Pub Date : 2022-11-07DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i2.37697
Veronica Paredes
In this article, I explore how nature metaphors are used within communities related to the Allied Media Conference (AMC) in Detroit. The AMC celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2018, and took place annually in Detroit for twelve years leading up to that milestone (Allied Media Projects 2022b). Beyond AMC’s commitment to Detroit, the conference offers a compelling set of case studies for considering dialogue between intentional praxis of gathering and important issues related to environmental racism, popular education, and science fiction. AMC is designed to explore methods of building and sustaining within media-based organizing, while the conference itself models practices of building and sustaining within its own network. Primarily focused on adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy (2017) and the mobile multimodal art installation Beware of the Dandelions (2015–2016) from the collective Complex Movements, this paper argues that AMC uniquely weaves components together that create the conditions for studying organizational process through understandings of the natural world.
在本文中，我将探讨如何在底特律联合媒体会议(AMC)相关的社区中使用自然隐喻。AMC在2018年庆祝了其成立20周年，并在这一里程碑之前的12年里每年在底特律举行一次(Allied Media Projects 2022b)。除了AMC对底特律的承诺，这次会议还提供了一系列引人注目的案例研究，以考虑有意的聚会实践与环境种族主义、大众教育和科幻小说等重要问题之间的对话。AMC旨在探索在基于媒体的组织中建立和维持的方法，而会议本身则模拟了在自己的网络中建立和维持的实践。本文主要关注adrienne maree brown的《紧急战略》(2017)和来自集体复杂运动的移动多模式艺术装置《当心蒲蒲英》(2015-2016)，认为AMC独特地将组件编织在一起，通过对自然世界的理解为研究组织过程创造了条件。
{"title":"Natural Metaphors for Network Gathering: Technologies of Meeting at the Allied Media Conference","authors":"Veronica Paredes","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i2.37697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i2.37697","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I explore how nature metaphors are used within communities related to the Allied Media Conference (AMC) in Detroit. The AMC celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2018, and took place annually in Detroit for twelve years leading up to that milestone (Allied Media Projects 2022b). Beyond AMC’s commitment to Detroit, the conference offers a compelling set of case studies for considering dialogue between intentional praxis of gathering and important issues related to environmental racism, popular education, and science fiction. AMC is designed to explore methods of building and sustaining within media-based organizing, while the conference itself models practices of building and sustaining within its own network. Primarily focused on adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy (2017) and the mobile multimodal art installation Beware of the Dandelions (2015–2016) from the collective Complex Movements, this paper argues that AMC uniquely weaves components together that create the conditions for studying organizational process through understandings of the natural world.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122138747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.36203
Line Henriksen, Cancan Wang
In this paper, we explore the troubles and potentials at stake in the developments and deployments of lively technologies like Twitter bots, and how they challenge traditional ideas of ethical responsibility. We suggest that there is a tendency for bot ethics to revolve around the desire to differentiate between bot and human, which does not address what we understand to be the cultural anxieties at stake in the blurring boundaries between human and technology. Here we take some tentative steps towards rethinking and reimagining bot-human relationships through a feminist ethics of responsibility as response by taking as our starting point our own experience with bot creation, the Twitter bot “Hello30762308.” The bot was designed to respond with a “hello” to other Twitter users’ #hello, but quickly went in directions not intended by its creators.
{"title":"Hello, Twitter Bot!: Towards a Bot Ethics of Response and Responsibility","authors":"Line Henriksen, Cancan Wang","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.36203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.36203","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we explore the troubles and potentials at stake in the developments and deployments of lively technologies like Twitter bots, and how they challenge traditional ideas of ethical responsibility. We suggest that there is a tendency for bot ethics to revolve around the desire to differentiate between bot and human, which does not address what we understand to be the cultural anxieties at stake in the blurring boundaries between human and technology. Here we take some tentative steps towards rethinking and reimagining bot-human relationships through a feminist ethics of responsibility as response by taking as our starting point our own experience with bot creation, the Twitter bot “Hello30762308.” The bot was designed to respond with a “hello” to other Twitter users’ #hello, but quickly went in directions not intended by its creators. ","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121954466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37431
Alexis Shotwell
{"title":"The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Bold Type Books, 2021)","authors":"Alexis Shotwell","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37431","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130008853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35071
Silvia Posocco
Transnational adoption and surrogacy make explicit the relations between war, structural violence and crisis, and global shifts in the organization and governance of reproduction. This article focuses on the interrelatedness of vitality and death, and the nexus between biopolitics and necropolitics, through an analysis of adoption and surrogacy. It reinscribes the transnational circulation and exchange of persons, substance and bodily capacities within the logics of multiple genealogies of war, violence, and extraction in the globalized borderlands between Guatemala and Mexico. The article charts the simultaneous demise of transnational adoptions in Guatemala and growth in surrogacy arrangements in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco, as well as the inception of oocyte harvesting for in vitro fertilization (IVF) in reproductive medicine providers in Guatemala City. The article then tracks forms of expertise and technical infrastructure across national borders and domains of knowledge and practice. It shows the proximity between reproductive medicine and forensic science evident in DNA analysis used in forensic anthropology to document human rights violations, but also offered as commercial services in an expanding reproductive medicine sector. This configuration of biolabor encompasses the extractive practices tied to reproductive medicine and forensics, as persons, bodily substance, and, increasingly, bioinformation transverse contexts, jurisdictions, and social and racial formations.
{"title":"Harvesting Life, Mining Death: Adoption, Surrogacy and Forensics across Borders","authors":"Silvia Posocco","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35071","url":null,"abstract":"Transnational adoption and surrogacy make explicit the relations between war, structural violence and crisis, and global shifts in the organization and governance of reproduction. This article focuses on the interrelatedness of vitality and death, and the nexus between biopolitics and necropolitics, through an analysis of adoption and surrogacy. It reinscribes the transnational circulation and exchange of persons, substance and bodily capacities within the logics of multiple genealogies of war, violence, and extraction in the globalized borderlands between Guatemala and Mexico. The article charts the simultaneous demise of transnational adoptions in Guatemala and growth in surrogacy arrangements in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco, as well as the inception of oocyte harvesting for in vitro fertilization (IVF) in reproductive medicine providers in Guatemala City. The article then tracks forms of expertise and technical infrastructure across national borders and domains of knowledge and practice. It shows the proximity between reproductive medicine and forensic science evident in DNA analysis used in forensic anthropology to document human rights violations, but also offered as commercial services in an expanding reproductive medicine sector. This configuration of biolabor encompasses the extractive practices tied to reproductive medicine and forensics, as persons, bodily substance, and, increasingly, bioinformation transverse contexts, jurisdictions, and social and racial formations.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129650743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35229
J. Gillespie
This essay re-examines the life of the three enslaved Black “women” Anarcha, Lucy and Betsy at the hands of the acclaimed “Father of Modern Gynecology” J. Marion Sims through the lens of Afropessimism as a means of developing a new analytics of seeing modern scientific development. Through a critical Black studies engagement with the work of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, the paper sets out to explain and expand the concept of ‘primitive accreditation’ as it relates to the foundational narratives and performances of violence constitutive of the modern scientific conceptual economy. Through paradigmatic analysis, the essay aims to antagonize the ease in which anti-Blackness coheres bio-centric notions of gender, sexuality, and humanity as well as suggest that science studies as a field has not yet wrestled with the gender/genre question of Blackness as a problem for the axioms of thought and being.
本文通过非洲悲观主义的视角，重新审视了“现代妇科之父”马里昂·西姆斯(J. Marion Sims)手中三个被奴役的黑人“女性”安那卡、露西和贝特西的生活，并以此作为一种看待现代科学发展的新分析方法。通过对布鲁诺·拉图尔(Bruno Latour)和史蒂夫·伍尔加(Steve Woolgar)的作品进行批判性的黑人研究，本文开始解释和扩展“原始认可”的概念，因为它与构成现代科学概念经济的暴力的基本叙述和表现有关。通过范式分析，本文旨在对抗反黑性将性别、性和人性等生物中心概念凝聚在一起的轻松，并表明科学研究作为一个领域尚未将黑性的性别/类型问题作为思想和存在公理的问题进行斗争。
{"title":"Anarcha’s Science of the Flesh: Towards an Afropessimist Theory of Science","authors":"J. Gillespie","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35229","url":null,"abstract":"This essay re-examines the life of the three enslaved Black “women” Anarcha, Lucy and Betsy at the hands of the acclaimed “Father of Modern Gynecology” J. Marion Sims through the lens of Afropessimism as a means of developing a new analytics of seeing modern scientific development. Through a critical Black studies engagement with the work of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, the paper sets out to explain and expand the concept of ‘primitive accreditation’ as it relates to the foundational narratives and performances of violence constitutive of the modern scientific conceptual economy. Through paradigmatic analysis, the essay aims to antagonize the ease in which anti-Blackness coheres bio-centric notions of gender, sexuality, and humanity as well as suggest that science studies as a field has not yet wrestled with the gender/genre question of Blackness as a problem for the axioms of thought and being.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122120328","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37572
Harris Kornstein
{"title":"Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies, by Cait McKinney (Duke University Press, 2020)","authors":"Harris Kornstein","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37572","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37572","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"149 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122461618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37921
Kalindi Vora
The growth of global fertility chains asserts the central role of reproduction, both social and biological, to the endurance of racial capital’s extraction of value from bodies and labor. This commentary highlights issues of histories of race and labor as they track with calls for reproductive justice across borders.
{"title":"Intertwined Colonial Pasts and the Present in Global Fertility Chains","authors":"Kalindi Vora","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37921","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37921","url":null,"abstract":"The growth of global fertility chains asserts the central role of reproduction, both social and biological, to the endurance of racial capital’s extraction of value from bodies and labor. This commentary highlights issues of histories of race and labor as they track with calls for reproductive justice across borders.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115492419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.34774
Kristi Onzik, M. Gagliano
Scientists are oft trained to think that “feeling” is not simply irrelevant but antithetical to their methodologies. That scientists are not simply objectively trained minds but also bodies that feel has been an important feminist contribution towards reimagining scientific knowledge—not as the product of self-directed teleological discovery, but as situated in time, place, and transformed through relations that oft exceed the binary logics of scientific representation; those founded upon rationalist distinctions between feeling/knowing, body/mind, object/subject. Through a collaborative methodological lens we (ethnographer + scientist) are calling radicle empiricism, we ask how a scientist comes to make sense of feeling and knowing—and the relations “between”—throughout shifting configurations of a pea plant decision-making apparatus. By focusing this study at the level of the apparatus (Barad, 2007), we provide an empirically based description—not a proposed model or theory—of some of the material-discursive relations through which the concepts of “feeling” and “knowing” are (re)configured through a scientist’s unexpected encounters with pea plant root tips or radicles. As such, we offer a perspective that does not assume “feeling” or “knowing” as distinct categories of a scientist’s knowledge making endeavors, nor as categories of experience that function independently of the historical, social, and material conditions through which they are made perceptible. Immanent to this description is an invitation to explore creative and collaborative practices of science-making in which the phenomena we study—whether pea plants or other persons—have the opportunity to reformulate not only our categories of “feeling” and “knowing” but the conditions through which they are made possible.
{"title":"Feeling Around for the Apparatus: A Radicley Empirical Plant Science","authors":"Kristi Onzik, M. Gagliano","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.34774","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.34774","url":null,"abstract":"Scientists are oft trained to think that “feeling” is not simply irrelevant but antithetical to their methodologies. That scientists are not simply objectively trained minds but also bodies that feel has been an important feminist contribution towards reimagining scientific knowledge—not as the product of self-directed teleological discovery, but as situated in time, place, and transformed through relations that oft exceed the binary logics of scientific representation; those founded upon rationalist distinctions between feeling/knowing, body/mind, object/subject. Through a collaborative methodological lens we (ethnographer + scientist) are calling radicle empiricism, we ask how a scientist comes to make sense of feeling and knowing—and the relations “between”—throughout shifting configurations of a pea plant decision-making apparatus. By focusing this study at the level of the apparatus (Barad, 2007), we provide an empirically based description—not a proposed model or theory—of some of the material-discursive relations through which the concepts of “feeling” and “knowing” are (re)configured through a scientist’s unexpected encounters with pea plant root tips or radicles. As such, we offer a perspective that does not assume “feeling” or “knowing” as distinct categories of a scientist’s knowledge making endeavors, nor as categories of experience that function independently of the historical, social, and material conditions through which they are made perceptible. Immanent to this description is an invitation to explore creative and collaborative practices of science-making in which the phenomena we study—whether pea plants or other persons—have the opportunity to reformulate not only our categories of “feeling” and “knowing” but the conditions through which they are made possible.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131343994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.36212
Tineke Broer, M. Pickersgill, S. Cunningham-Burley
In recent decades, scientific knowledge, especially about the brain, has been leveraged within policies and programmes aimed at parents of infants and young children. However, the ways in which parents engage with (neuro)science, and how they value recommendations based on this vis-à-vis other forms of expertise, is not often examined. Drawing on 22 interviews, we present an analysis of how parents and care-givers in Scotland negotiated (neuroscientific) ideas about parenting that they encountered through one of two voluntary parenting programmes alongside broader advice they received (e.g., through books, friends, families). We examine how parents’ negotiations were related to particular configurations of the past and the future, and analyse how these temporal imaginaries help to justify accounts of parenting practices. Scientific knowledge encountered through parenting programmes was appreciated by many, but enjoinders based upon it were not wholeheartedly adopted. Importantly, constructions of possible futures (and pasts) contoured our participants’ engagements with advice and expertise. Consequently, we demonstrate that temporal imaginaries can play an important role in how parents’ reflexively develop and situate their own epistemologies of parenting.
{"title":"Temporal Imaginaries in Accounts of Parenting Practices: Negotiations of Time, Advice, and Expertise","authors":"Tineke Broer, M. Pickersgill, S. Cunningham-Burley","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.36212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.36212","url":null,"abstract":"In recent decades, scientific knowledge, especially about the brain, has been leveraged within policies and programmes aimed at parents of infants and young children. However, the ways in which parents engage with (neuro)science, and how they value recommendations based on this vis-à-vis other forms of expertise, is not often examined. Drawing on 22 interviews, we present an analysis of how parents and care-givers in Scotland negotiated (neuroscientific) ideas about parenting that they encountered through one of two voluntary parenting programmes alongside broader advice they received (e.g., through books, friends, families). We examine how parents’ negotiations were related to particular configurations of the past and the future, and analyse how these temporal imaginaries help to justify accounts of parenting practices. Scientific knowledge encountered through parenting programmes was appreciated by many, but enjoinders based upon it were not wholeheartedly adopted. Importantly, constructions of possible futures (and pasts) contoured our participants’ engagements with advice and expertise. Consequently, we demonstrate that temporal imaginaries can play an important role in how parents’ reflexively develop and situate their own epistemologies of parenting.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114961404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35188
B. Parry, Rakhi Ghoshal
The global use of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) to address structural infertility has burgeoned since the early 2000s. Large corporate in vitro fertilization (IVF) providers from the metropolitan north quickly identified India as a prime location for service delivery, creating satellite clinics in its metropolitan centers. Having learnt from their European masters the colonizer’s art of exporting ART services from the metropolitan core to the periphery, a leading cabal of senior Indian reproductive specialists have since created their own “reproductive empires” perfusing service provision into peri-urban and even semi-rural localities in India and equally underserved emerging markets in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. In this paper, we chart the contours of these new empires and explore the implications of this progressive colonization for the quality of service delivery. We argue that the vast scale of expansion has resulted in unwelcome stratification as unscrupulous providers dilute the quality of services to render them affordable to lower socioeconomic groups. Weakly formulated iterations of ART legislation have also allowed this market to thrive under chaotic and uncertain conditions. These dynamics, we argue, create perverse markets that increase, rather than reduce, patient infertility, by holding unsuspecting clients in extended regimes of indentured therapy. In unpacking the drivers of this phenomenon, we identify several key factors: the neoliberalism of health service provision in India; the privatization and corporatization of care; gendered competitiveness; and potent cultural preferences for biologically related children.
{"title":"Reproductive Empires and Perverse Markets: Unpacking the Paradoxical Dynamics of ART Market Expansion in Non-urban India and Beyond","authors":"B. Parry, Rakhi Ghoshal","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35188","url":null,"abstract":"The global use of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) to address structural infertility has burgeoned since the early 2000s. Large corporate in vitro fertilization (IVF) providers from the metropolitan north quickly identified India as a prime location for service delivery, creating satellite clinics in its metropolitan centers. Having learnt from their European masters the colonizer’s art of exporting ART services from the metropolitan core to the periphery, a leading cabal of senior Indian reproductive specialists have since created their own “reproductive empires” perfusing service provision into peri-urban and even semi-rural localities in India and equally underserved emerging markets in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. In this paper, we chart the contours of these new empires and explore the implications of this progressive colonization for the quality of service delivery. We argue that the vast scale of expansion has resulted in unwelcome stratification as unscrupulous providers dilute the quality of services to render them affordable to lower socioeconomic groups. Weakly formulated iterations of ART legislation have also allowed this market to thrive under chaotic and uncertain conditions. These dynamics, we argue, create perverse markets that increase, rather than reduce, patient infertility, by holding unsuspecting clients in extended regimes of indentured therapy. In unpacking the drivers of this phenomenon, we identify several key factors: the neoliberalism of health service provision in India; the privatization and corporatization of care; gendered competitiveness; and potent cultural preferences for biologically related children.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114992510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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