Carla Lam - New Reproductive Technologies and Disembodiment: Feminist and Material Resolutions

NEW REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES AND DISEMBODIMENT

Series Editor: Ross Abbinnett, University of Birmingham, UK

Theory, Technology and Society presents the latest work in social, cultural and political theory, which considers the impact of new technologies on social, economic and political relationships. Central to the series are the elucidation of new theories of the humanity-technology relationship, the ethical implications of techno-scientific innovation, and the identification of unforeseen effects which are emerging from the techno-scientific organization of society.

With particular interest in questions of gender relations, the body, virtuality, penality, work, aesthetics, urban space, surveillance, governance and the environment, the series encourages work that seeks to determine the nature of the social consequences that have followed the deployment of new technologies, investigate the increasingly complex relationship between the human and the technological, or addresses the ethical and political questions arising from the constant transformation and manipulation of humanity.

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Feminist and Material Resolutions

CARLA LAM

University of Otago, New Zealand

ASHGATE

Carla Lam 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Carla Lam has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Lam, Carla.

New reproductive technologies and disembodiment : feminist and material resolutions / by Carla Lam.

pages cm. (Theory, technology and society)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4724-3705-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-4724-3706-8 (ebook)

ISBN 978-1-4724-3707-5 (epub) 1. Human reproductive technologySocial aspects. 2. Human reproductionSocial aspects. 3. WomenPsychology. 4. Feminist theory. I. Title.

GN482.1.L36 2014

305.4201--dc23

2014033842

ISBN 9781472437051 (hbk)

ISBN 9781472437068 (ebk-PDF)

ISBN 9781472437075 (ebk-ePUB)

This book was born of an enormous and long-term effort supported by many people, and the University of Otago through my department of politics there. I have due gratitude for the Performance Based Research Fund at the University of Otago, and the human translation into a series of research assistants, including Iona Mylek, Emma King, and most recently, Stevie Jepson for crucial support. Without the understanding of my students and tutors including especially Lynne Bowyer, the journey to completion would have been significantly increased especially at the end.

I am indebted to my colleagues at the politics department for various forms of support and care, but especially to Lena Tan and Janine Hayward. A special thank you also to Robert Patman whose dogged, stalwart belief in the project and its completion arrived when any other response would have signalled its death knell. Furthermore, the mentoring friendship and support of Heather Devere and Jay Smith was significant in bringing this book to light thank you.

I am perpetually thankful for my sister, mother and father, friends near and far especially Lindsey McKay who has shared all aspects of this process with me over the years. Special recognition also goes to Lena Tan (a dear friend as well as a colleague since I arrived in New Zealand) and Sarah Lovell for moral support, pep talks and unfailingly excellent advice. Finally, thank you to Ashgate whose helpful reviews, editor and administrator made the process easy.

In the early twenty-first century, new reproductive technologies (NRTs) facilitate the literal disembodiment of reproduction. In vitro fertilization (IVF), embryo transfer (ET), and cloning take conception outside the female body; development of an artificial womb promises to take gestation outside the uterus; and practices such as pre-scheduled caesarean sections (C-Sections) ensure that birth itself will be technologically mediated and a medical process that largely takes place outside of the mothers body. Furthermore, new monitoring technologies that visualize and test the unborn foetus allow for greater medicalization of both pregnancy and birth. These may give women a greater sense of security and control, but they can also restrict their embodied knowledge and experiences. Similarly, surrogacy disaggregates reproduction and redefines motherhood, and biology itself, reimagining and transforming the reproductive process into a series of commodifiable, discrete transactions. This technological mediation, in and of itself, is not unwelcome; however, it potentially represses less technological models and opens up womens bodies to control by patriarchal and capitalist interests.

Discourse surrounding biotechnology conforms to polarized theorizations that amount to restatements of the biology/society debate. This book uniquely Barads neologism puts into circulation more longstanding feminist epistemological thinking, as an endeavour concerned predominantly with the ethical dimensions of all ways of knowing, or knowledge as situated practice only understood in social and political contexts.

Nina Lykkes useful phrasing, the post-constructionist turn refers also to post-constructionism as a new methodological tool, or thinking technology (from Haraway), which provides a crucial platform of exchange to discuss trans-dualistic Post-constructionist feminist theories are also sometimes controversially referred to as new material feminisms and in this book I will use these two terms interchangeably, only adding other terms in fidelity to individual authors preferences for the same concepts.

Some feminist scholars read the new reproductive technologies as the latest chapter in the long history of the misappropriation of womens reproduction into androcentric Western understandings through techno-science, and medicine. This Western paradigm by which womens embodied power is assimilated into patriarchal culture and politics through the attribution of womens reproductive roles to men, I call birth appropriation. Adam creates Eve out of his body, Zeus gives birth to Athena from his head, men become fathers of the democracy, the nation, the church and so on. Yet new reproductive technologies reveal the paradox of womens reproductive experiences in patriarchal cultures as both, and often simultaneously, experiences of power and vulnerability. instantiation of birth appropriation because they represent a new conceptual and material relationship of humans to nature that builds on, yet is distinct from, modern understandings.