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- Convenors:
-
Ursula Offenberger
(University of Tübingen, Germany)
Almut Peukert (University of Hamburg)
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- Discussant:
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Tamara Pascale Schwertel
(University clinic Koeln)
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
Our panel invites for critical, justice-oriented research on non-reproduction, considering practices and discourses that shape and have shaped matters of non-reproduction in different times and places. We aim to explore infrastructures of population control from non-procreationist perspectives.
Long Abstract:
Modern nation states worldwide have established reproductive matters as a particular fringe between public and private live: reproduction, raising children and ensuring their well-being, has turned into a matter of home and family making. At the same time, reproductive politics have been turned into calculative matters and become part of particular epistemic infrastructures (Murphy 2017), thus linking political economy with attempts at population control. Because reproductivity, also when technologically assisted, is widely considered the standard case of organizing societies, its absence is often problematized through discourses of danger and fear of declining populations.
While reproduction is an established topic in Science and Technology Studies (e.g., Clarke 1998), the counterpart, non-reproduction, has received comparatively less attention. Accompanied by respective philosophical deliberations (e.g., Benatar and Wassermann 2015), anti-natalist/anti-procreationist movements have gained momentum in climate politics. These developments raise broader questions about the discourses, controversies, and material relations that have shaped anti-natalist ideas. As these discourses and practices have been highly ableist, sexist, racialized and colonialist in the past, critical and justice-oriented research on non-reproduction needs to consider possible inequalities with regard to gender, sexuality, race, class, dis/ability, religion or other categories of difference, in order to develop anti-racist, ecologically and feministically grounded, post-anthropocentric visions of prosperity (Clarke and Star 2018).
Our panel invites empirically informed contributions on historically and geographically distributed sites, social worlds and communities of practicing non-reproduction, the situated knowledges produced, and the controversies fought out. Adding to existing philosophical deliberations, our STS informed perspective aims at both collecting different accounts for a good life without biological children and at understanding key elements of discourses and practices of non-reproduction, thus shedding light on politics, affects, materialities and other elements that shape matters of non-reproduction on a global and on a local scale.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Kuo-ing Lai (National Chengchi University, Taiwan)
Long abstract:
Drawing on the concept of performativity by Michel Callon, this paper investigates how the demographic transition model was deployed in the initiation of the family planning program in Taiwan when the size of the island’s population came to be perceived as a main determinant of the success of economic development.
To realize the downward curve of the birth rate, a statistical network to evaluate the program’s contribution to controlling the population was constructed. A coupon was given out as an incentive to encourage married women with enough children to implant an intrauterine device (IUD), which also served as a data collection tool to trace individual women's reproductive behavior. By collecting and analyzing the coupons, the government was able to calculate the number of IUDs implanted to justify the program’s effect.
As the program progressed and expanded, non-IUDs methods (pills, condoms, and sterilization) were incorporated in the 1970s as replacement methods for women with failure of IUDs. Some women were approached by the family planning workers who came to visit and advised them to use contraception for spacing or stopping births, while others, hoping to control their reproduction, learned about the program through media advertisements or word of mouth. I describe the milieu created by the program that aimed to facilitate women's use of contraception, thereby counting women’s bodies in the statistical network.
Data analyzed in this paper was collected from historical archives, advertisements, and interviews with six family planning workers and twenty-three women aged 60-90.
Ziqi Xie (Boston University)
Long abstract:
In 2016, China replaced its 36-year-long One Child Policy with a universal Two-Child Policy, which was soon substituted by the Three-Child Policy in 2021. The close interweaving between the state’s population and reproductive governance and Chinese medical institutions often renders the health professionals, as or being viewed as the active agents of biopolitical governance. However, my 23 months of fieldwork in two top-ranking IVF clinics between 2017 and 2023 reveals that even doctors’ seemingly accordant discourses and practices oftentimes do not parallel the government’s goals. Invoking medical and ethical concerns rather than their role as policy implementers, IVF doctors position themselves as professionals holding biomedical authority. Whereas the new population policies have transferred the responsibilities and expectations of reproduction from medical institutions to families, doctors rather than the patients often serve as “moral pioneers” to cut off these transfers of reproductive responsibility through their medical authorities. On the one hand, this stance leads to doctors’ emphasis on women’s “advanced maternal age” and low success rates due to female infertility, which unwittingly helps reinscribe the state’s disparagement of declining fertility rates caused by women. On the other hand, IVF doctors’ advice and practices coincidentally side with the women’s reproductive autonomy which conflicts with their family members’ desire and the state’s call for multi-child families. The state sentimentalizes the demography anxiety and defines reproduction biomedically and demographically, which nevertheless is reframed and reenacted by IVF doctors, supplemented by their ethical definitions of well-being and moral reasonings about an ideal family.
Molly Frizzell (University of Southern California)
Long abstract:
In a natalist society, or one that values reproduction, the choice to not procreate is strongly counter-cultural. This paper explores how the social media application TikTok enables the childfree social movement to challenge pro-reproductive ideologies. We approach this from the conceptual framework of Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) (Bhattacharya, 2017), drawing on theories of social movements in the network society (Castells, 2007), biopower (Foucault, 1990), natalism (Grewal, 2008), and academic studies of the childfree social movement. A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) of 50 TikTok videos posted by childfree creators suggests that TikTok acts as a site of connection for communities practicing non-reproduction, supporting resistance to natalist ideologies through discursive strategies of shameless visibility. In sharing knowledge about the benefits of life without children, identifying and responding to shaming pro-reproductive discourses, and navigating (non-)reproductive technologies, like the IUD or hysterectomy, that prevent pregnancy, such strategies not only empower users to reconsider parenthood decisions, but also normalize the choice to live childfree. Yet, this paper also critically interrogates for whom and where such decisions are made possible. This research contributes to a literature on non-reproduction and anti-natalism as well as mediated representations of social movements.
Frederika Schulte (University of Tuebingen)
Long abstract:
While abortion in Germany still is illegal (but tolerated), social categories like age, health or class influence the societal expectations of who should continue an unintended pregnancy and who should in fact not (Auerbach). Simultaneously, the issue of abortion is shaped by the persistent struggle for abortion rights, thus for a right not to procreate (Obinger-Gindulis). Therefore, abortion represents a phenomenon of non-reproduction, where struggles of power and control are constantly contested. The fight over medical technologies in this context shape these controversies worldwide (Clarke/Montini).
In my research, I have conducted 13 narrative interviews to investigate how individuals integrate the experience of an abortion into their biographies. Drawing on my empirical work, I will show how the interviewees – within the German discourse – (de)construct differences between abortion and other (non-)reproductive practices, focusing on the role of materialities in this negotiation. It is especially interesting to see how practices of grief, family-making or self-empowerment are created and adapted to compensate for “the lack of a coherent set of cultural resources to guide the experience” (Sawicka). Moreover, the interviews show a variety of normatively loaded usages of medical technologies surrounding abortion. Especially, the decision for a surgical or a medicinal procedure is a focal point for the observation of materialities, affects and power structures underlying non-reproductive matters in Germany.
So, by looking through the lens of abortion from an STS-perspective, this contribution will focus on differentiation practices in the context of non-reproduction and the inherent structures of social power and inequalities.
Elif Gül (University of Vienna)
Short abstract:
This contribution discusses the use of the thermal method as a form of non-reproducing masculinity and agnotology as a theoretical framework to understand the non-production of contraceptives for people producing sperm.
Long abstract:
This presentation engages with user activism for male contraceptives, more specifically the thermal method as a way to stop sperm production. Birth control methods are a vital part of our world. The production of these technologies, however, has mostly focused on female bodies and people who can get pregnant, hence, today we have contraceptive methods that only cater to one user group. People producing sperm have no big alternatives to condoms and vasectomies, or so it seems. This has created an asymmetry that has been fostered by societal ideas of gender and sexuality as well as scientific ignorance. Some men and people producing sperm have decided to take matters into their own hands as a form of resistance and activism. The thermal method for people producing sperm works simply by cutting sperm production by increasing the temperature to which the testicles are exposed, hence, either warming testicles in water, wearing heated underwear, or attaching the testicles back to the groin. A group of users and producers have formed a community around this practice to support each other and exchange knowledge since the medical sciences have not contributed much to the development or testing of this method. This research is based on interviews with people who use the thermal method as a means of birth control and analyses this as a form of caring masculinity and activism against epistemic ignorance and hegemonic masculinity.