The Business of Being Made : The Temporalities of Reproductive Technologies, in Psychoanalysis and Culture

The Business of Being Made is the first book to critically analyze assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) from a transdisciplinary perspective integrating psychoanalytic and cultural theories. It is a ground-breaking collection exploring ARTs through diverse methods including interview research, clinical case studies, psychoanalytic based ethnography, and memoir. Gathering clinicians and researchers who specialize in this area, this book engages current research in psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and debates in feminist, queer and cultural theory about affect, temporality, and bodies. With psychoanalysis as its fulcrum, The Business of Being Made explores the social constructions and personal experiences of ARTs. Katie Gentile frames the cultural context, exploring the ways ARTs have become a complex form of playing with time, attempting to manufacture a hopeful future in the midst of growing global uncertainty. The contributors then present a range of varied experiences related to ARTs, including: Interviews with women and men undergoing ARTs; A psychoanalytic memoir of male infertility; Clinical research and work with transgender, gay and lesbian patients creating new Oedipal constellations, the experiences of LBGTQ people within the medical system and the variety of families that emerge; Research on the experiences of egg donors (now central to the business of ARTs) and a corresponding clinical case study of successful egg donation; The experiences of ongoing failure which is the often unacknowledged for ART procedures; How and when people choose to stop using ARTs; A psychoanalytic ethnography of a neonatal intensive care unit populated in part with the babies created through these technologies and their parents, haggard and in shock after years of failed attempts. Full of original material, The Business of Being Made conveys the ambivalence of these technologies without simplifying their complicated consequences for the bodies of individuals, the family, cultures, and our planet. This book will be relevant to clinicians, medical and psychological personnel working in assisted reproductive technologies and infertility, as well as academics working in the fields of sociology, literature, queer and feminist theories and at the intersections of cultural, critical and psychoanalytic theories. The Business of Being Made- Front Cover The Business of Being Made Title Page Copyright Page Contents Contributors Acknowledgments Part I: Setting up the context by integrating cultural and psychoanalytic theories to explore ARTs Chapter 1: Introducing The Business of Being Made Cultural time, babies, and ARTs Biomedicalization + reprofuturity + psychoanalytic time = a recipe for complex social control and agency About ARTs and infertility Structure of the book Notes Chapter 2: Bridging psychoanalytic and cultural times - using psychoanalytic theory to understand better how reprofuturity and biomedicalization produce subjectivities The commodification of affect and the corresponding fetish of the fetus Time and the production of subjectivities Developmental time Developing multiple times Bodies/objects of time Time as representation and regulation The centrality of faith and duration Time, spaces, and symbolization The temporal production of biomedicalization Biomedicalization as fundamental to the construction of ARTs Babies produce “normal” time Reprofuturity produces gender Reprofuturity, affect, and desire The winning combo of biomedicalization and reprofuturity Producing racial/ethnic and class disparities Notes Chapter 3: Situating ARTs in the cultural imagination It’s all about the woman’s body/erasing men’s bodies ARTs transcend the body ARTs as a process of exercising choice ARTs as an effortless panacea ARTs reinforce while seeming to transcend the Oedipal Notes Chapter 4: Producing temporalities through assisted reproductive technologies ARTs and the temporality of uncertainty “It’s like buying a lottery ticket” (Steve) - ARTs producing affect “I should have had gold-plated tampons” (Mari) ARTs as a training in dissociation Confusion of tongues Finding an end in a durationless present Adoption . . . now? Being healthy, not just pregnant Notes Part II: Filling in the gaps of ARTs Chapter 5: The bodies and bits of (re)production: Dilemmas of egg “donation” under neoliberalism Neoliberalism and bodies Background on egg transfer Reproductive technologies and neoliberalism Bodily commodification and egg transfer Egg donation, discourses of motherhood, and neoliberalism A (suggested) feminist psychological framework for studying egg transfer Conclusion Chapter 6: Male infertility: The erection of a myth, the myth of an erection My view from inside the rabbit hole The search for enlightened context: comparing social science research and psychoanalytic theory The intersection of personal narrative and the effort to unpack male infertility The problematic relationship between psychoanalytic theory and the paradigm of male power Sometimes a phallus is just a penis: challenging male authority We all have to start somewhere: first steps at deconstructing my experience of masculinity Note Chapter 7: Baby making: It takes an egg and sperm and a rainbow of genders The reproduction of mothering: a generation later Medical, social, and induced fertility The twenty-first-century birth story Conclusion Notes Chapter 8: The shadow side of ART: Babies and parents in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) Introduction From ART to NICU: from life creating to life saving Disrupted reproduction In the shadow of the rainbow: meeting Ms. Y Shadow knowledge Multiples - risks to mothers and babies Single embryo and the problem of cost ART singletons - still some risk “Instant family”? Parenting multiples: depression, stress, and interactional difficulties Multiples - risks to children’s mental health Multiples and late preterm health risks Knowing and not knowing Really scared and waiting - once again: meeting Ms. F The claustrum Threatened vitality - time, shame, and desiccation Coda Notes Part III: Looking closely: A case study of egg donation Chapter 9: Spoken through desire: Maternal subjectivity and assisted reproduction A moment of practice ART embodies culture Discourse writes the subject The unconscious is the discourse of the other (Lacan, 1957, p. 10) Lack The lack is lacking (Lacan, 2014) Alienation is constitutive of the imaginary order (Lacan, 1981, p. 146) Desire inscribes itself Birth of desire Signification Acknowledgments Notes Chapter 10: On viability and indebtedness - or “Get away from her, you bitch!” (after Roberto Bolaño) Holding an intention Notes Chapter 11: Teleplastic abduction: Subjectivity in the age of art or delirium for psychoanalysis: Commentary on Simon’s “spoken through desire” Whose body? Telepathy Teleplasty Abduction Copyright anxiety Notes Chapter 12: Zen and the art of making babies: A discussion of Tracy Simon’s paper Oedipal anxiety and the art of making babies Technology, medicine, ethics, and regulatory anxiety Nora and Simon Notes Chapter 13: Reply to commentaries: Hartman, Lepecki, and Guralnik Part IV: Epilogue Chapter 14: Epilogue - embodying the gaps in the face of catastrophe and hyperobjects Starting global - hyperobjects Psychoanalysis and cultural theories of splitting off catastrophe Embodying some gaps in psychoanalysis Notes References Index The Business of Being Made is the first book to critically analyze assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) from a transdisciplinary perspective integrating psychoanalytic and cultural theories. It is a ground-breaking collection exploring ARTs through diverse methods, including interview research, clinical case studies, psychoanalytic based ethnography, and memoir. Gathering clinicians and researchers who specialize in this area, this book engages current research in psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and debates in feminist, queer and cultural theory about affect, temporality, and bodies. The book explores the social constructions and personal experiences of Arts, Katie Gentile frames the cultural context, exploring the ways ARTs have become a comples form of playing with time, attempting to manufacture a hopeful future in the midst of growing global uncertainty. The contributors presents a range of varied experiences related to ARTs, including Interviews with women and men undergoing ARTs; A psychoanalytic memoir of male infertility; Clinical research and work with transgender, gay and lesbian patients creating new Oedipal constellations and variety of families, research on the experiences of egg donors and a corresponding clinical case study of successful egg donation; The experiences of ongoing failure, how and when people choose to stop using ARTs; A psychoanalytic ethnography of a neonatal intensive care unit populated primarily with the babies created through these technologies and their parents. The Business of Being Made conveys the ambivalence of these technologies without simplifying their complicated consequences for the bodies of individuals, the family, cultures, and our planet. This book will be relevant to clinicians, medical and psychological personnel working in ARTs and infertility, as well as academics working in the fields of sociology, literature, queer and feminist theories and at the intersections of cultural, critical and psychoanalytic theories __The Business of Being Made__With psychoanalysis as its fulcrum, explores the social constructions and personal experiences of ARTs. Katie Gentile frames the cultural context, exploring the ways ARTs have become a complex form of playing with time, attempting to manufacture a hopeful future in the midst of growing global uncertainty. The contributors then present a range of varied experiences related to ARTs, including:Interviews with women and men undergoing ARTs;A psychoanalytic memoir of male infertility;Clinical research and work with transgender, gay and lesbian patients creating new Oedipal constellations, the experiences of LBGTQ people within the medical system and the variety of families that emerge;Research on the experiences of egg donors (now central to the business of ARTs) and a corresponding clinical case study of successful egg donation;The experiences of ongoing failure which is the often unacknowledged for ART procedures;How and when people choose to stop using ARTs;A psychoanalytic ethnography of a neonatal intensive care unit populated in part with the babies created through these technologies and their parents, haggard and in shock after years of failed attempts. Full of original material, conveys the ambivalence of these technologies without simplifying their complicated consequences for the bodies of individuals, the family, cultures, and our planet. This book will be relevant to clinicians, medical and psychological personnel working in assisted reproductive technologies and infertility, as well as academics working in the fields of sociology, literature, queer and feminist theories and at the intersections of cultural, critical and psychoanalytic theories.