Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception
Sarah Franklin
Language: English
Pages: 268
ISBN: 0415067677
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
New reproductive technologies, such as in vitrio fertilization, have been the subject of intense public discussion and debate worldwide. In addition to difficult ethical, moral, personal and political questions, new technologies of assisted conception also raise novel socio-cultural dilemmas. How are parenthood, kinship and procreation being redefined in the context of new reproductive technologies? Has reproductive choice become part of consumer culture? Embodied Progress offers a unique perspective on these and other cultural dimensions of assisted conception techniques. Based on ethnographic research in Britain, this study foregrounds the experiences of women and couples who undergo IVF, whilst also asking how such experiences may be variously understood.
Celia Lury to develop a cultural analysis of Thatcherism in the 1980s greatly clarified some of my thinking around the material presented in Chapter 2, as did my work with the Science and Technology subgroup at CCCS on public debate about reproduction in Britain in the 1980s. I am particularly indebted also to Maureen McNeil for introducing me to the constellation of issues related to science, nature and progress which structures this volume as a whole. Off-Centre: feminism and cultural studies
of “meaning” which we are prepared to attribute to ethnographic evidence’ (1967:40). Spiro agreed: ‘[This] controversy is theoretical and methodological in character. It involves such issues as the nature of culture, how it works, what its functions are, what explanatory variables must be attended to in attempting to interpret any of its manifestations’ (1968:243). As the wide spectrum of these views as to what the ‘virgin birth’ debates were ‘about’ makes clear, conceptions of conception among
explicitly embedded, or ‘contained’, and it is through this enframement that it derives its meaning, value and importance. The value of Weiner’s model is supported by evidence from Schneider concerning the conception beliefs of the Yapese, which underwent transformation from the time of his fieldwork in 1947–8 to encompass the ‘western’ view of conception twenty years later. The newly received model of conception was that ‘the man plants a seed in the woman and the woman is like a garden’, true
definition of her ovaries and Fallopian tubes is accepted at one level (in that she is undergoing IVF), it is also rejected at another (as causing her to feel too ‘negative’). Most importantly, this extract demonstrates precisely ‘It just takes over’ 161 how IVF is ‘lived’ in terms of personal identity, by adopting complex strategies of psychological preparedness. A particular version of selffashioning specific to the context of IVF can be seen in this description, based on a re-imagining of
Frances Keating’s words, ‘It’s your whole life you’re talking about’. Understanding the reasons why women choose IVF is thus essential to understanding their experience of the procedure. The reasons informing this choice, and the emotions which give rise to it, are the ‘bottom line’ informing the experience of undergoing IVF. It is all about hope: hope for success at each stage, hope for a resolution, hope for the future, and mostly hope for a child. Yet it is also all about 170 ‘Having to