Through the Looking Glass

Published by Duke University Press as part of its series Experimental Futures, Sarah Franklin’s latest book, Biological Relatives (2013), makes a compelling contribution to our understanding of the evolving relationship between biology and technology, and the way in which this relationship is changing our understanding of kinship in the twenty-first century. While at times repetitive (or, should I say, “reproductive”), Biological Relatives is arguably the most complete cultural analysis of NRTs (new reproductive technologies) that has been published to date. Splicing in an Alice in Wonderland metaphor along with the ethnographic field work, cultural studies, feminist theory, and biomedical science that make up Biological Relatives, Franklin argues that IVF (in vitro fertilization) is a “curious” stem cell technology that operates as the “technologization of [biological] substance and a substantialization of technology” (258). In so doing, IVF provides a “looking glass” view into the ambivalent process of “remaking life.” In a Habermasian move, she discounts a simplistic understanding of reproductive technologies as an automatic progress narrative in which the retooling of the human embryo is a duty to the future, and instead examines our state of being “after IVF” as a frontier wherein the very idea of the biological has been relativized. Technology not only has changed our understanding of the biological but also our understanding of evolution, inheritance, gender, and genealogy. In its entirety, Biological Relatives is a heavily interdisciplinary project that performs the “curious work of culturing biology both in and out of glass” (312). One of Franklin’s many clever double entendres, “culturing biology” refers both to a looking back at the way in which biology has long been cultured by technologies of gender, sex, and kinship, and a looking forward at how our ability to culture biology in vitro has enabled the emergence of new “biological relatives,” while a deeper understanding of biology’s contingency necessitates that we rethink what it means to be “biologically relative.” It is this methodology of looking backward in order to look forward that, I argue, provides the narrative trajectory for Franklin’s book. While her early chapters succeed in their ability to rethink the history of biology, technology, and kinship in light of new developments in reproductive medicine, her later chapters are less effective in envisioning the implications of these new “biological relatives” on the future of kinship and the social, economic, and political structures in which they are embedded.

The chapters that make up Biological Relatives do not build upon one another to advance a calculated argument about the relationship between biology and technology or the future of kinship, but instead function as a loose mosaic that approaches what it means to be “after IVF” from a number of different positions, via a number of different methodologies (feminist anthropology in chapter 4, patient ethnography and 1980s feminist political debates in chapter 5, IVF literature and “iVF” visual imagery in chapter 6, and A.R.T clinic art installations in chapter 7). Employing Marilyn Strathern’s model of merographic connection both methodologically and argumentatively, each chapter is distinct and part of the larger whole. Derived from the aptly biological term “meroblast,” which describes the partial cleavage of cells in an early embryo, merography describes “the way ideas write or describe one another; the very act of description makes what is being described a part of something else” (Strathern, 204). A central part of Euro-American kinship theory, merography recognizes the overlapping logics of the hybrid reproductive model in which domains—like nature and culture—can maintain their distinctness while also being brought into conjunction with one another, emphasizing the plurality of their connections. Franklin deploys merographic thinking as she discusses IVF as part of a biological, technical, and cultural process, acknowledging that researchers and participants often inhabit these overlapping points of view simultaneously. As she argues, “It is precisely the experience of inhabiting multiple contradictory frames of reference at the same time that in part accounts for the distinctiveness of the IVF experience, and its inherent ambivalence” (156). I argue it is [End Page 221...