Psychological IVF: conceptualizing emotional choreography in a fertility clinic

Abstract

During ethnographic fieldwork at a fertility clinic in Denmark, I became intrigued by emotions. In particular, I found an incidence labelled ‘psychological IVF’ theoretically provocative as it challenged my views on materializations, which I was preparing to study. This paper centres on the story of psychological IVF, and I use this narrative to consider emotions and materialization methodologically. I also ask how emotions at fertility clinics can be conceptualized to enable analysis of their materialization, change, and effects. In order to do so, I develop the term ‘emotional choreography’. This theoretical work has three aims. First, it seeks to illustrate how the story of psychological IVF offers a rich range of materializations of emotions. Secondly, this work proposes a feminist materialist conceptualization of emotions that is both non-representational and posthuman. This conceptualization draws upon Thompson's notion of ontological choreography and Barad's theory of agential realism, extending these concepts to develop the notion of emotional choreography. Finally, this paper aims to contribute to current discussions regarding (new) materialisms within feminist theory, underscoring the conceptual importance of the feminist legacy.

Keywords:

• agential realism
• assisted reproductive technologies
• emotional choreography
• emotions
• feminist materialism
• materialization
• non-representationalism
• performativity

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the various scholars who have helped me reflect on emotions, materialization, and feminist materialisms. Furthermore, I want to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of this special issue, Sarah Dionisius, Thomas Lemke, and Lars Thorup Larsen, for critical, insightful, and valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Stine Willum Adrian is an Associate Professor of Techno-Anthropology at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, Denmark. Adrian's research interests lie in questions concerning gender, reproductive technology, intersectional analysis, and material feminisms. She previously conducted a comprehensive ethnographic study on fertility clinics and sperm banks in Denmark and Sweden. Her current work explores the globalization of Danish sperm due to the expansion of Danish sperm banking and Denmark's position as a European destination for the use of donor sperm.

ORCID

Stine Willum Adrian http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1481-4318

Notes

1 IUI stands for intrauterine insemination a technology where the sperm is washed and placed in the uterus of the woman.

2 I use the term ‘childfree' instead of ‘childless’, which implies that having no children is a lack. Childfree is currently the preferred term in discussions of choosing to live without children either as a pure choice or due to life circumstances.

3 Although only implicitly reflecting emotions in clinical work related to prenatal testing in Denmark, Schwennesen and Koch's (2009, 2012) ethnographic work supports this theoretical choice to think about the materialization of emotions.

4 Charis Thompson has published under the name of Cussins. In this paper, I use her current name but cite work written under both names.

5 During the fieldwork it was rather unclear from which country the woman originated. However, the staff defined the couple as black and African without much further reflection.

6 Since 2007, single and lesbian women are legally entitled to receive treatment at public clinics in Denmark. At the time of the fieldwork, they could be inseminated at clinics run by midwives or biomedical laboratory scientists, but not medical doctors. At private clinics, regulations stipulate that women above the age of 45 cannot be treated.

7 I would like to underscore that I do not seek to reduce ANT, post-ANT, and research agendas by building on the principle of symmetry purely to hold on to analytical symmetry (Latour 1987). Nonetheless, several studies inspired by this tradition worked deliberately on emotions, but these did not enable me to work with the empirical complexity I encountered (Moser and Law 1998).

8 This is also a concept developed to introduce a different perception of gender and technology compared to those inspiring the radical feminist critique of assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Radical feminists claim that gynaecological practice is another patriarchal technology for objectifying women (Farquhar 1996; Thompson 2002; Adrian 2014b). However, Thompson illustrates that, although objectification takes place often at fertility clinics, it is done in multiple ways with different effects. This process is part of a performativity that women at certain times during gynaecological exams find necessary to desexualize the situation (Cussins 1996).

9 The concept of posthumanism has different genealogies depending on how the term is discussed. For a further elaboration on feminist posthumanism, see Braidotti (2006), who gives an excellent overview.

10 Arguably, she is likewise quite inspired by Haraway's classic text on situated knowledges (Haraway 1991, 183–202).

11 The term ‘material-discursive’ closely resembles Haraway's (1997, 2) notion of the material-semiotic. By using the notion of discourse, Barad (2003) emphasizes the legacy of Foucault who underscores how the world materializes through discourses.