Transbiology: A Feminist Cultural Account of Being After IVF
This article is a rewritten version of a keynote
lecture given at The Scholar & Feminist Conference 2009,
"The Politics of Reproduction: New Technologies of Life," held on
February 28 at Barnard College in New York
City.[1]
Watch video of Sarah Franklin's
keynote lecture.
Listen to a podcast of Sarah Franklin's
keynote lecture.
The 2009 Scholar and Feminist Conference coincides with the 40th
anniversary of the first experimental fertilisation of a human egg,
in 1969, and thus offers a timely moment to examine the cultural legacy
of IVF. A good place to begin is the enormous, and largely neglected,
feminist literature on new reproductive technology—or NRT. Even
without Google Scholar, the most cursory search of this literature will
confirm that NRT is one of the major themes of post-war 20th century
feminist scholarship, and a field that is as rich in equivocation as it
is impressive in its erudition. It is no exaggeration to say that
thousands of books and articles have been written by feminists on
reproductive technologies—old and new.
Artificial insemination, surrogacy, surgery, and hormonal enhancement
of fertility, as well as contraception, can all be counted as forms of
technological assistance to reproduction, or what are known as 'new' or
'assisted' reproductive technologies. But it is the rapid expansion of
IVF technology, and its evolution as a platform for genetic as well as
reproductive intervention, that gives rise to the acronyms ART and NRT
from the 1980s onwards. The feminist scholarly literature that developed
during this period is highly diverse and unusually
international.[2]
One of the most prominent strands of debate associated with this
vigorous early period is the denouncement of new reproductive
technologies from prominent radical feminists during the 1980s,
including Maria Mies, Janice Raymond, Gena Corea, Renate Klein, Jalna
Hanmer, and Robyn Rowland, among others. This group is also associated
with the formation and leadership of FINRRAGE, the Feminist
International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic
Engineering, founded in 1986.[3]
To the extent that there is a 'trademark' or 'generic' radical
feminist position in this period, it can be characterised by its
presumption of an identity between new reproductive technology and
patriarchal culture. According to this view, new reproductive
technologies encapsulate, enforce, and intensify the core values of
patriarchal culture. IVF is the unadulterated offspring of patriarchal
science, or, following Mary O'Brien, the manifestation, or even proof,
of a masculine desire to colonise and control the female reproductive
process.[4]
Within this political framework, female consumers of NRT
were perceived by some radical feminists, such as Renate Klein and Gena
Corea, as not only victims of exploitation, but as collaborators with a
male dominated medical establishment. This 'mirror theory' of new
reproductive technology, and its accompanying rhetoric of female
exploitation, victimisation, and collaboration, arguably did not always
show feminist radicalism, scholarship, or politics at their very
best.[5]
However, the emphasis on only one version of radical feminism in this
period, and even the representation of it as dominant, are, like many
retrospective accountings, both superficial and somewhat misleading.
Like the feminist literature on NRTs more broadly, the 'FINRRAGE
position' was somewhat more complicated.[6]
Already, in the 1980s, the
'NRT = patriarchy' position, and its corresponding view of women who
had amniocentesis or IVF as being, in Renate Klein's infamous phrase,
'dupes,' was resisted by many feminists—including other radical
feminists, and large sections, if not a majority, of the FINRRAGE
membership. Some feminists were motivated by alternative views of
mothering, such as in the writings of Adrienne Rich, which
differentiated between motherhood as a patriarchal institution and as a
potential source of radical empowerment. Others, such as Naomi Pfeffer
and Anne Woollett, sought to empower women to use new reproductive
technologies to their advantage. Pfeffer and Woollett's sympathetic
account of female infertility, published in 1983 by the London feminist
publishing house Virago, was partly motivated by opposition to the
'feminists against women' who denounced women IVF patients as victims
complicit with patriarchy. Similar studies exploring women's experience
of IVF and infertility were generated from within FINRRAGE in the mid
1980s in response to the 'hard line' against NRTs, which increasingly,
to some, resembled a caricature of radical feminist goals. Studies of
women's reasons for choosing IVF were undertaken from the mid-1980s
onward by FINRRAGE members Christine Crowe (Australia), Lene Koch
(Denmark), Marte Kireczyk (The Netherlands), Linda Williams (Canada) and
myself in the UK.[7]
Conflict arising from these and other challenges
to the FINRRAGE 'hard line' of complete opposition to all forms of
reproductive technology led to the decline of the network from 1989
onwards.[8]
These early FINRRAGE studies of women's experience of IVF
in several countries, and the pioneering work of Margarete Sandelowski
in the United States,[9]
have since become part of a tradition of
feminist studies of IVF that has been continued by Judith Lorber, Gay
Becker, Charis Thompson, Marcia Inhorn, Karen Throsby and many
others.[10]
This comparative empirical tradition of feminist literature
on IVF, largely focused on women's ambivalent experiences of it, is now
a well established and rapidly expanding area of research, yet one that
is rarely used to address questions of biotechnology more broadly.
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