Abstract
Reviewed by: Lulu Le Vay, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Carla Lam investigates feminism and reproductive technology by bringing the body back into feminist analysis. Her book engages with a material dimension inspired by Marxist principals, primarily through the notion that lived material realities shape how we think and structure our experiences. Lam’s work is steered through a material feminist approach, which helps her explore female subjects’ interaction with material structures and how this affects women’s reproduction through technological intervention. Lam unpacks this dynamic by identifying scientific discourse and culture as masculine in its descriptions of the pregnant body as body parts, which she discusses by drawing on a wide range of feminist work that emerged in the debates around foetal visualising technology. Lam argues that this moment in science and technology created the shift from embodied subjects to the disembodied, a method by which to normalise the reproductive experience for men who cannot experience reproductive labour.
Lam sifts through the extensive body of feminist engagement with reproductive technologies by dividing the work into differing positions on the practice – resistors (radical feminists), embracers (socialist feminists) and the equivocals who saw reproductive technologies as both oppressive and liberatory. Resistant feminists such as Corea and Rich believe that reproductive technologies are an extension of patriarchal control, an imposed violence and male plot against women. The embracing feminists such as de Beauvoir and Firestone argue that biological reproduction is oppressive and that to be disentangled from the process would be liberating, while writers such as Haraway and Plant argue that technology has the capacity to dissolve the boundaries forged through the Cartesian duality. Equivocals like Butler and Farquhar embrace science as part of life, and argue that women have the right to take control of their own reproduction through individual agency. Lam also emphasises how resistant feminists view the social significance of infertility as being recent: ‘because we now believe NRTs [new reproductive technologies] can “cure” infertility that we believe it must be cured’ (p. 49).
Out of the range of debates covered, two particular areas of her discussion stood out. Firstly, how reproductive technology has initiated a ‘masculinization of women’s reproductive consciousness’ (p. 33) by enabling women to become fathers, specifically through being able to acquire a genetic child through surrogacy, which allows women to reproduce without the labour of pregnancy or birthing. Lam emphasises that the importance of the genetic tie has historically been integral to the perpetuation of the male genetic line, which is now accessible to women. Secondly, Lam draws productively on disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s work on misfitting, which explores the vulnerability of interacting with material environments, and applies it to infertility through the concept of the ‘reproductive misfit’ (p. 122). Lam proposes that this captures the tension between the (reproductive) female subject and the (social) world – flesh and environment, body and world. This emphasises the interaction between material and social dynamics rather than biological or social determinism.
What is missing from this otherwise in-depth overview of the debates surrounding reproductive technology is a more extensive inclusion of the core body of work on race and reproductive technology. Although race is touched upon in the discussion of race and infertility, it is only done so in brief. This is surprising of a contemporary text, as a lack of focus in this field has been previously highlighted by France Winndance Twine (2011: 8) as a core issue within the field. This is particularly poignant in light of the rapid growth of reproductive tourism in developing countries such as India, which has provoked a wave of scholarship by, amongst others, Pande, Jaiswal and Vora.
In addition, what I believe has also been bypassed is the importance of the analysis of cultural representations of reproductive technology and infertility, which explores how family ideology is articulated within the public sphere. Cultural representations are directly influenced by developments in science and technology, which do the work to reinforce normative ideals of family and motherhood. Lam does refer to core popular novels early on, and to the employment of fetal representations within the consumer market, but this could have been expanded on, particularly in light of Franklin’s (1990: 227) claim that popular representations are a powerful force in the social world and cultural construction of reproduction.
Feminist scholarly work on reproductive technology is vast, spanning over four decades. Therefore, having access to a single volume that condenses the range of arguments and positions within clear designated sections and within a historical context comes as a welcome addition to the canon. What this book does well is to provide an overview of these debates for scholars of all levels, providing an entry point into the body of work and its core arguments.