Beyond the petri dish: potentiality in assisted conception in South Africa
Doctoral Thesis
2019
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Research in assisted conception technologies has examined how technologies open up potential trajectories, futures, and family arrangements, yet remain shaped and embedded within local histories and politics (Franklin, 1997, 2003; Inhorn, 2003; Thompson, 2005; Roberts, 2012). Embryos (Franklin, 2006a), sex cells such as eggs and sperm (Ariza, 2018), and IVF more generally (Inhorn, 2003; Simpson, 2013), offer particular potential futures but also threaten existing social orders. In this thesis, I present an ethnographic analysis of potentiality in IVF in South Africa through tracing sites and processes to apprehend, assess, and manage potential. Potentiality invokes desires and fears about the future while inviting attempts to render the future knowable and manageable (Taussig, Hoeyer, & Helmreich, 2013). Drawing on 14 months of multi-sited ethnographic research in fertility clinics and egg donor agencies in urban South Africa, I draw out the political, affective and temporal registers of potentiality as they materialise in concrete instances of reproductive medicine that is entangled within a context of capitalist biomedicine. Here, I argue that while biomedical knowledge systems frame certain objects, times, and futures as having potential, it simultaneously negates and neglects other kinds of futures, an attribute I describe as “scoping.” While ARTs and the social “facts” they reproduce are imaged as global and mobile objects, they are deeply entangled within the terrain — historical, political, economic — in which they become materialised. I argue that while IVF has the potential to disrupt “established” orders, intensive effort, which I theorize as “curature,” works to manage and domesticate IVF’s potential, reinforcing certain shapes of family, gender, morality, race and kinship arrangements. I argue that examining potentiality in IVF in South Africa reveals the politics — namely political-economic and racialised — and histories that shape reproductive technologies and potentialities.
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Moll, T. 2019. Beyond the petri dish: potentiality in assisted conception in South Africa. . ,Faculty of Humanities ,Social Anthropology.