Body boundaries, fiction of the female self: An ethnographic perspective on power, feminism, and the reproductive technologies

Feminist Studies

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 113-140

  Goslinga Roy, Gillian M ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0040196037     PISSN: 00463663     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3178595     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. For example, Dion Farquhar, The Other Machine: Discourse and Reproductive Technologies (New York: Routledge, 1996), 190-91; Sarah Franklin, "Postmodern Procreation: A Cultural Account of Assisted Reproduction," in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 336; Helena Ragoné, Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 110; Claire Snowdon, "What Makes a Mother? Interviews with Women Involved in Egg Donation and Surrogacy," Birth Issues in Perinatal Care 21 (June 1994): 77-84; Marilyn Strathern, "Displacing Knowledge: Technology and the Consequence for Kinship," in Conceiving the New World Order, 346-64.
2. For example, Dion Farquhar, The Other Machine: Discourse and Reproductive Technologies (New York: Routledge, 1996), 190-91; Sarah Franklin, "Postmodern Procreation: A Cultural Account of Assisted Reproduction," in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 336; Helena Ragoné, Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 110; Claire Snowdon, "What Makes a Mother? Interviews with Women Involved in Egg Donation and Surrogacy," Birth Issues in Perinatal Care 21 (June 1994): 77-84; Marilyn Strathern, "Displacing Knowledge: Technology and the Consequence for Kinship," in Conceiving the New World Order, 346-64.
3. For example, Dion Farquhar, The Other Machine: Discourse and Reproductive Technologies (New York: Routledge, 1996), 190-91; Sarah Franklin, "Postmodern Procreation: A Cultural Account of Assisted Reproduction," in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 336; Helena Ragoné, Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 110; Claire Snowdon, "What Makes a Mother? Interviews with Women Involved in Egg Donation and Surrogacy," Birth Issues in Perinatal Care 21 (June 1994): 77-84; Marilyn Strathern, "Displacing Knowledge: Technology and the Consequence for Kinship," in Conceiving the New World Order, 346-64.
4. For example, Dion Farquhar, The Other Machine: Discourse and Reproductive Technologies (New York: Routledge, 1996), 190-91; Sarah Franklin, "Postmodern Procreation: A Cultural Account of Assisted Reproduction," in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 336; Helena Ragoné, Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 110; Claire Snowdon, "What Makes a Mother? Interviews with Women Involved in Egg Donation and Surrogacy," Birth Issues in Perinatal Care 21 (June 1994): 77-84; Marilyn Strathern, "Displacing Knowledge: Technology and the Consequence for Kinship," in Conceiving the New World Order, 346-64.
5. For example, Dion Farquhar, The Other Machine: Discourse and Reproductive Technologies (New York: Routledge, 1996), 190-91; Sarah Franklin, "Postmodern Procreation: A Cultural Account of Assisted Reproduction," in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 336; Helena Ragoné, Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 110; Claire Snowdon, "What Makes a Mother? Interviews with Women Involved in Egg Donation and Surrogacy," Birth Issues in Perinatal Care 21 (June 1994): 77-84; Marilyn Strathern, "Displacing Knowledge: Technology and the Consequence for Kinship," in Conceiving the New World Order, 346-64.
6. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Femenist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 43.
7. Both the video, The Child the Stork Brought Home, and the thesis "Epistemologies of Embodiment in the New Reproductive Technologies: A Gestational Surrogacy Case Study," were completed at the Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1997 and 1996, respectively.
8. Gelya Frank, "Becoming the Other: Empathy and Biographical Interpretation," in Biography 8 (summer 1985); 189-210; L.L. Langness and Gelya Frank, Lives: An Anthropological Approach to Biography (Novato, Calif.: Chandler & Sharp, 1981); The Personal Narratives Group, eds., Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
9. Gelya Frank, "Becoming the Other: Empathy and Biographical Interpretation," in Biography 8 (summer 1985); 189-210; L.L. Langness and Gelya Frank, Lives: An Anthropological Approach to Biography (Novato, Calif.: Chandler & Sharp, 1981); The Personal Narratives Group, eds., Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
10. Gelya Frank, "Becoming the Other: Empathy and Biographical Interpretation," in Biography 8 (summer 1985); 189-210; L.L. Langness and Gelya Frank, Lives: An Anthropological Approach to Biography (Novato, Calif.: Chandler & Sharp, 1981); The Personal Narratives Group, eds., Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
11. Marjorie Mbilinyi provides a powerful model and rationale for collaborating with informants in the collection of life histories in "'I'd Have Been a Man': Politics and the Labor Process in Producing Personal Narratives," in Interpreting Women's Lives, 204-27.
12. Gillian M. Goslinga-Roy, "The Agent and the Voyeur: On the Ethics and Politics of Videotaping a Gestational Surrogacy Arrangement" (paper presented at the American Anthropology Association meetings, Chicago, 19-21 Nov. 1999).
13. Helena Ragoné reports this same discursive management by surrogacy centers in her enthnography of traditional surrogacy, Surrogate Motherhood, 38-50.
14. I understand power along Foucauldian lines. In a late interview, Foucault argues that power is present in all human relations; for power, he goes on to explain, is "the relationships in which one wishes to direct the behavior of another." States of domination are faced "when an individual or a social group manages to block a field of relations of power, to render them inpassive and invarriable and to prevent all reversibility of movement-by means of instruments which can be economic as well as political or military." See James Bernauer and David Rasmussen, The Final Foucault (Cambridge: First MIT Press, 1988), 3-11.
15. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in her Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 180.
16. In the feminist literature, see Gena Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (New York: Harper & Row, 1985); and Robyn Rowland, Living Laboratories: Women and Reproductive Technologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
17. In the feminist literature, see Gena Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (New York: Harper & Row, 1985); and Robyn Rowland, Living Laboratories: Women and Reproductive Technologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
18. Even the less condemnatory accounts, such as Ragoné's, take as the key issue in surrogacy the boundary crossing between private and public domains. I return to Rogoné's arguments below. See also Larry Gostin, ed., Surrogate Motherhood: Politics and Privacy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
19. All quoted phrases are drawn from formal and informal interviews.
20. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: Routledge, 1990).
21. Broker agencies shamelessly capitalize on this desire: Ragoné (p. 32) notes that an agency doubled its responses from potential surrogates when their ad was changed from "Help an Infertile Couple" to "Give the Gift of Life." Hilary Hanafin, a prominent head psychologist at one of the most successful broker agencies, has found that most surrogates have experienced losses in their own lives, such as abortions or having to put children up for adoption, and suggests this desire to "give" may be therapeutic. (Interview with author, 17 Aug. 1995). This position, I contend, robs surrogates of a more complex agency because it privatizes their choice and removes from view its embeddedness in social relations at large.
22. Farquhar offers the most incisive analysis yet of the shared ideologies between what she identifies as "fundamental" feminist positions demonizing the reproductive technologies and "liberal" biomedical discourses celebrating their advent.
23. Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 201.
24. Rosalind Petchesky, "The Body as Property: A Feminist Re-vision," in Conceiving the New World Order, 396.
25. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
26. Carole Pateman, quoted in Petchesky, "Body as Property," 395.
27. Gena Corea, Man-Made Women: How Reproductive Technologies Affect Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Deborah Steinberg, "The Depersonalisation of Women through the Administration of In Vitro Fertilisation," in The New Reproductive Technologies, ed. Maureen O'Neil, Ian Varcoe, and Steven Yearley (London: Macmillan, 1990), 74-121; Rowland.
28. Gena Corea, Man-Made Women: How Reproductive Technologies Affect Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Deborah Steinberg, "The Depersonalisation of Women through the Administration of In Vitro Fertilisation," in The New Reproductive Technologies, ed. Maureen O'Neil, Ian Varcoe, and Steven Yearley (London: Macmillan, 1990), 74-121; Rowland.
29. Gena Corea, Man-Made Women: How Reproductive Technologies Affect Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Deborah Steinberg, "The Depersonalisation of Women through the Administration of In Vitro Fertilisation," in The New Reproductive Technologies, ed. Maureen O'Neil, Ian Varcoe, and Steven Yearley (London: Macmillan, 1990), 74-121; Rowland.
30. That women gain power as surrogates is a less popular position. See Carmel Shalev, Birth Power: The Case for Surrogacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
31. Haraway, "Situated Knowledges," 195.
32. Another way that this "ontology" is racialized is discussed by Farquhar who points out, for example, that the "infertile body" is constructed as "white and female, despite the fact that black infertile couples are one-and-a-half-times more infertile than their white counterparts" (74).
33. Petchesky draws from Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
34. Petchesky draws from Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
35. Petchesky, "Body as Property," 399, 400.
36. Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 90-107.
37. Patricia Williams, quoted in Petchesky, "Body as Property," 400.
38. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Press, 1980).
39. The surrogacy cost the Martins about $65,000. This included the surrogacy center fee of $17,000, Julie's fees and expenses, the hospital expenses, psychotherapist fees for Julie's sessions at the center, the fertility clinic's fees and medical costs, as well as some obstetrician costs (most of these were covered by Julie's insurance, with the Martins paying deductibles and copayment fees).
40. Gay Becker, "Metaphors in Disrupted Lives: Infertility and Cultural Constructions of Continuity," Medical Anthropology Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1994): 383-410; Sarah Franklin, "Postmodern Procreation: A Cultural Account of Assisted Reproduction," in Conceiving the New World Order, 323-45, and "Deconstructing 'Desperateness': The Social Construction of Infertility in Popular Representations of New Reproductive Technologies," in The New Reproductive Technologies, 200-229.
41. Gay Becker, "Metaphors in Disrupted Lives: Infertility and Cultural Constructions of Continuity," Medical Anthropology Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1994): 383-410; Sarah Franklin, "Postmodern Procreation: A Cultural Account of Assisted Reproduction," in Conceiving the New World Order, 323-45, and "Deconstructing 'Desperateness': The Social Construction of Infertility in Popular Representations of New Reproductive Technologies," in The New Reproductive Technologies, 200-229.
42. Gay Becker, "Metaphors in Disrupted Lives: Infertility and Cultural Constructions of Continuity," Medical Anthropology Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1994): 383-410; Sarah Franklin, "Postmodern Procreation: A Cultural Account of Assisted Reproduction," in Conceiving the New World Order, 323-45, and "Deconstructing 'Desperateness': The Social Construction of Infertility in Popular Representations of New Reproductive Technologies," in The New Reproductive Technologies, 200-229.
43. Becker, 386, 386-87.
44. Cheryl Saban, Miracle Child: Genetic Mother, Surrogate Womb (Newark, N.J.: New Horizon Press, 1992).
45. On this point, see Rosalind Petchesky, "Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction," Feminist Studies 13 (summer 1987): 263-93; Janelle Taylor, "An All-Consuming Experience: Obstetrical Ultrasound and the Commodification of Pregnancy," forthcoming in Biotechnology, Culture, and the Body, ed. Paul Brodwin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
46. On this point, see Rosalind Petchesky, "Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction," Feminist Studies 13 (summer 1987): 263-93; Janelle Taylor, "An All-Consuming Experience: Obstetrical Ultrasound and the Commodification of Pregnancy," forthcoming in Biotechnology, Culture, and the Body, ed. Paul Brodwin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
47. The Martins did go on to hire a second gestational surrogate. She was impregnated with remaining healthy embryos that had been frozen at the transfer and gave birth to twins in 1997. Pamela Martin reported to me that this surrogate was, indeed, easier to work with than Julie.
48. Ragoné, 80-81.
49. Julie's husband, Dallas Thayer, was present for the labor and the birth (he was Julie's labor coach) but had to leave immediately after she delivered, to relieve their one-and-a-half-year-old son's babysitter, because the labor was roughly fourteen hours long. The partners of surrogates have received no attention in analyses and debates about surrogacy, and yet they are very important to the women's experience of surrogacy and also give of their own labor and time in the arrangements. Dallas, for example, handled all insurance paperwork, accompanied Julie to several obstetrician appointments, often took on additional babysitting duties for their toddler to relieve his pregnant wife, as well as supported her emotionally throughout the pregnancy.
50. Psychologists at the monthly meetings repeatedly encouraged surrogates to refer to each other as "colleagues" and to think of themselves as "professionals." This deliberate professionalization of the surrogacy experience makes it difficult for surrogates to share honestly about personal doubts they may have about the choice they've made, the center's practices, or the couple they "work" for, because they would seem unprofessional. However, according to Julie, these more "troublesome" feelings were sometimes discussed in the center's hallways before and after the meetings and occasionally led to alliances among surrogates that empowered them to challenge the psychologists' authority.
51. The video I made, The Child the Stork Brought Home, did crack the Martins' tight veneer of naturalized class privilege by giving the surrogate full and uncensored representation, therefore compromising their own. They retaliated by threatening litigation should I distribute the video as the releases they signed allow, proving that ethnographers are equally enmeshed in relations of power, even if their more academic work, such as this article here, grant them immunity through the conventions of anonymity.
52. Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Los Angeles, Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 1988), 345.