Governing the Female Body: Gender, Health, and Networks of Power

10 “Doing What Comes Naturally . . .”: Negotiating Normality in Accounts of IVF Failure

233 The new reproductive and genetic technologies constitute a broad and dynamic technosocial domain within which new social relations are produced. Implicit in this process of the forging of new relations is the production of new bodily norms and regulatory practices. Writing from a Foucauldian perspective about the new reproductive technologies , and particularly in vitro fertilization (IVF), Jana Sawicki (1991) identifies these new technologies as disciplinary techniques, which operate by “creating desires, attaching individuals to specific identities and establishing norms against which individuals and their behaviors and bodies are judged and against which they police themselves” (p. 68). While the new reproductive and genetic technologies provide new forms of knowledge and opportunity, they also function to govern the body in novel ways. Carlos Novas and Nikolas Rose (2000) have described this governance in terms of “somatic individuality,” where, for example, knowledge of genetic risk produced through the availability of genetic testing produces new responsibilities around the body and the self. Individuals, according to Novas and Rose, are not rendered passive by the diagnosis of disease (or the risk of future disease), but rather are produced as new types of subjects, becoming “skilled, prudent and active, an ally of the doctor, a proto-professional” (p. 489). Paul Rabinow (1996), elaborating Michel Foucault’s (1978) concept of biopower, articulates these new social relations and obligations in terms of “biosociality,” where identity groupings are formulated in relation to biomedical and technological knowledge and practices, and new forms of identity in turn produce their own norms and responsibilities in relation to bodily governance and health practices. 10 “Doing What Comes Naturally . . .” Negotiating Normality in Accounts of IVF Failure K A R EN THROSBY University of Warwick karen throsby 234 In this work on the new forms of bodily governance emerging out of the rise of the new reproductive and genetic technologies, however, the gendering of bodies and practices is often lost, and little attention is paid to the differential productions of biosocial responsibilities. The work of Rayna Rapp, Deborah Heath, and Karen-Sue Taussig (2001) provides an important exception to this. In an article describing a range of U.S.-based genetic support and activist groups, they show that “in most genetic support groups, the kinship activists are disproportionately wives and mothers” (p. 397). Briefly discussing the history of health activism, they suggest that over the course of the twentieth century, “health activism became increasingly marked as the domain of female volunteerism” (p. 398). Many of the local and national genetics-related groups they studied were founded by women, usually mothers of children with genetic problems, who they describe as “staking public claims on the turf of family health” (p. 398). This finding suggests that the active bodily management practices of the somatic individual are not necessarily carried out by the individual themselves, but may become the responsibility of others, disproportionately women, for whom the work of caring is easily naturalized and therefore rendered invisible as work. The prime site for exploring these issues further is IVF because although the “couple” has emerged as the “patient” in fertility treatment (van der Ploeg, 2004), the treatment itself focuses almost exclusively on the female body, even in the case of male factor infertility, rendering women not only as objects of substantial medical intervention, but also producing significant responsibility for women in relation to treatment and its outcomes. Importantly, the exclusion of women from IVF narratives is not simply a matter of representational oversight, which could be rectified by “adding in” women. Instead, the dominant representations of IVF are in fact predicated on this exclusion, through the prevailing construction of IVF as “giving nature a helping hand.” The work of IVF, then, becomes an extension of the “natural” reproductive labor of “normal” (normative) femininity. This understanding is central to the construction of IVF as a “normal” and mainstream technology, and constitutes a primary rhetorical means, for both patients and treatment providers, of distinguishing the IVF “miracle baby” from its more socially contentious sibling, the “designer baby.” The need for this discursive work highlights not only the extent to which the (un)reproductive female body is subject to surveillance and discipline, but also the widely held unease about the use of technology for reproduction—an unease that is readily apparent in the voracious media appetite for stories about “designer babies” or cloning. These stories draw on a wide repertoire of fears “Doing What Comes Naturally . . .” 235...