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- Convenors:
-
Alessandra Brigo
(Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
Falia Varelaki (Ca' Foscari University of Venice - Italy)
Mwenza Blell (Newcastle University, UK)
Venetia Kantsa (University of the Aegean)
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- Discussant:
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Giulia Zanini
(Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel rethinks reproductive temporalities as dynamic forces through which polarisation is generated, negotiated, and sometimes undone, revealing how time operates as a technology that orders, stratifies, and politicises reproductive life itself.
Long Abstract
Rather than taking reproduction as a ready-made arena of moral or political division, this panel asks how time itself becomes a medium through which polarisation operates. We propose to think of reproductive temporalities not simply as schedules or experiences, but as energies, rhythms, and orientations that shape how reproductive life is lived, contested, and made sense of.
Seen in this way, polarisation is not merely about opposed positions but about dynamics that move or restrict, synchronise or desynchronise people, institutions, technologies and discourses and may be approached in terms of gender asymmetries, age perceptions, and temporal technologies—such as waiting lists, ultrasound measurements, diagnostic timelines, gestational limits, and bureaucratic delays— which produce asymmetries that shape who can act, make decisions, or hope within reproductive fields. Through the lens of time, we can trace how the entanglements of medicine, law, and politics generate asynchronous relations that sustain tension and disagreement, yet also make connection and recognition possible. This panel rethinks reproductive temporalities as dynamic forces through which polarisation is generated, negotiated, and sometimes undone, unravelled in the lived temporalities of clinical description, care, waiting, and decision, revealing how time itself becomes a field of political and affective tension.
We invite ethnographic contributions that explore how polarising dynamics unfold through temporal arrangements of waiting, urgency, delay, standardisation and duration in reproductive practices and debates. What forms of temporal coordination or disjunction do these create? How do they produce, or perhaps loosen, the configurations through which power and value take temporal form?
By approaching polarisation as a temporal technology, we also ask what this perspective might reveal about the potential of anthropology today: how ethnography, attuned to time, relation, and contradiction, can reimagine understanding itself as an act of engagement in a polarised world.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Gestational age assessment operates as a temporal technology shaping access to abortion and pregnancy care. This paper explores how divergent dating practices, professional positionalities, and activist engagements produce multiple reproductive temporalities and how researching those unfolds.
Paper long abstract
Gestational age (GA) assessment is a pivotal yet underexamined temporal technology in reproductive healthcare. Across Europe, heterogeneous protocols, instruments, and epistemologies used to date pregnancy generate discrepancies that shape access to abortion, pregnancy care, and childbirth options. Rather than treating these discrepancies as technical inconsistencies, this paper approaches GA assessment as a site where reproductive temporalities are actively produced, negotiated, and politicised, showing how time itself can become a medium of polarisation in reproductive care.
Drawing on the PregDaT project, a comparative qualitative study conducted in France, Greece, Italy, and the UK, the paper explores how clinical timelines, legal gestational limits, and bureaucratic delays produce asynchronous relations that structure decision-making and access to care through analysing interactions, interviews and observations involving healthcare professionals, pregnant people, and transnational abortion-support NGOs.
Central to the analysis is a reflexive attention to researcher positionality and to the negotiation of fieldwork across distinct professional worlds. The paper argues that reproductive ethnography itself becomes a temporal practice of one kind: one that both reveals how polarisation is sustained through discordant rhythms, while also highlighting moments of alignment among actors.
Paper short abstract
This presentation explores how Finland’s sterilization age limit is experienced by voluntarily childless individuals and physicians. Drawing on doctoral research, it shows that regulation based on the procedure’s age limit often generates tension and confrontation in patient–physician interactions.
Paper long abstract
In Finland, some voluntarily childless people wish to apply for sterilization because they see it as the most suitable contraceptive method for themselves. However, according to the Finnish Sterilization Act (1970/283), a person who does not have significant health reasons for seeking sterilization must be at least 30 years old or have three children, either alone or together with a spouse. Finnish legislation is relatively strict compared to other Nordic countries, where there are no criteria related to the number of children and the age limits for sterilization are lower (e.g., 18 or 25 years).
The age limit of sterilization often evokes strong reactions. Voluntarily childless individuals frequently experience it as paternalistic, whereas physicians tend to see the regulation as a way to protect individuals from possible future regret. Generally, however, the legally defined age limit becomes a factor that generates tension and confrontation between patients and physicians.
This presentation is based on ongoing doctoral research, which includes 31 interviews and 71 thematic writings from voluntarily childless individuals, as well as 12 interviews with physicians working in the field of sterilization, collected between 2021 and 2023. Drawing on this data, I examine in detail how these reactions and tensions are expressed and negotiated in both patients’ and physicians’ experiences.
Paper short abstract
When French abortion centers face early pregnancies invisible on ultrasound, some impose two-week waits while others practice abortion immediately. These protocols create barriers and inequalities in abortion access, revealing how abortion temporality is actively produced.
Paper long abstract
This presentation examines how time operates as a medium of polarisation in abortion care through the case of “early pregnancies of unknown location” (GLI) in France. When women seek abortion very early in pregnancy (before 4 weeks of pregnancy), before the embryo is visible on ultrasound, French medical centers adopt radically different temporal protocols. Some impose systematic waiting periods of up to two weeks until the pregnancy becomes visible, requiring repeated ultrasounds, vaginal examinations, and blood tests—imposing significant logistical constraints and possible psychological costs. Others offer immediate abortion followed by hormonal monitoring. While both protocols claim medical legitimacy, they generate profound inequalities in access to care.
Drawing on six months of daily ethnographic observation in three French abortion centers and 140 interviews with healthcare professionals, this presentation analyzes how these temporal arrangements—waiting lists, ultrasound timing, diagnostic delays, hormone measurement schedules—produce barriers and asymmetries in reproductive healthcare. The analysis reveals how doctors may invoke legal constraints to women seeking abortion that do not actually exist, how secretaries perform “filtering work” by imposing delays at the telephone stage, and how some women slip through protocol exceptions while others do not.
The choice between protocols depends on physicians' dispositions and may generate negotiations and conflicts within medical teams. By examining these negotiations, the presentation demonstrates that gestational temporality is not an objective biological fact but is actively produced through medical technology and its uses.
Paper short abstract
Technological practices show that reproductive time is not fixed. Norms re reproductive time are entwined with existing socially-produced vulnerabilities, including ecological ones. We explore the biological clock and the doomsday clock in relation to environmental reproductive justice in Finland.
Paper long abstract
The temporal logics of reproduction are changing in novel ways due to recent developments in assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), the further-commercialization of healthcare, and the rapid expansion of biotechnological and pharmaceutical enterprises. Technological practices have demonstrated that reproductive time is not a fixed ‘biological clock’. We analyze how norms regarding reproductive time are imposed on people in ways that map onto existing vulnerabilities including gender, race, class, sexuality and disability. We focus on Finland, a Nordic welfare state operating on a confused ethos of universal healthcare and financial capitalist health politics.
Cryopreservation enables a broader transnational traffic in donor gametes. AI data-driven algorithms, also transnationally mobile, promise time- and cost-effective selection of ‘high-quality’ gametes and successful personalised treatments, presuming that AI is an ethical agent. However, there is evidence of ecological damage caused by increased use of AI tools. While reproductive technologies have always raised bioethical and political questions, we discuss how looking at issues of reproductive time can challenge neoliberal ethics. Rising to the challenge, our analysis utilizes a queer feminist lens, considering ecological facets of what is going on. We are attuned to both reproductive rights and reproductive justice in mapping out a framework for gendered reproductive time in bioethics of ART.
Crucially, however, the posthumanist component of our analysis seeks to consider reproductive time (‘the biological clock’) in relation to potential human extinction (‘the doomsday clock’). How could reproductive justice and more-than-human justice exist in the same framework, in social structures haunted by histories of eugenics?
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnographic research in Spain, this paper shows how the Artificial Womb Technology reconfigures reproductive temporalities and generates polarised tensions around viability and care in neonatal medicine.
Paper long abstract
In between the realms of gynecology and neonatology, a novel device known as Artificial Womb Technology (AWT) is currently being developed to improve the survival of preterm newborns born at the limits of viability -between 21 and 24 gestational weeks-. In contrast to existing neonatal technologies, its novelty lies in maintaining preterm infants in a fetal state, sustained through a technological extrauterine life in which the patient is suspended within a hybrid reproductive temporality - neither fetus nor neonate-. This liminal state disrupts binary conceptions of intra and extra-uterine life and generates polarized tensions among potential users and healthcare professionals.
Drawing on ethnographic observations in a neonatal intensive care unit and on AWT trials in Spain, as well as interviews with parents of preterm infants, health professionals, and the AWT research team, I show how the temporal interval opened by the AWT generates frictions in how care and decision-making are conceived in relation to this technology. By extending gestational time through technology, AWT creates tensions at three interconnected levels: concerns about the possibility of lowering the limits of viability; the legal and ontological liminality of the AWT patient; and the destabilisation of the reproductive autonomy of the pregnant person, all of which are entangled by imaginaries of ectogenesis and science fiction that frame AWT both as a promise and a threat. I argue that the new reproductive temporalities of AWT desynchronise existing clinical practices, reshaping moral values related to viability, personhood and responsibility in neonatal medicine.
Paper short abstract
This paper will explore the tensions exposed by time in the administration of third-party reproduction in France. Drawing on an ethnography of the gamete recruitment process in public ART centers, it will focus on “glitches” (delays, cancellations…) in the experience of fertility professionals.
Paper long abstract
Time is central to assisted reproductive technologies (ART): protocols must synchronise with bodily rhythms, treatment schedules unfold over months, sometimes racing against declining reproductive capacities and age. In France, the 2021 expansion of donor conception access to lesbian couples and single women led to a dramatic increase in demand–inseminations with donor sperm rose 4.3-fold between 2021 and 2024–, which was not met by proportional increases in funding or staffing. Consequently, wait times for donor gametes have also increased dramatically, reaching an average of 1.5 years for spermatozoa and 2 years for eggs in 2025. Time remains, therefore, of the essence in ART in France.
This paper will focus on “glitches”– delays, cancellations, difficulties to organise appointments–through an ethnographic study (June 2025-May 2026) of the gamete donor recruitment process in 5 French public ART centres. I will reflect on my own experience of time during observations and interviews with the various practitioners involved (biologists, gynaecologists, psychologists, genetic counsellors). I will also analyse paradoxical discourses, such as professionals demanding time to properly assess a donor candidate’s profile, while expressing frustrations when colleagues in other departments take time to complete their tasks. This will allow for a discussion on how time reveals broader tensions in the organisation of third-party reproduction, particularly in the daily realities faced by fertility professionals navigating the French bioethical framework for third-party reproduction, as well as the challenges of public hospital administration.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how time structures reproductive inequalities through transnational surrogacy. It shows how biomedical temporal regimes, anticipation and waiting shape access to legitimate parenthood. It highlights reproductive micro-infrastructures and the relational labour parents entail.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines reproductive temporalities as a central site through which polarisation around reproduction is produced, negotiated, and sustained, drawing on the trajectories of male couples engaging in transnational surrogacy. In a national context where these forms of parenthood remain legally and symbolically marginalised, it argues that time operates as a key political mechanism in the making of legitimate families.
Mobilising the concept of reproductive micro-infrastructures, the paper analyses the anticipatory, coordinative, and waiting practices through which intended parents make parenthood possible outside state-recognised frameworks. By tracing the temporal stages of reproductive itineraries it highlights the role of biomedical metrics (clinical calendars, gestational thresholds, standardised protocols) as normative technologies. Far from neutral, these temporal regimes standardise reproductive experiences, distribute capacities to act, and function as tools of control that distinguish legitimate from illegitimate forms of parenthood.
The paper further shows that these trajectories rely on extensive, invisible, affective, moral, and relational labour carried out at the margins of nationally sanctioned reproduction. This labour involves managing uncertainty, waiting, and urgency, as well as sustaining collaborative relationships with other reproductive actors, particularly surrogate mothers, whose embodied, emotional, and social temporalities often remain misaligned with institutional schedules.
Through an ethnographic attention to temporal disjunctions, synchronisations, and negotiations, the paper demonstrates that reproductive polarisation unfolds less through overt ideological opposition than through differentiated regimes of time that enable certain parental projects while constraining others. It thus contributes to rethinking reproductive temporalities as dynamic forces through which power, legitimacy, and reproductive governance are enacted.
Paper short abstract
This paper theorizes reproductive risk as a chronic condition of the present. Identifying temporal technologies within clinical practice that architect a state of permanent anticipation, it examines the social consequences of this regime with the aim of fostering more equitable models of care.
Paper long abstract
The biomedical model frames risk as a statistical probability of a future adverse health outcome. Yet, for pregnant individuals, risk operates less as a future threat than as a present form of suffering, a chronic condition produced by the biomedical management of uncertainty itself. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in clinical and urban settings in Spain, this paper explores how the biomedicalization of reproductive risk produces a temporal regime in which pregnant people inhabit a continuous, pathologized liminal state, and how this regime, in turn, reproduces polarization.
Through routine monitoring and diagnostic thresholds, pregnancy is structured as an ongoing process of evaluation in which health status remains provisional and continuously open to revision. This temporal arrangement places individuals in a prolonged state of ontological ambiguity, where they are neither healthy nor clearly ill. Thus, reproductive care organizes time around permanent anticipation as a gendered norm for reproductive citizenship. These temporal regimes generate polarizing effects by sorting reproductive trajectories into unstable categories of normality and pathology, low and high risk, or responsible and irresponsible motherhood. Such distinctions are deeply socially stratified, shaping decision-making within clinical encounters. In contexts where risk is increasingly framed as structurally unavoidable –linked to environmental exposure, for example– the demand to anticipate and mitigate potential harm becomes particularly burdensome. By conceptualizing reproductive risk as a chronic temporal condition, this paper argues for rethinking reproductive care beyond models of foresight and mastery, showing how risk is produced through the everyday governance of uncertainty, time, and care.