Managing Visibility

Abstract

One of the key features of the feminist approach upon which this book is based is the conceptualisation of those engaging with IVF not as passive recipients or victims of it, but as users who are not only actively engaged in the process, but also located at its frontiers — a location replete with both possibility and risk. This identity as users is central to the understanding of IVF as a public practice — that is, as something that people do, rather than have done to them, not only within the discrete confines of the clinic, but crucially outside it. The daily practices of IVF, and particularly the administration of the hormonal drug treatments that precede the more high-profile clinical moments of egg collection, fertilisation and embryo transfer, take place in the wider social context within which people live, work and socialise. Furthermore, its outcomes have to be managed and negotiated in that same social context. Consequently, IVF is easily rendered visible to others. However, technologies do not speak for themselves, and are constantly subject to an ongoing process of meaning production; a process which renders any given meaning ultimately both provisional and uncontainable. Therefore, the visibility of IVF (and consequently, the person undergoing it) carries with it the necessity to actively manage and negotiate the responses of others in order to try to contain those meanings in ways which preserve the construction and public representation of the individuals and their engagement with treatment (and its failure) as fundamentally normal and as constituting no social threat.