“Wie sonst das Zeugen Mode war”: Reproduktionstechnologien in Literatur und Film (review)

Based on a detailed analysis of a substantial textual body drawn from literature and film since the nineteenth century, Tanja Nusser explores the depiction of technologies of human reproduction in these media. This very informative and simultaneously exciting read is explicitly not intended as a literary or cultural history of reproduction technologies; rather, it tracks the biomedical imaginary in select literary texts and focuses on the technologies as narrative objects. Nusser frames the various discourses inherent in this biomedical field and influencing fiction since the end of the nineteenth century by simultaneously following up on the—at any time most recent—developments in reproductive technologies, and by analyzing how these latest trends find their way into literature and film. Following a very instructive introduction (chapter 1) that outlines the project and explicates the theoretical approach in detail, Nusser’s book consists of five additional chapters that analyze various examples from literature and film, and a most convincing conclusion. The chapters that form the main body of Nusser’s book are predominantly arranged chronologically, reflecting the historical developments in reproductive technologies. The occasional references pointing ahead, or back to historical developments, are very appropriate since they illuminate thematic or discursive developments, and hence support the ease of access to the book.

Following the “Vorgeschichten” (chapter 2), which focus on the imaginary predecessors of the new reproduction technologies, in chapter 3 Nusser analyzes a variety of texts—some of which, such as Ewers’s Fundvogel (1928) and Alraune (1911), have been ignored by literary criticism so far—that concentrate either on the effects experimental medicine has on people’s personal lives, or on the industrial mass production of humans. Nusser illustrates how the scientific, ethical, and judicial discourses shift from enabling sterile women to have children to conceptualizing possibilities of industrial mass production of human beings. Chapter 4, focusing on discourses that developed during the last decades of the twentieth century and literary successors of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, emphasizes the monstrous horizon of reproductive medicine, as well as the potential implicit in cloning, to unsettle traditional notions of the family. In chapter 5, Nusser concentrates on motion pictures that conceptualize the latest developments in reproduction technologies in terms of apocalypse or fantasies of self-procreation, and reveals the extent to which these films stabilize or challenge stereotypical images of the female body and its reproductive abilities. Chapter 6 turns to twenty-first-century discourses surrounding reproductive technologies, among others “cyborg-kids,” changing notions of what constitutes humanness, and the “threat” to pregnancy as part of female biology and the notion of the nuclear family.

The concluding chapter 7 might be considered the very compelling climax of this fascinating book. In her discussion of art projects (by Chrissy Conant, Suzanne Anker, and Nell Tenhaaf) dealing with reproductive technologies, the author—referring to the chapters that have dealt with the topics that reoccur in her discussion of art—recapitulates, condenses, and expands on the various topics she has examined throughout her study, and persuasively brings together the various strands of the argumentative line she has developed during the proceeding chapters. Nusser emphasizes that while her study follows a linear pattern that arranges the literary texts chronologically, the popular depictions of reproductive technologies current at various times in literature, film, and art all cite the same traditional images, stereotypes, clichés, and concepts to convey the latest developments in research. Particularly, the notion of an immaculate conception and birth determines and in fact dominates the imaginary of reproduction technologies. Combined, these images not only produce ambivalence—after all, the complexities underlying the popular discourses accompanying reproductive technologies possess the power to question hegemonic definitions of kinship and thus have disruptive potential—but above all tend to stabilize Western societies’ notions of “normality” by portraying normalizing societal ideas (e.g. by positing the norm as white and nonmonstrous).