New Reproductive Technologies and Disembodiment: Feminist and Material Resolutions by Carla Lam (review)

In various—often even opposing—ways, embodiment has always been crucial for feminism. Carla Lam’s important book addresses the fact that new reproductive technologies (NRTs) increasingly disembody reproduction for women; simply put, these technologies render women’s experience more akin to that of men. Birth becomes not only technologically mediated, but reproduction can now be taken out of the female body. This has both practical and theoretical implications. It is critical, therefore, that feminists both reflect upon the ramifications of NRTs and, at the same time, consider how NRTs influence our understandings and experiences of reproduction—and of embodiment. Embodiment is changing, not just at the material but also, concomitantly, at the conceptual level. Lam’s book explores the fact that NRTs “represent a new conceptual and material relationship of humans to nature” (3) even as NRTs continue the history of birth appropriation.

Lam’s valuable study, New Reproductive Technologies and Disembodiment: Feminist and Material Resolutions, has two interrelated aims. First, as indicated by the title, it examines how feminists think about NRTs and how— and how much—feminist thinking on this topic differs. Second, as indicated by the subtitle, it turns to material feminism and elaborates “materiality as a kind of workable settlement between biological determinism and social essentialism” (2). The book advocates a biosocial theory that challenges traditional dualisms: mind/body, culture/nature, nurture/nature.

Lam believes that NRTs are the best magnifying glass for analyzing women’s reproduction (6), and the power and vulnerability it involves. For women as potential birthers, NRTs can be both oppressive and liberating; what is crucial is not only whether we reject or embrace them, but how we theorize the historic transformation they have inaugurated. Theodor Adorno ([1951] 2006) wrote in Minima Moralia (aphorism 29) that “the splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass” (50). Lam’s book astutely and innovatively revives “feminist standpoint epistemology” (12) as key to grasping the import and impact of NRTs. Feminists (and others) have long noted problems in the view “from above,” the “bird’s eye view” of any issue, and have critiqued the alleged neutrality and objectivity of such viewpoints. A specific and partial view, to the contrary, including a view from below, can open up alternative insights and ultimately be more revealing. Lam demonstrates that a critical feminist standpoint discloses not only how NRTs may operate to oppress women, but it decisively shows that NRTs are not a neutral tool: they inherently foster patriarchal structures and dualisms. Lam draws on the groundbreaking work of Mary O’Brien, refiguring O’Brien’s notion of “reproductive consciousness” as a kind of feminist standpoint epistemology.

Lam’s revival of the work of O’Brien is an eminent and important strength of her book. In the 1970s, some early feminists wrote about making important discoveries only to realize that Virginia Woolf had already expounded these very ideas in A Room of One’s Own (1929). Along similar lines, feminists today sometimes speak of assuming that The Second Sex (1949) is dated, only to discover just how current and important many of Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas are in this work. Feminist theory, for the most part, responds to its times and concerns, and, at various junctures, feminism attends to specific, urgent issues. As a result, durable theoretical insights and philosophical postulates sometimes simply get lost with the passing of time. Lam rightly supports the critique of the “wave” metaphor of feminist theory, the narrative of sequential theoretical approaches. O’Brien wrote decades ago, and the theoretical and philosophical significance of her analyses have generally been overlooked, or even dismissed, by many who believed that attending to the way in which sexed bodies connected with consciousness would necessarily entail biological determinism. Lam is wise enough not to waste time reinventing the wheel, and instead builds on O’Brien’s concepts to think through NRTs. She notes that “post-constructionist theory”—sometimes referred to as the “new material feminism” insofar as...