Memo 2: Making Parents the Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies
Charis Thompson has been really helpful for some of the concepts that seemed to be coming up in my previous research. Some of the work I have done before was to look at the work of DeSutter et. al. who found upon surveying transgender women about their desire to have children and to preserve genetic material prior to transition was seen by a portion of their sample as an inability to break with an “essentially male” past. So my natural next question is what can I find out about the construction of genetic material as specifically gendered and what that can tell me about how gender functions to create physiological sex as necessarily fixed and binary.
Thompson’s chapter on masculinity in the fertility clinic provided some assistance to navigating this. While she doesn’t advance any particular theoretical concepts that I’m unfamiliar with, her ethnographic data on the performance and parodization of masculinity in the ART clinic provides some data with which I can begin to think about masculinity as it is impressed upon bodies, the ways that gender and sex can be seen as chosen or not, and which elements of masculinity are seen as embedded in which physiological processes.
I guess I’m trying to square the poststructuralist theory that I feel connected to and that has the best tools for assessing if truth is even possible, with the very embodied experiences of the structures that theory tries to pull apart. Thompson makes a point of trying to do this, though I feel that she mischaracterized poststructuralism somewhat. She suggests that there is a volunteerism to poststructuralist accounts of gender on page 119 and I think this is missing a really important point about power and the violence of the mechanisms that power is enforced through. Without an account of power and domination, Thompson’s use of poststructural theory seems to imply that we can just choose our categories and that will be the end of the hegemonic taxonomies of personhood. I wonder if this is an attempt by Thompson to be less political than an account of power seems to require. She does seem to be making an effort to take a middle road, even when that middle road limits the potential of her analysis.
Mostly, all concerns about theoretical decisions aside, I’m finding Thompson to be best for providing me with ethnographic data on fertility clinics from the perspective of someone who has undergone fertility treatment. I was in the beginning stages of that process when I conceived the only one of my children that I have given birth to, and it has been obvious to me from the beginning of this research that I would need some deep analysis of the process of fertility treatment in order to get a handle on the experience of queer and later transgender reproduction. This will provide me with helpful comparison cases, particularly since Thompson is very aware of the deeply heteronormative values that surround fertility medicine.
works referenced:
Thompson, Charis. Making Parents the Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005.