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Shivers-McNair: Failure to Produce #cwcon #j5
- 1. failure to produce Ann Shivers-McNair University of Washington @a_shiversmcnair asmcnair@uw.edu
- 2. an involuntary fertility test
- 3. “I went ahead and did a tubal patency test on the remaining fallopian tube while I was in there, and it looks good.” (my OBGYN to my partner, immediately after a surgery to remove a serous cystadenoma that also resulted in a salpingectomy and partial oophorectomy)
- 4. “…another kind of horror for us is lack of production: the disused factory, the failed business, the idle machine.” (Martin, 1997, on how medical literature describes menstruation and menopause)
- 7. “Objects may even take the shape of the bodies for whom they are ‘intended,’ in what it is that they allow a body to do.” (Ahmed, 2006)
- 8. “The failure of something to work is a matter of a failed orientation: a tool is used by a body for which it was not intended, or a body uses a tool that does not extend its capacity for action.” (Ahmed, 2006)
- 10. “You’ll change your mind.” “We need to preserve the possibility for fertility.” “There are so many women who would be grateful to have even your quasi-fertility.” “If you care so much about infertility, why don’t you use your fertility to be a surrogate?”
- 11. “Intra-active practices of engagement not only make the world intelligible in specific ways but also foreclose other patterns of mattering. ... Therefore, accountability and responsibility must be thought of in terms of what matters and what is excluded from mattering.” (Barad, 2007)
- 12. What and who do the technologies of in/fertility (the medical procedures, the apps, the discourse) enable to matter and exclude from mattering?
Editor's Notes
- Trigger warning: I consider myself an ally to women for whom infertility is a deeply painful experience, but I realize that my story may be painful to hear for women who don’t share my orientation to fertility. I’m not entirely sure what my fertility status is. I have never wanted children. I had a wonderful and privileged childhood, and I have a wonderful mother. I’ve been in a happy, committed relationship for 11 years. I just don’t see motherhood as part of my identity. But my recent experiences with ovarian cysts has changed how I think about the rhetoric and discourse of fertility, and I want to share my story as a way of adding to—not negating—the important rhetorical work surrounding issues of infertility. Why this at CW? Technologies as rhetoric (technologies includes procedures, apps, and discourse), intervening in those technologies
- August 2013: I had an IUD inserted. I was moving to Seattle to go back to grad school and embark on 15 months of long distance with my partner. It was an emotional time. They were using an ultrasound to check the placement of the IUD and discovered they couldn’t see my uterus at all, because there was this massive fluid-thing blocking it. I was sent to different specialists and originally misdiagnosed with ascites (free fluid in the abdominal cavity, which is a symptom of terminal illnesses like liver failure), and then finally an MRI revealed that it was actually a massive cyst. I thought I’d just been gaining weight (in a really concentrated location) from the stress of moving, but I’d had strangers and friends and family ask me if I was pregnant because I looked pregnant. A week before I moved to Seattle, I had surgery to remove the cyst, which was later determined to be a benign serous cystadenoma. When we discussed the procedure we knew it had to be somewhat exploratory, but never was a fertility test discussed.
- To assess tubal patency, a blue dye (methylene blue) is injected into the cavity of the uterus via a special plastic or metal cannula placed in the canal of the cervix. The cannula also allows the surgeon to move the uterus in any direction. If the tubes are patent they first become slightly distended as they fill with the dye. The dye then spills out through the open ends of the tubes into the abdominal cavity.
- Menstruation and menopause are forms (however temporary) of infertility, which is often described in medical literature using language of failed production. In advocating for language that does not assume that menstruation is a failure to produce, Martin reminds us that for women who are trying NOT to get pregnant, menstruation is not a failure to produce but simply a thing unto itself.
- Ever since the discovery of the serous cystadenoma, I’ve been on high alert regarding even normal follicle cysts, which I get constantly as a side effect of my IUD, Mirena. My doctor has asked me to track the symptoms of those cysts (many of which are hemorraghic and extremely painful) and my cycle, which is all kinds of messed up by the cysts (which usually contain excess hormones in their fluids).
- The disco ball of pain (left) and the endlessly confounded period-predicting algorithm (right)
- The app (re)orients me, and I reorient the app.
- Rhetorics of fertility and experiences of infertility: the language of “failure to produce” damages both women who want to have children but can’t AND women who aren’t sure whether they can have children but don’t want to. I wish we even had a different word from “infertility.”
- Rhetorics of fertility and experiences of infertility: the language of “failure to produce” damages both women who want to have children but can’t AND women who aren’t sure whether they can have children but don’t want to. I wish we even had a different word from “infertility.” Like Maria showed us, the kairotic fertility fairytale tells us that “failure to produce” is a problem for woen I see this as participating in what Maria described as “recognizing women as agents and advocates of their own health.”