Assisted reproductive technologies (ar ts) presentation pt1
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This document summarizes the evolution of feminist perspectives on assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in three phases from 1984 to the present, focusing on early concerns about medicalization and patriarchy giving way to recognition of ARTs' role in mediating embodiment and a critique of gender as socially constructed even at the biological level through normalization processes in fertility clinics.
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Assisted reproductive technologies (ar ts) presentation pt1
- 1. Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) Is Man to Father as Woman is to Father? Fertile Ground: Feminist Theorize Reproductive Technologies as featured in Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography Of Reproductive Technologies (Charis Thompson 2005) By: Sarah Lee, Sarah Luca and Jess Li
- 2. Fertile Ground: Introduction • “Paradoxical tension” between ARTs and ART advocates and feminists • The evolution of feminist work regarding infertility in the age of ARTs and analogous feminist “waves”
- 3. Fertile Ground: Phase 1 (1984-1991) • Medicalization of Infertility a point of interest for various feminist groups (uniting source) • Medical Dangers & the Experimental Nature of early ARTs (IVF, artificial insemination, hormonal therapies, etc.) for the woman’s body and patriarchal maternal imperative (Radical Feminist Critiques)
- 4. Fertile Ground: Phase 1 (cont’d) • Social stratification, commodification of reproduction (Socialist Feminist Critique) • Complicity/Connection of ARTs with Eugenics and Patriarchal Regimes of Biomedicine (?) • The Mainstream/Liberal Response • Conceptualization of Infertility itself
- 5. Fertile Ground: Phase 2 (1992-2000) • After the mid-1990s, access to ARTs are not so dependent on social identities • The Post-Structuralist shift in third wave feminism (from moral certainty to ambivalence) • Science & Technology Studies and Technofeminism
- 6. Visibility Technologies and Fetal Personhood? • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Mr1Mw HpZXA • How did visibility technologies such as the Ultrasound impact the conceptualization of the fetus and the moral debate on abortion?
- 7. Fertile Ground Phase 2 (Cont’d) • ARTs now characterized as having agency in mediating embodiments of reproduction • Less focus on “vertical” stratification (class/economics) and more focus on “horizontal” stratification • Transnational Politics of Reproduction
- 8. Man to Father as Woman is to Mother • Assertion that biological categories of sex are socially constructed and maintained (Fausto- Sterling and Judith Butler) • Masculinity in ART clinics examined through perfomativity theory (Butler) and Biomedical ontology of gender (Fausto-Sterling) • Scripted Gender identities are repaired and maintained through ontological/biological and experiential performative processes
- 9. Male-Factor Infertility • Male Factor Infertility and Social Stigma • Increased Diagnosis of Male-Factor Infertility since the 1990s and technological responses • Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection ICSI • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGbIL9Q WSsM
- 10. Ethnographic Vignettes • The Virility Trope (biological reductionism of masculinity) • The Good Father Trope (social reductionism of masculinity)
- 11. Norming and Performing Gender • Structuralist Ideological Theory of Masculinity as “Positional” (Culture) and Femininity as “Relational” (Nature) • Thompson argues that her ethnography of fertility clinics reveals both a relational and positional prescription of masculinity, thereby revealing its constructedness
- 12. Critique on the Social Constructedness of Biological Sex • Is gender dimorphism in the binary sense then really constituted by social processes (such as normalization) as asserted by Thompson, Butler, Fauster-Stirling and others? • Do you see any problems with this theory and its applicability to material reality and scientific knowledge?
Editor's Notes
- 1)There exists a paradoxical tension between ARTs and ART advocates and feminists due to the essentialist association between motherhood and women.-Explanation: There is a greater burden on women in terms of involuntary childlessness and infertility than men and ARTs seek to alleviate that burden. However, by supporting ARTs as they operate in the current heteronormative, patriarchal framework seems counter-progressive to feminists.2) Thompson traces the trajectory of feminist work regarding infertility in the post-industrial age of reproductive technologies. She delineates between two stages of feminist literature on reproductive technologies and infertility and asserts that they are characterized by their spatial-temporal contemporaries: second and third-wave feminist movements. The feminist waves themselves are further segmented (liberal feminism, radical feminism, structural-functionalist feminism, post-structuralist feminism, etc.) We will further explore these two stages and their expression of first and second wave feminist concerns.
- -With the birth of the first “test tube baby” Louise Brown in 1978 and the ensuing proliferation of early ARTs, feminists were eager to critically examine the socio-cultural effects RTs on motherhood/fatherhood and societal stratification at large. -In the 1970s (prior to the widespread adoption of ARTs), some radical feminists encouraged the development of ARTs, arguing that artificial reproduction had the potential to alter our social differentiations between motherhood & fatherhood—but only if feminists were in control of these technologies. Other radical feminists however, opposed the over-medicalization of reproduction in the West from the onset as being manifestations of a patriarchal bias towards biomedicine.-From the 1980s to the mid 1990’s however, the critiques of ARTs intensified and diverged along different feminist political strata: radical feminism, socialist feminism, liberal/mainstream feminism. -Liberal feminists tended to view ARTs with technological optimism, believing that technologies that could augment and amplify choice for women in regards to their reproduction were positive developments (a viewpoint that still stands to this day). However, the nature of early ARTs were not always medically sound as pertaining to women’s bodies and this would be a source of contention that united the liberal feminists and radical feminists at the beginning (until the ARTs were rendered safer) -Cases of early infertility treatments (IVF, sperm donors, hormonal medication, etc.) were more experimental, had higher failure rates and sometimes outright posed medical hazards to women’s bodies. This was an early uniting source between radical and some liberal feminists. For example, a small number of infamous cases involving women taking hormonal drugs to stimulate the simultaneous release of more than one egg led to ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, a potentially lethal condition (some women actually died from this). -The adoption of ARTs, early feminist critics argued, would not be accommodated in a timely manner by legal and social paradigm shifts that could allow for a responsible, non-patriarchal framework for ARTs-However, there were two small spots of technological optimism in regards to ARTs from radical feminists and socialist feminists. The former emphasized the potential ARTs had for possibly subverting the heternormative model of parenthood (e.g. lesbian partners). While the latter espoused their potential role in the breakdown of class stratification and cautioned against the commercialization of ARTs.
- -Unfortunately, as we know the commercialization of ARTs is exactly what occurred after.-Early social feminist emphasis of class stratification expressed in the economic disparity of access to ARTs as well as the connection that ARTs posed for some with their potential link to Eugenics, abuse of sterilization/abortion/family planning and genetic engineering (usually associated with socially marginalized classes) were also concerns. These concerns were mostly of a structuralist/structural-functionalist nature, that is, they were addressing the existing and historical social structures that ARTs could conform to and assist. -In the United States, IVF and entailing processes for one pregnancy ranged between $30,000-$40,000, making it prohibitively expensive for non-wealthy couples-The Liberal/Mainstream response was to ameliorate the criticisms by addressing and engaging them in dialogue. ARTs were an anomaly for biomedicine, given their intersection with consumerism. How do you address a market-related issue? Why, of course with a market-related strategy. In this case, it was transparency and reform. Activists, professional organizations and even pharmaceutical companies joined into the fill the information gap (even on non-ART alternatives to infertility such as adoption and voluntary childlessness). However, this was not enough for radical feminists who warned that merely normalizing RTs could render the socially stratified dimensions to these technologies invisible and also deepen the epistemological separation between mother and fetus.
- -After the mid-1990s, access to ARTs were less mediated by social identities (more open to LGBT couples, singles, etc.) but still mediated by capital-The shift in third wave feminism came as radical feminists were less inclined to reject essentialist associations between women and motherhood (as well as so-called “feminine” values: nurturing, authentic, nonviolent, etc.) and instead even began to embrace them in a way. This led to the infertile woman’s dilemma being characterized less as an ideological brainwashing of women to the maternal imperative but an innate desire to have children. Let’s be clear, this is still a constructed association but it opened the way for Post structuralism to take hold in feminism in the third-wave. -Post-structuralism understood stratification, structure, agency and experience as being symbiotic and mutually interdependent. This blending of the discursive (idea) and material led poststructuralist feminists (such as anthropologist Marilyn Strathern) to focus on the technical/material specificities of ARTs and their mutually-constitutive relationship with the notion of kinship (which biologically determinist in the West). -The Post-Structuralist shift was predicated also by a shift from moral certainty to a more nuanced, ambivalent view of ARTs. The multiplicity of experiences by different women (both upper and lower classes, gay/straight, racial, etc.) and the variance in agency expressed by these women upset the uniformity applied on women in Phase 1. The distribution of power was also seen less as top-down hierarchical but much more reflexive and multi-sectional (Foucauldian reference hehe). Greater regulation of ARTs were additionally making them safer and more widely accessible.
- -visibility technologies were intimately tied to the emergence of the notion of fetal personhood. -According to Balsamo, “the newly visible fetal body now determines the moral status of the maternal body which is subtly redefied as a womb with a view” -The ontological re-ordering the fetal and maternal life? What do you think?
- -The STS & Technofeminist responses in Phase 2 characterized ARTs as having agency in their own right in terms of mediating embodiments of reproduction and kinship. Some of these new embodiments even contained the potential to subvert some of the gender-stereotypical, heteronormative, nuclear family model from which they initially arose (unintended consequences). -”Hegemonic masculinity” was resorted to less and less as a go-to assumption in feminist critiques. -STS & Technofeminist responses focused less on “vertical” stratification (class/economics as this was reminiscent of the structural-bias observed in Phase 1) and more focus on “horizontal” stratification (race, sexuality, they had been neglected in analysis, compared to class/economics in Phase 1). While Thompson characterizes the latter development as much-needed, she laments the neglect of class differentiation in Phase 2. -Cross-cultural variation in reproduction began to be observed near the end of Phase 2, to gain greater global contextual framework for reproduction, infertility and its intersections in all the facets of culture (e.g. Nationalism and the imperative to reproduce or economics and the desirability to reproduce in certain classes. For example, middle-upper class women encouraged to reproduce while lower-class women discouraged).
- -Judith Butler and the theory of gender performativity draw on the representational ideas of drag, performance and parodic relation to the articulation of gender in reality. As a highly constructionist assertion, this puts into question the existence of pre-determined, fixed, naturalized identities. As a result “the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found precisely in the arbitrary relation between [performed] acts” (pg 117, mention that this is a quote). She even insists that the biological category of sex is constructed, relying on the epistemological argument that since all knowledge is sensory-mediated in the first place, classifications of identity are therefore artificial hegemonic unions. -Biological ontology of gender theory by Fausto-Sterling insists that the male/female sexual binary is actually a shaded continuum (she has conducted research on intersexed people) and that the vast middle ground is biological ambiguity and intermediary. The metaphysical assertion contained in this theory is that nature comes to us like malleablecookie dough, but we apply science (and, of course, prejudice), as the cookie cutters, to create discrete categories of male and female-By drawing on the framework of these two, Thompson sets out to conduct ethnographic research on masculinity in ART clinics from the “stylized repetition” of social-temporal acts (Butler) to the under-articulation of the biological ontology of gender. That is, Thompson looks at the way that gender is enacted through performative processes in ARTs clinics as well as the way that biology does not rigidly determine gender in certain contexts pertaining to ART clinics. -Thompson’s thesis is that scripted gender identities (masculinity in particular in this scenario) are repaired and maintained through parodic performances of hypergender-appropriate behaviour and “passing”, i.e., having an authentic, intact gender identity (e.g. having a high sperm count despite impotence caused by spinal injury). Thompson states that she uses structuralist understandings of gender (for example, masculinity and virility) to uncover the poststructuralist nature of gender construction. A process she coins the choreography of ontology.
- -Male factor-infertility confers a greater societal stigma on afflicted men, more so than in non-male-factor heterosexual, infertile couples. Thompson insists that this is because of the normalization/naturalization of structuralist male identification with fertility. -The overimplication of women as ART patients and reduction of male patient roles’ to ejaculation disrupts the traditional male subject positions as fathers and partners. Women still bear children from their own bodies, therefore their relationship as the "mother" is not changed even in the context of the ART clinic. However in this case, the "man" does not remain the "father" in the same way that "woman" remains "mother“. (138). This leads men in ART clinics to showcase through other means their intact masculine identities. -Since the 1990s, there has been a dramatic increase in diagnosis and research into male-factor infertility. Technological responses to male-factor infertility have subsequently spawned from ARTs such as ICSI, TESE-ICSI (testicular sperm extraction in conjunction with ICSI), electroejaculation, etc. ICSI is the primary ART used in resistant male-factor fertility cases and even in some non-male-factor fertility cases (e.g. when less than five eggs have been retrieved after superovulation)
- The Virility Vignette:-man was applauded by unacquainted women in the waiting room for producing spermsample quickly-Men were reduced to their ability to produce sperm as an extentionof their male functions -Men often experience severe stimigzation with infertility, i.e: becoming feminized, weak, impotent, therefore virtility is seen as macho and masculine-Men in ART seminar who try to arrange themselves into a hierarchy according to those with the least comprised virility/masculinity (e.g. infertility due to injury—implies once intact masculinity) all the way to those with the most compromised virility/masculinity (e.g. congenital azoospermia, absence of sperm, the “congenital” means this particular condition is present from birth) The Good Father Vignette:-Male patients were expected to comply with being a good patient in order to prove his worthiness of ARTs and capability of being a good father/husband, according to established idealized norms of the nuclear family-The vignette of the man who was not a good patient (refused to wake up at 6:30am for a sperm fertility assessment) and the ICSI which was initially done without his consent almost as criticism of his lack of participation in the ART process. -Reification of the social norms of a supportive/compliant father and husband
- -Thompson acknowledges that her ethnography draws on the structuralist subjectivity of masculinity as “positional”, that is: abstract and objective, with agency enacted from and for the position of the man himself as an obective entity. The culture portion of the culture/nature dichotomy corresponds with this Structuralist view of masculinity.-Conversely, the subjectivity of femininity is seen as “relational” in this Structuralist paradigm. Ortner, Chodorow, Simone de Beauvoir and others assert that the female body is biologically more enslaved to procreation and thus, nature. Her body, social roles and psychic structure are argued to be more attuned to this primordial role of motherhood and its gestational responsibilities. -Thompson argues that her ethnography of fertility clinics reveals both a relational and positional prescription of masculinity. The relational portion is demonstrated by the social norm of the supportive/compliant husband and father. The positional portion of masculinity is demonstrated by the centrality of virility and paternity to manliness. Though this dichotomy is mobilized by Thompson, she maintains that her vignettes conceptualize masculinity as performative. Because men (and women) were familiar with the social prescription of masculinity and had normalized them, they were able to “perform” it in the context of the ART clinics.
- As I was reading the article, the problematic nature of this theory that gender (and even sexual) dimorphism is constructed became more salient to me. There are two main arguments that are usually offered in defense of this controversial thesis that sexual dimorphism is political rather than ontological. One is based on a general critique of knowledge (an epistemological argument), and the other on a specific picture of reality (a metaphysical argument). The epistemological argument:-All experiences and therefore, knowledge are mediated (at least by sensory perception). Objective reality cannot truly be accessed. The fact that experience is open to different interpretations does not eliminate objectivity, and the fact that science is fallible and lacks certainty does not render it just another political power discourse. The mediation of our knowledge may prevent perfect reflections of nature's exact contours, but nature does come to us in discrete forms. Sex is one of those discrete forms and only radical skepticism suggests that we must arbitrarily impose sex categories because we can't be certain about our perceptions of males and females. Gender however, is a different story than sex.The metaphysical argument of Fausto-Sterlingargues the male/female sexual binary is really just a shaded continuum—the poles of which represent traditional masculine and feminine physical equipment, while the vast middle ground is all manner of biological ambiguity. If that is true, it lends credence to the idea that even biological sexual identity is by convention. We are all biological intermediaries, and there are no fixed kinds. The metaphysical assertion is: Nature comes to us like undifferentiated cookie dough, but we apply science (and, of course, prejudice), as the cookie cutters, to create discrete categories of male and female. However, her purported numbers of intersexuality are inflated due to the incorporation of groups not actually considered intersexual by biological standards then subsequently revising those numbers slightly lower.The solution to prejudiced essentialism and marginalization of those who do not fit fixed categories of identification is not to argue that there is no such thing as "male/female“ sexual dimorphism or "normal/abnormal" or "typical/atypical." Instead of arguing that nothing is normal and we're just making it all up, we should learn how to embrace difference rather than manage it through denial.