious beliefs to compromise the care of their patients. All too often, those affected by these practices are women. The subject of study is approached by analysing the context through autoethnography, whose understanding emerges from an implied dialogue in terms of examining the interrelations between researcher and context in order to inform and illustrate social change.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how graduate students draw on discourses of risk and idealized adoption to enact ARTs as “an option for other people.” This paper continues a discussion on the fluid cultural spaces found at the intersections of ARTs and the reproductive futures of assumably fertile individuals.
Paper long abstract:
Over the past thirty-odd years, developing trends of delayed primiparity, longterm post-secondary education, and the proliferation of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) have been teologically correlated within academic and scholarly work. In the summer for 2015, I worked with post-graduate students at the University of Saskatchewan, examining the relationships among these trends and the extent to which they are facets of students imagined reproductive futures. In this paper, I examine how the post-graduate students with whom I worked framed, understood, and enacted ARTs, and by association, age-related infertility.
By drawing on conceptions of risk, the post-graduate students with whom I worked negotiate enactments of assisted reproductive technologies in which the fluidity of these technologies, and their noted destabilization of kinship, are (re)stabilized through the normalization of ARTs as an option "for other people." Furthermore, the students with whom I worked imagine reproductive futures which focus on their assumed future fertility, as well as discourses idealizing adoption. In doings so, they enact ARTs as "last options" in pursuing parenthood. By examining the imagined reproductive futures of post-graduate students, and the extent to which age-related infertility and it's treatment factor into those futures, we can access the fluid cultural spaces in which understandings and enactments of ARTs are rooted not just in individuals own personal experiences, but also in the cultural facets upon which we normalize and stabilize our reproduction, and ourselves.
Paper short abstract:
What does it mean to create a life from a holistic framework in the context of an intensely materialist, capitalist, and (bio)technological society? This paper will examine how the use of alternative medicine for infertility alters normative understandings of procreation and the reproductive body.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropological scholarship on infertility has flourished since the birth of Louise Brown on July 25, 1978 - the world's first 'test tube baby.' The emergence of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) led anthropologists to become interested in various biomedical interventions for infertility, such as in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and egg and sperm donation, (Cahn 2013; Franklin 1997; Inhorn 2012; Kahn 2000; Roberts 2012; Teman 2010). However, to date, there has been a lack of research which focuses on those individuals who opt for more holistic treatments. This paper will examine the ways in which men and women diagnosed with infertility incorporate Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) into their treatments, rather than relying exclusively on Western biomedical practices such as ARTs. To explore the entanglements of alternative medicine and infertility, this paper seeks to address the following questions: How might alternative fertility treatments be (re)conceptualized in the context of a dominant framework of Western biomedicine that relies on the normalization of technological advancements like ARTs? What happens when the high-tech world of biomedicine is no longer the only possibility for creating life? How might a philosophy of holism disrupt the cultural and ideological assumptions of Western biomedicine? Drawing on preliminary ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area from July-August 2016, I will pay close attention to the logics of healing and care that are mobilized by TCM practitioners and fertility patients as they attempt to negotiate between two systems of medical knowledge - TCM and Western biomedicine - to diagnose, manage, and treat infertility.
Paper short abstract:
While clinicians and patient resources tend to frame polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) as primarily a reproductive health condition, I argue that this is reductive of many people's actual embodied experience of the diagnosis.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on research that I have been conducting over the past year in Toronto, I argue in this paper that the normative biomedical framing of polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) as primarily a reproductive health condition is reductive of many people's actual experience of the diagnosis. More specifically, clinicians and patient resources tend to frame PCOS as primarily a women's reproductive health condition, echoing a larger trend within biomedicine of the reproductive essentialization of women. Several of the people I have interviewed have expressed frustration that their doctors do not seem to see PCOS as an issue to be treated unless/until they are trying to conceive; other symptoms of PCOS for which patients may desire biomedical intervention include hirsutism, hair loss, and increased risk for diabetes and heart disease (Women's College Hospital 2011). Further, the framing of PCOS as a fertility and therefore a "women's health" issue and its description in normative gendered terms, as causing higher levels of "male" hormones in women, excludes trans and gender nonbinary people, who are put in the uncomfortable position of accessing "women's health" clinics and other resources if they wish to seek treatment for the diagnosis.