One of the biggest implications of IVF, however, is not the biological consequences of its widespread use three generations from now, but the cultural changes its rapid normalisation has engendered. Marilyn Strathern was the first to begin to chart these in two 1992 publications, Reproducing the Future and After Nature. 1 In both books, Strathern drew on anthropological theories of kinship to examine changes to the meaning of natural or biological facts engendered by the advent of new reproductive technologies. She argued that NRTs revealed the contingencies of how different domains of facts provide the ground for others, comparing this movement to the function of analogy. NRTs, with their new analogy of kinship as the outcome of technological choice, made explicit the ‘hybrid’ logic of kinship connection—which was not fixed by biology, one-way, or given by nature but rather digital, plural, and merographic—i.e. always switching back and forth. What makes a person biological is not the same as what makes them social: what makes them kindred is not the same as what makes them an individual, and so forth. NRTs, and the discourses surrounding them, added into the switching back and forth of kinship analogies and new elements of choice and technological assistance. This had a displacing effect. In Strathern’s terms, the analogies ‘travelled back’ to renaturalise conception as an act of technological choice rather than natural fact. Human reproduction was now explicitly ‘after assistance,’ ‘after culture,’ and ‘after IVF.’
This displacement of the prior ground of natural biological conception by technologically-assisted conception is evident today in the way that pregnancies are described as being ‘spontaneous’ or ‘unassisted’ when they are not the result of NRT. Post-IVF, non-miracle babies are no longer un-marked. We are thus ‘after IVF’ in another sense—IVF has to an extent become the model for ‘normal’ reproduction. IVF at once ‘reproduces’ conception as an in vitro replica of ‘natural, existing biology’ and inaugurates a powerful new domain of ‘artificially constructed’ biology that is simultaneously understood to be ‘just like’ the ‘real thing’ and completely different from it—being improved, redesigned, cleaner, and more manageable. IVF is in this sense a classically hybrid technology—a technology that has become second nature, and so normalised and naturalised it establishes a new ‘ground’ against which more radical innovations, such as human cloning for example, are compared.
One reason the history of IVF deserves to be reconsidered, I suggest, is because it turns out that this hybridity is very characteristic of the logic of post-genomic biology more generally today, which constantly vacillates between naturally existing and technologically assisted biologies. Arguably, IVF inaugurates precisely the doubled, hybrid logic of being just like the real thing, only not—as in genetically modified foods, artificial skin, or cloned sheep. 2 This is why the importance of IVF has been underestimated: the number of people who use the procedure may be small, but the power of its logic—and its core analogies—are vast. Both sides of the IVF analogy have importance for feminism: the idea that new biomedical techniques or biotechnological applications are ‘just like’ their ‘natural biological’ counterparts—i.e. that they are ‘mere’ imitations—naturalises synthetic applications such as hormone replacement therapy. Conversely, emphasis on the ‘designed’ or ‘engineered’ character of IVF aligns it with the many other contemporary practices that challenge a model of biology as fixed, inevitable, or determining—including plastic surgery, transgenesis, and the transsex movement. By this logic, IVF brings us to another set of questions about how technology and choice operate as denaturalising idioms not only for reproduction and kinship, but for gender and sex?
Schematically it is often asserted that the Pill brought about a separation of sex from reproduction. Artificial insemination and embryo transfer enabled reproduction without sex. Both the Olympic Committee and feminism had a hand in confirming the separation of gender from sex. And with the publicity surrounding Oregon’s Thomas Beatie, the pregnant trans man, we can rethink Gayle Rubin’s sex-gender system once again. Recalling Rubin’s definition of the sex-gender system as ‘the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed needs are satisfied,’ we have to ask if the term ‘biological sexuality’ has any meaning anymore. 3 Or indeed ‘biological’ anything? We have to ask whether the transformation of biological sexuality—or for that matter biology full stop—into products of human activity is not a precise description of what The Economist magazine has recently dubbed “The Age of Biology.” Arguably, it is in part the condition of being ‘after IVF’ that will enable the sex-gender system of what is now known as ‘big biology’ to be mapped.
To think through these questions I want to delve further back into the feminist archives, to an earlier feminist writer, Shulamith Firestone. Firestone is of course famous, or infamous, for her advocacy of new reproductive technologies as a means of freeing women from the tyranny of biology by liberating them from pregnancy. For this prediction, her 1970 publication The Dialectic of Sex: the Case for Feminist Revolution has long drawn regret and vitriol from critics accusing its author of all manner of folly—from technological determinism and biological essentialism to sheer naïveté. 4
Maria Mies characterises the dangers of the “technocratic illusion many feminists pursue in the wake of Shulamith Firestone:”
They think the new reproductive technology and genetics could, if they were in the control of women be used for finally abolishing men (by cloning them off). These women not only fail to realize that economic/political and military power is not in the hands of Lesbians …. Ultimately, all these arguments are based on a biologistic interpretation of a historical and social relationship. They are without doubt going in the direction of racist and fascist thinking. 5
Mies is hardly unique in her accusation that Firestone and her fellow travellers unwittingly promoted the same totalitarian reasoning they allegedly sought to oppose by attempting to take control of human biology, and in particular biological reproduction. To the contrary, it could even be claimed that criticism of Firestone’s famous fallacy has become iconic of a retrospective dismissal of second-wave radical feminism more broadly as being anti-family, anti-maternity, and even anti-woman. The ‘Miss Firestone Regrets’ version of 70s feminism includes a lengthy list of malapropisms—from over-reliance on out-dated polarities to unforgivably bad tailoring.
- Marilyn Strathern, Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). [↑]
- Eco-futurist Stuart Brand uses the IVF analogy, for example, to lobby for greater acceptance of genetically modified foods. In an interview in the Financial Times in January 2010, he argues IVF is a key example of how an initially threatening technology can come to seem “just as good” as what it is replacing: “We’ve had 12 or 13 years of genetically engineered food in this country and it’s been great. My prediction is that in a couple of years we’ll see a soya bean oil that has Omega 3 fatty acids to cut down heart disease. Who would refuse that, any more than people refuse to take medicine?” In the long run, he insists, opposition will die out. “IVF is the big example. I remember when that was an abomination in the face of God’s will. As soon as people met a few of the children, they realized that they were just as good as the ‘regular’ ones. My hope is that, unlike nuclear, which involves almost a theological shift, getting gradually used to genetic foods will be a non-issue.” (Brand quoted in Honigman 2010).[↑]
- Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Towards an Anthropology of Women, Rayna Reiter, ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975): 157-210.[↑]
- Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: the Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Bantam, 1970).[↑]
- Maria Mies, “‘Why Do We Need All This?’: A Call Against Genetic Engineering and Reproductive Technology,” Women’s Studies International Forum 8.6 (1985): 553-560.[↑]
