Queering the Fertility Clinic
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Queering the Fertility Clinic Laura Mamo
Published online: 6 March 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract A sociologist examines contemporary engagements of queer bodies and identities with fertility biomedicine. Drawing on social science, media culture, and the author’s own empirical research, three questions frame the analysis: 1. In what ways have queers on the gendered margins moved into the center and become implicated or central users of biomedicine’s fertility offerings? 2. In what ways is Fertility Inc. transformed by its own incorporation of various gendered and queered bodies and identities? And 3. What are the biosocial and bioethical implications of expanded queer engagements and possibilities with Fertility Inc.? The author argues that “patient” activism through web 2.0 coupled with a largely unregulated free-market of assisted reproduction has included various queer identities as “parents-in-waiting.” Such inclusions raise a set of ethical tensions regarding how to be accountable to the many people implicated in this supply and demand industry. Keywords Sociology of Medicine . Biomedicalization . Assisted Reproduction . LGBT Health . Queer Studies
Not all bodies have sperm, some do… Not all bodies have eggs, some do… And not all bodies have a uterus, some do… Who helped bring together the sperm and egg that made you? —Cory Silverberg, 2012 It was in the summer of 2008 that the first pregnant man was introduced to the world (Beatie 2008). Thomas Beale’s gender identification as a man coupled with his pregnant female body became an immediate cultural frenzy. Was it his masculinity, his gender nonconformity, his reproductive transgression or something else that ignited such fascination? Media described Beale as the first legal transgender man to become pregnant implying that L. Mamo (*) Health Equity Institute, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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J Med Humanit (2013) 34:227–239
his legal designation plus pregnancy, not his pregnant masculinity, was marked as a historical first.1 2 In her qualitative research on women who partner with transgender and transsexual men, the sociologist Carla Pfeffer (2012) argues that the social forms of these families and relationships do not fit neatly within dominant structures of same-sex or opposite sex constellation; instead, social contradictions, paradoxes, and transformation potentials emerge in these lived experiences. This article is not about Thomas Beale, trans parents, or trans family forms specifically; instead, it is about how these lived experiences of pregnancy and family formation inform and constitute a queering of the fertility clinic. More specifically, this article is about the intersections of gender, sexuality and reproductive biomedicine for those who “choose” clinical biomedicine to achieve their pregnancy goals and the fertility clinics they encounter along the way. In 2007 when I published Queering Reproduction based on U.S. lesbians and their quests for pregnancy, I argued tha
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