Speculative feminism and the shifting frontiers of bioscience: envisioning reproductive futures with synthetic gametes through the ethnographic method

Scientists are developing a technique called in vitro gametogenesis or IVG to generate synthetic gametes for research and, potentially, for treating infertility. What would it mean for feminist concerns over the future of reproductive practice and biotechnological development if egg and sperm cells could be produced in laboratory conditions? In this article, I take on the question by discussing the emerging technique of IVG through the speculative feminist analysis of ambiguous reproductive futures. Feminist cultural and science studies scholars have explored the transformative effects of biomedicine on reproduction through science fiction novels and other cultural products. I theorise the speculative and visionary in biomedicine in the context of ethnographic methodology by drawing on ‘thought experiments’ conducted with stem cell scientists as shared acts of future-oriented contemplation. I develop the figure of SF proposed by Donna Haraway to investigate how science facts and speculative fabulation together shape futurities of reproduction. I propose including shifting frontiers in feminist thinking of the SFs in bioscience. Biomedical research aims to shift the borders between what is known and not known in reproductive biology, subsequently raising new technical, ethical and political issues in terms of stratified reproduction. The article shows that synthetic gametes are anticipated to intensify selective procreation. Simultaneously, IVG is seen to forge new biogenetic relationships and possibilities for non-normative reproduction and kin-making. Following Haraway, I argue that by ‘staying with the trouble’ of these biotechnological visions, feminist speculative analytics on technoscience offers a valuable tool to envision more hopeful and equal futures together with scientists.

The Reproduction of Stratified (Assisted) Reproduction

This chapter considers epidemiological, historical, and ideological forces that constructed infertility as a “white” ailment and in vitro fertilization (IVF) as a treatment for the infertility of white professional women in their late 30s, 40s, and beyond. The author begins with a case from her own practice and then returns to IVF’s origins in the United States in the 1980s to show how in its practice and its technical details it reproduces race and class inequalities. Ultimately, the author argues that IVF grew out of an ideology of stratified reproduction, in which the fertility, reproduction, and motherhood of white, professional women was valued and that of poor women and women of color was not. While usual bioethical analyses of infertility treatment focus on the questions raised in sensational cases, here the author considers the race and class coding of infertility as a moral issue because, as she concludes, it is a question of whose lives matter.

Feminist Global Health Security

Feminist Global Health Security highlights the ways in which women are disadvantaged by global health security policy, through engagement with feminist concepts of visibility; social and stratified reproduction; intersectionality; and structural violence. The book argues that an approach focused on short-term response efforts to health emergencies fails to consider the differential impacts of outbreaks on women. This feminist critique focuses on the policy response to the Zika outbreak, which centred on limiting the spread of the vector through civic participation and asking women to defer pregnancy, actions that are inherently gendered and reveal a distinct lack of consideration of the everyday lives of women. The book argues that because global health security lacks a substantive feminist engagement, policies created to manage an outbreak of disease focus on protecting economies and state security and disproportionately fail to protect women. This state-based structure of global health security provides the fault-line for global health security and women. Women are both differentially infected and affected by epidemics and, the book argues: it was no coincidence that poor, black women living in low quality housing were most affected by the Zika outbreak. More broadly, it poses the question: What would global health policy look like if it were to take gender seriously, and how would this impact global disease control sustainability?

Epilogue

This epilogue discusses COVID-19, which reveal much about gender in global health security. It highlights that women are more likely to be healthcare workers, demonstrating the visibility missing in COVID-19, yet this is not recognised by policymakers. Women are also more likely to suffer the downstream effects of social reproduction through school closures and stay-at-home orders as well as the associated mental load. The epilogue also shows how COVID-19 has affected access to SRH services with an impact on stratified reproduction. It concludes that the everyday crisis of women trying to manage the response, whilst at risk of soaring rates of GBV and lack of access to sanitation and space, verifies the argument made throughout this book. Now the world is listening.

Clean Your House and Don’t Get Pregnant

Drawing on social reproduction, and stratified reproduction, this chapter demonstrates that there is a tension between the securitised approach of the Zika response and the lived reality of the women most affected. In doing so, it also reveals a struggle between the state and women. The securitised policy response at national levels placed the responsibility onto women to avoid being bitten by mosquitoes, to reduce mosquito breeding grounds, and ultimately to avoid bearing a child with CZS. This is problematic: women were not included in the decision-making to create suitable policy pathways to reduce their risks of infection, to the extent that the very population the response should have provided for, has been systematically excluded from the response. Women were instrumentalised, objectified, and responsibilised by the state. Thus, the chapter shows, global health security through a state-centric delivery of security is failing women.

Sociological Perspectives Across Individual Experiences, Social Structures, and Representations

This chapter is a literature review which aims to highlight the most critical aspects discussed in the surrogacy scholarship, whose interdisciplinarity represents a major value for the advancement of the sociological understanding of the phenomenon. The literature review is organized into three levels. The first is that of individual experience, which includes some of the main ethnographies that have tried to explain the motivations that push people, aspiring parents but above all the surrogates, to undertake this procreative path. At the second level, that of the social structure, there are three recurring themes: inequality—explained through the concept of stratified reproduction—which permeates the relationships between the parties and upon which the surrogacy market proliferates; the transformation of procreation into a productive process in which life is commodified and the woman reduced to her womb; the transformation of kinship from a natural fact to a cultural product, which is defined by one’s own intentions, and the parallel fragmentation of motherhood into several figures. At the third level, that of representation, there are the studies that discuss how surrogacy is told by the media, and the studies that provide a systematization of the different feminist perspectives on the subject.

Making Family

I explore lesbian mothers’ narratives of pregnancy, birth, and adoption in relation to the fertility and adoption industries. I use the stories of these mothers to explore the scaffolding of power regulating motherhood, and the ways that it varies from state to state, as well as the conflictual terrain of public representations of lesbian-headed families. Stratified reproduction between lesbians and heterosexual women, and between lesbians of different races and socioeconomic statuses, fundamentally shaped these mothers’ family-making experiences. Whatever their responses to mainstream expectations regarding motherhood, their family-making practices were articulated and evaluated—by themselves and others in their social worlds—in reference to heteronormative social practices. Whether rejected or embraced, pervasive mainstream representations of motherhood and family shaped responses and social interactions. Laws and policies also shaped the ways that families were formed and understood, yet families carved out creative family structures and understandings of kinship relations.