Negotiating masculinities: reproductive technologies, biosocial exclusion and men’s engagements in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the ways how heterosexual middle-class men negotiate and readjust their role in the context of reproductive technologies, which are often seen as stereotypically a female terrain. Based on ethnographic research between 2009 and 2013 in three fertility clinics in Istanbul and on a digital self-help platform I pay close attention to men’s emerging practices in the context of Turkey, where the neoliberal-authoritarian JDP (Justice and Development Party) has reinforced patriarchal and traditional gender identities and roles over the last two decades. I draw upon anthropological perspectives on new and emergent masculinities, and also examine how these are constructed, performed and renegotiated both online and offline. This I do by focusing on men’s narratives of what I call biosocial exclusion and counterstrategies, when men designated their role as ‘outsiders’ and/or ‘sperm providers’ during treatment. I use this concept to discuss men’s understandings of themselves as reproductive actors and as parts of biosocial relations – the couple, family and society. I argue that there are transformations in practices of male biosocial subjects. I aim to capture the effects of the new biosocial relations of self-help, advocacy and activism of concerned people – both online and offline.

KEYWORDS:

• Masculinities
• reproductive technologies
• Internet
• Turkey

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of this special issue by NORMA, my reviewers, and Dr Meghana Joshi for critical comments during the writing of various drafts. I would also like to thank my colleagues involved in the project ‘Kinship as Representation of Social Order and Practice’ at the Humboldt University for the opportunity to share material and ideas. My gratitude goes to the men and women who spoke to me about their most intimate experiences with infertility and reproductive medicine. Also to the clinics, and doctors and activists who provided me access.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nurhak Polat is a social anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research at the University of Bremen, Germany. She holds a PhD degree from the European Ethnology at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research and teaching interests are medical anthropology, science and technology studies, gender and masculinities, anthropology/ethnography of and in Turkey, internet ethnography, digital technologies and authoritarianism. She is an author of Umkämpfte Wege der Reproduktion: Kinderwunschökonomien, Aktivismus und sozialer Wandel in der Türkei (Contested Ways of Reproduction: Fertility Economies, Activism and Social Change in Turkey) (transcript, 2018), as well as a co-editor of Europa dezentrieren. Globale Verflechtungen neu denken (Decentring Europe. Rethinking of global entanglements, Campus, 2019). She is currently working on her post-doctoral research dealing with the intersection of authoritarianisms, digital technologies and data politics. She published recently a paper on that in Turkish: Koronavirüs normalliği, viral izler ve dijital otoriterleşme (The Covid-19 normality, viral traces and digital-authoritarian tendencies, Birikim, 373, 2020).

Notes

1 I borrow this term from Sebastian Mohr’s analysis of the lives of Danish sperm donors. Biosocial refers to Rabinow’s ‘biosociality’ (1996) that points that selves, bodies, subjectivities and forms of solidarity are shaped by biomedicine.

2 See http://www.tsrm.org.tr and https://www.eshre.eu/Data-collection-and-research/Consortia/EIM/Publications (access, 05.04.2020).

3 This was the project ‘Kinship as Representation of Social Order and Practice’ in Collaborative Research Cluster (SFB 640) ‘Changing Representations of Social Order’ at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.

4 I had access to the data of the project for my analyses, a total of over 100 interviews that were conducted in Turkey over a period of about 10 years. Some material is already discussed in previous publications (Polat, 2012; 2018).

5 The majority of the population is Sunni Muslims and ethnic Turks. There are non-Sunni Muslims, like Alevis, a religious cum political community whose practices and rituals differ fundamentally from those followed by the Sunni as well as ethnically non-Turkish communities, like Kurds, and non-Turkish-Muslim minorities like Christian Armenians and Greeks, and Jews.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: [Grant Number 1].