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.

1. This article is a rewritten version of a keynote lecture given at the Scholar and Feminist conference in 2009. My thanks to the organizers of this wonderful event, and to both the editors and reviewers of The Scholar and Feminist Online for helpful advice, criticism, and feedback. Portions of this article are forthcoming in “Revisiting Reprotech: Shulamith Firestone and the Question of Technology” in Shulamith Firestone Revisited, Mandy Merck, ed. (London: Palgrave, 2010).[↑]
2.  Compare, for example, the back-to-back feminist anthologies on NRTS published in the late 1980s: Patricia Spallone and Deborah Steinberg, eds., Made to Order: the Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (London: Pergamon, 1987) and Michelle Stanworth, ed., Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine (Cambridge: Polity, 1987).[↑]
3.  Influential publications by members of the FINRRAGE network include Gena Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (New York: Harper & Row, 1985); Renate Klein, Infertility: Women Speak Out About their Experiences of Reproductive Medicine (London: Pandora, 1989); Janice Raymond, Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle over Women’s Freedom (New York: Harper, 1993); Robyn Rowland, Living Laboratories: Women and Reproductive Technology (London: Octopus, 1992); Jocelyn Scutt, ed., The Baby Machine: Reproductive Technology and the Commercialisation of Motherhood (London: Merlin, 1990).[↑]
4.  Mary O’Brien. The Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge, 1981). [↑]
5.  For a review of early feminist work on new reproductive technologies, see Sarah Franklin and Maureen McNeil, “Reproductive Futures: Recent Literature and Current Debates on Reproductive Technologies,” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 545-61. For a later analysis and overview see Dion Farquhar, The Other Machine: Discourse and Reproductive Technologies (New York: Routledge, 1996).[↑]
6.  See, for example, the wide diversity of feminist positions represented in the founding anthology of the feminist debate over NRTS: Rita Arditti, Renate Duelli Klein, and Shelley Minden, eds., Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood (London: Pandora, 1984). Similarly see the discrepancy between the “hard line” position advocated in the introduction and the somewhat less unequivocal positions advocated by the individual chapter authors represented in the 1988 FINRRAGE anthology edited by Deborah Steinberg and Pat Spallone in Made to Order: the Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress.[↑]
7. Naomi Pfeffer and Anne Woollett, The Experience of Infertility (London: Virago, 1983).[↑]
8. Christine Crowe, “Women Want It: In Vitro Fertilisation and Women’s Motivations for Participation”WSIF 8 (1985): 547-52; Linda Williams, “Its Gonna Work for Me,” PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1988; Lene Koch, “IVF—An Irrational Choice?,” Reproductive and Genetic Engineering 3 (1990): 225-32; Sarah Franklin, “Deconstructing ‘Desperateneness’: The Social Construction of Infertility in Popular Media Representations,” in The New Reproductive Technologies, M. McNeil, I. Varcoe, and S. Yearley, eds., (London: Macmillan, 1990): 200-229; Sarah Franklin, “Contested Conceptions: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception,” PhD dissertation, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Study, University of Birmingham, 1992; Sarah Franklin, “Making Sense of Misconceptions: Anthropological Approaches to Unexplained Infertility,” in Changing Human Reproduction: Social Science Perspectives, M. Stacey, ed. (London: Sage, 1990): 75-91[↑]
9. Margarete Sandelowski, “Women’s Experience of Infertility,” Journal of Nursing Scholarship 1986; “Fault Lines: Infertility and Imperilled Sisterhood,” Feminist Studies 16.1 (1990): 33-51; “Compelled to Try: the Never-Enough Quality of Reproductive Technology,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 5.1 (1991): 29-47; With Child In Mind: Studies of the Personal Encounter with Infertility (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).[↑]
10.  See for example: Gay Becker, The Elusive Embryo: How Women and Men Approach New Reproductive Technologies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Sarah Franklin, Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception (London: Routledge, 1997); Judith Lorber, “Choice, Gift, or Patriarchal Bargain? Women’s Consent to in vitro Fertilization in Male Infertility,” Hypatia 4.3 (1989): 23-36; Marcia Inhorn, Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Charis Thompson Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Karen Throsby When IVF Fails: Feminism, Infertility and the Negotiation of Normality (London: Palgrave, 2004).[↑]