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Social Text 20.4 (2002) 91-119



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Extracting Men from Semen:
Masculinity in Scientific Representations of Sperm

Lisa Jean Moore


All human beings have in common an original connection to a sperm cell. Presently, each individual human body originates in part from sperm, even though the mechanism to deliver the sperm to an egg differs. But our social mediated understandings of sperm can be quite different. In multiple social worlds, sperm is layered with meanings related to both the public and private realms of human sexuality, reproduction, life and death, health and illness, masculinity and femininity, and populations. My work traces these social, cultural, medical, and historical representations of human semen and investigates several industries that develop political and economic relationships with semen (Moore and Schmidt 1999; Schmidt and Moore 1998). 1 Semen is understood biologically as a mixture of prostaglandin, fructose, fatty acids, and 1 percent sperm cells, but there are numerous other ways we have come to think about this substance. An embodied material available from most men, human semen is constructed as capable of diverse activities including fertilization and infection. Both life and death hang in the balance.

This essay examines how sperm's meanings are socially constructed within the scientific arena. Scientific discourses are dialectically related to the practices and representations of gender and reproductive behavior. A complex set of discursive outcomes related to gender, agency, capitalism, and human reproduction emerges from this dialectical relationship. I follow the development of scientific representations of sperm, with specific consideration to the dimensions of gender and agency, and consider how these representations are situated within a larger social discourse on reproduction deeply contextually embedded within a crisis of masculinities.

The scientific innovation of new practices and procedures with respect to semen has radically transformed men's role in reproduction. It is not a coincidence that the narrative I reconstruct here—sperm's rise to power, fall from grace, and resurrection—follows the retrospective popular cultural story of contemporary Western man's own rise to patriarchal power and ongoing reaction to the threat of feminism. Four hundred fifty years after their discovery, diagnosing, and imaging, cryopreserved single sperm cells can now be injected into ova. An individual man's reproductive participation, previously perceived as imperative and essential, is now readily controlled, potentially limited, and possibly even redundant. [End Page 91] Simultaneously, this narrative of scientific development in the imaging and use of sperm is linked to the stories of men's relative social power in the arenas of reproduction, families, and fatherhood. The ever expanding body of scientific knowledge about semen strives to quantify the potent/ healthful and weak/dangerous qualities of sperm. These scientific metrics, laden with unscientific qualitative subtext, assist in the social construction of sperm as "good guys" and "bad guys." That is, sperm is transformed through analogies into powerful heroes and evil villains or degraded through the use of feminized adjectives and adverbs.

In this essay, by moving back and forth between the creation of social, popular, and scientific knowledges, practices and procedures about sperm are situated within existing tensions of masculinity. By analyzing scientific and popular textual and visual representations of semen as well as the scripting of habitual acts of masculinity, I hope to illustrate the collaboration between texts and social behaviors in the creation of discourses of masculinity. It is important to note that while there is traffic between these masculinity-producing scientific and popular discourses about semen (as demonstrated below), the pressures and interests on the scientific world may guide the research question, design, and "findings." For example, biotechnological research, including research at academic centers, presently takes place under enormous economic pressure from the pharmaceutical industry. Combine this corporate pressure with the desire for professional dominance and a long history of sexism, and it becomes apparent that scientific "findings" about sperm are constrained within these interests and pressures.

Martin's research (1991) explored the absurdity of "objective and true" knowledge about fertilization by revealing the ways in which knowledge is always socially and temporally situated. She explained that these biological textbook...

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