Abstract
This chapter revisits the concept of networked feminism within the wider context of debates in contemporary feminism about forms of gendered and reproductive labour (Dickenson, 2007; Franklin and Lock, 2003; Thompson, 2005). I turn here to account for feminist projects of knowledge production about reproductive technologies and their regulation in digital media, focusing specifically on the example of fertility policy around egg donation and fertility tracking with smart technologies. The significance of reproductive labour for global capitalism, and the biodigital vulnerabilities that are created in relation to reproductive technologies are my key interests in this discussion. Reproductive labour and the changes in the political economy of reproduction brought by new reproductive technologies, such as in-vitro fertilisation and egg extraction, are controversial issues that have invited numerous feminist interventions around the world. A conceptualisation of gendered labour is vital for an understanding of the reconfigurations of the ‘political’ in our digitally mediated worlds. Second, I move on to analyse the communicative acts that contribute to a layperson’s knowledge production about reproductive rights, and note how these cut across academic/grassroots, online/offline, and national/local spaces, whilst challenging these boundaries. Feminist networks attempt to create alternative but credible sources of knowledge that question dominant understandings of biomedicine and its policy. My examination shows how these actors establish their credibility and how their participation in mainstream digital media legitimises them as representatives of affected groups in society. The central preoccupation with subjective experience and seizing control over one’s body in contemporary feminist mobilisations indicates continuity with the Women’s Health Movement. As with the other chapters in this book, there are deep contradictions that characterise feminist politics of reproduction, as neoliberal discourses of individual choice, sexual agency and empowerment shape the conditions in which they emerge. I argue that these politics can be better understood in relation to embodied, material practices of knowledge production, mutual learning and self-experimentation with digital media and smart technologies.
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Notes
- 1.
BRCA1 and BRCA2 are human genes that produce tumor suppressor proteins. Specific inherited mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 have been associated with an increase in the risk of female breast and ovarian cancers. Several different genetic tests that check for all possible mutations in both genes are available (see NIH 2016).
- 2.
The multitude is Hard and Negri’s (2005) conceptualisation of a network of diverse and horizontally connected actors, such as civil society organisations, who cooperate to resist social inequality in global capitalism.
- 3.
The policies being reviewed by the HFEA included: The number of families donors can donate to; expenses, compensation and benefits in kind donors can receive for donation; donation between family members; the conditions which donors can place on the use of their gametes or embryos; the upper age limit for sperm donation, and the release of donor codes to parents of donor conceived children (HFEA 2010).
- 4.
Britain is increasingly closer to the US model of reproductive medicine in the sense that it is very wide and permissive towards embryo research and hESC. In the rest of Europe, reproductive medicine regulations mainly deal with IVF and prenatal diagnosis. See Alkorta (2006) for a comprehensive account of fertility medicine policies.
- 5.
‘Egg sharing’ schemes for treatment were authorised in 1998 and ‘altruistic egg donation’ for cloning in 2006–2007 (Plows 2010).
- 6.
FINRRAGE was a network of women who organised the Women’s Emergency Conference on the New Reproductive Technologies in Vallinge, Sweden, in March 1989. The conference provided a first formulation of common standpoints between more than 140 women from 35 countries (a majority of them from Asia) and established the transnational character of the network. Since then, FINRRAGE has cooperated with different local or national organisations in conducting a number of national, continental and international conferences.
- 7.
Both articles were written by Dennis Campbell, a health correspondent, and did not explicitly mention donation for research.
- 8.
The view that ARTs is a form of exploitation of Southern women by some Western feminists has been criticised as neo-colonialist and paternalistic (Widdows 2006). Nevertheless, Heather Widdows argues that Northern feminism should condemn the practices of egg donation for stem cell research and prostitution, which she views as exploitation of women.
- 9.
Three years later, in Germany the Stem Cell Act in 2002 legalised embryonic stem cell research and the import of embryonic stem cell lines. In the UK in 2001 the HFEA Research Purposes Regulations 2001/188 permitted stem cell research, including cell nuclear replacement (‘therapeutic cloning’). At the same time, the Human Reproductive Cloning Act made human reproductive cloning illegal.
- 10.
The network was present in the USA, at the 2004 conference ‘Gender and Justice in the Gene Age: A Feminist Meeting on New Reproductive and Genetic Technologies’, in New York. This brought together the Center for Genetics and Society, the Committee on Women, Population and the Environment, and Our Bodies Ourselves, aiming to respond to biotechnologies from critical feminist and global social justice perspectives. In 2005 they participated at the ‘Femme Globale-Gender Perspectives in the twenty-first century International Congress’, at Humboldt University, Berlin.
- 11.
Charis Thompson (2005), writing for the US context and focusing on infertility from an STS tradition, has provided a rich overview of STS scholarship and feminist scholarship of reproduction and ART. The difference between the two trends for Thompson is that STS studies ‘up’, relatively high-status scientists and knowledge production, whereas feminist scholarship of reproduction focuses on women as users of technologies, and is concerned with their practices of resistance and agency.
- 12.
COREthics is associated with the Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity (CBHD), a Christian bioethics research centre of Trinity International University.
- 13.
The Quantified Self (QS) is a community of people who use wearable devices in order to log personal information and improve various aspects of personal life, such as mood, physical and mental performance, or other aspects of everyday life, such as air quality.
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Fotopoulou, A. (2016). From Egg Donation to Fertility Apps: Feminist Knowledge Production and Reproductive Rights. In: Feminist Activism and Digital Networks. Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50471-5_4
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