Woman, Body, Conception: Unveiling the Arcana (original) (raw)
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Abstract Over the last few decades Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) has caught the attention of experts both from the biomedical field and social sciences, from across the world. The reasons are not difficult to seek. ART has direct ramification in constitutive areas of human life such as kinship, marriage, family, religion and biomedicine. Concerns of body and gender are central here. This new reproductive practice also has brought new dilemmasethical and political. Accordingly, it provides an acute lens to study the emergent relationship between science, technology and society. Surveying the existing literature, this paper attempts to trace the political, rational and ideological aspects concerned to reproductive behaviour of individual and group and the involvement of state and religion in the supposedly private domain of family, procreation and kinship. On the one hand this paper situate the questions in the larger context of globalization, using the concepts of ‘reproductive governance’, ‘demographic politics’ and ‘gendered reproduction’. On the other hand, it invokes the need of transcending the EuroAmerican understanding of family and filiation which is fundamentally based on bio-genetic connections. Accordingly, this paper explores, also, the studies that unravel new and different forms of rationality in making families using new reproductive technology or ART. Key words: Reproductive governance, ART, eugenics, technology and society, religion
THE WOMB: FROM SANCTUARY OF LIFE TO PUBLIC SPACE. WOMEN'S BODY IN ASSISTED REPRODUCTION
Assisted reproduction has opened the door to all manner of scenarios, from biological surrogate motherhood to gestational surrogates. Women are either seen as the victims of the reproductive technologies, because they lose control over their bodies hence their selves or they are argued to enjoy greater freedom. In a feminist approach women claim for themselves the right to decide where and how these boundaries should be drawn. Is this really empowerment or on the contrary disempowerment? Do all these technologies imply negotiation of the body boundaries? Is the body reduced to a vessel? New reproductive technologies are challenging our very notions of what it means to be a person. What are the implications of living in a society in which procreation is subject to personal preference and choice in a way that has never before been conceivable? What does it mean for definitions of motherhood if children can be "produced" through "donated" eggs and/or "rented" wombs? Are we moving towards women's empowerment or the new eugenics? Using a cross-cultural approach, we will examine the anthropology and bioethics of the new reproductive technologies.
The woman in the body: A cultural analysis of reproduction
BIRTH, 1990
As anthropology at its best can do, this book ex-poses hidden cultural assumptions about the nature of reality. Martin has produced a powerful study of the dialectic between medical metaphors for women's reproductive processes and women's own views of those processes. She ...
Local moralities and reproductive rationality Against the Euro-American understanding of family and filiation which is fundamentally based on bio-genetic connection, there are studies that unravel new and different forms of rationality in making families using new reproductive technology or ART. Katrina Hargreaves’ work (2006), based on field work in News Land, suggests an exceptional way of constructing parenthood and families such as through gamete donation, challenge foundational understandings about human reproduction, male and female reproductive roles and the formation of families. According to her, much of the work on kinship in EuroAmerican cultures has focused on new reproductive technologies, on gender, and on the social construction of science. In particular, anthropologists have been concerned with sets of issues about ‘nature’ and ‘biology’ and the relationship between the ‘biological’ and the ‘social’. There is a need for destabilising the analytical opposition and blurring the boundaries between these two concepts (Hargreaves 2006). Carsten (2000), for example, sets out to show that in many cultures the boundaries between the ‘biological’ and the ‘social’ are decidedly blurred and, in some cases, not visible at all (cited in Clarke 2009: 35)
The Narrative Erasure of the Maternal Body
In this paper I will devote my attention to a strange bifurcation concerning the maternal experience and its symbolical appearance. My aim is to analyse the way in which the linguistic account of maternity twists the maternal experience and produces a univocal and potentially oppressive model of motherhood. To do so, I want to take as a starting point the emergence of new methods of reproduction, that is, the vast array of assisted reproductive techniques (ART) that bring into being unexperienced forms of motherhood. I would like to make it clear that I will not look to such techniques from a socio-political point of view. Rather, I will move my analysis to a more abstract level. In this sense, I will leave out the ambiguities which affect all these techniques at a social level to highlight their symbolical potential. In fact, even if we cannot assume those medical procedures to be pure, flawless opportunities of emancipation (we are all well aware of the many controversial aspects of ART in general, surrogacy, and adoption), today I aim to account for the discrepancy that exists between the horizons opened up by new techniques and the general comprehension of motherhood. To cut it short, the hypothesis that I set out to test is that the maternal body is subject to a series of discourses that tend to obfuscate the variety of reproductive processes. In this sense, I will claim that social practices and widespread narrations jointly contribute to legitimise only one model of motherhood, the one that complies with a hegemonic hierarchical structure, based on familial ties, heterosexuality, and coupledom.
Body & Society, 2011
Laura Mamo's book is based on interviews with 36 women who engage with a range of fertility services in their attempts to become lesbian parents in the late 1990s. The women are between the ages of 29 and 44, and live in the area of Northern California around San Francisco at the time of the research. The research is meticulous and thorough and the interview data are sensitively handled, and beautifully contextualized from a range of sources. It is an enormously accessible text and the writing style is very engaging. It is also highly original in scope. Although there is a huge body of work on fertility services (e.g. and Mamo situates her work in relation to this, there is very little research on lesbian use of IVF, sperm banks and other fertility technologies. There is a growing body of research on lesbian kinship and queer families but with the exception perhaps of Amy Agigian's (2004) research on lesbian insemination, there is very little in the US context that matches the range of Mamo's work.
In the past few decades, reproductive biomedicine has quickly developed and become widespread, producing a number of new options that have challenged the definition of kinship and parenthood, as well as of bodies and gender relations, and even of nature and life itself. Reproductive biomedicine is embedded in the ongoing construction of our wider social imagination, producing a re-imagination of the “facts of life”. This is a locus where we can see how biomedical knowledge fosters a reframing of material bodily tissues. The same biological material can assume a different ontological status according to the socio-material processes in which it is embedded. Exploring the process of bio-objectification of embryo in the Italian case, this introduction describes how the equation between embryo and human life itself emerges inside and outside the labs and illustrates how the biomedical conceptualization of embryo is highly dominated by moral and ethical categories.
Although mature and vibrant, Latin American scholarship on sexuality still remains largely invisible to a global readership. In this collection of articles translated from Portuguese and Spanish, South American scholars explore the values, practices, knowledge, moralities and politics of sexuality in a variety of local contexts. While conventionally read as an intellectual legacy of Modernity, Latin American social thinking and research has in fact brought singular forms of engagement with, and new ways of looking at, political processes. Contributors to this reader have produced fresh and situated understandings of the relations between gender, sexuality, culture and society across the region. Topics in this volume include sexual politics and rights, sexual identities and communities, eroticism, pornography and sexual consumerism, sexual health and well-being, intersectional approaches to sexual cultures and behavior, sexual knowledge, and sexuality research methodologies in Latin America.