Reproductive vibes: therapeutic atmospheres and the reproductive force of tourism mobilities

ABSTRACT

Drawing on a conceptual framework of therapeutic atmospheres, I explore the question of how a tourist destination reverberated with reproductive potentiality or a ‘reproductive vibe.’ I draw on ethnographic fieldwork attentive to the ‘charged atmosphere of everyday life’, to consider how reproductive possibilities unfolded in the Costa Rican Caribbean for some tourist women. Moving away from the autonomous, liberal, mobile subject as only ever a rational agent in reproductive decision-making, this article introduces new actors into the analytical and empirical framework of reproductive mobilities and cross-border reproductive care. I look at destination branding entangled with therapeutic ‘life affirming’ possibilities that emanated from local spaces and relations with the environment. In doing so, I trouble the irrational/rationality binary that dominates notions of reproductive decision-making to consider the role of affect, feelings, and bodies in reproductive subjectivities.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational pregnancies
• tourism mobilities
• tourism media
• affective atmospheres
• therapeutic mobilities
• wellness tourism

Acknowledgments

To the anonymous reviewers of this article as well as the participants in the Reproductive Mobilities Workshop whose ideas sharpened my own, many thanks. I am also tremendously and eternally grateful to the people in Costa Rica who were generous with their time so that this fieldwork was possible. Susana Schik, in Puerto Viejo, and Lindsay Harris, in Kelowna, were invaluable research assistants.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The scare quotes around ‘natural conception’ are intended to trouble the normative heteropatriarchal and biologically-centered meanings of conception. See Jacquelyne Luce’s work on queer conceptions where she looks closely at how ‘the multiple meanings of assistance, conception, and reproduction’ are being reworked in anthropological investigations of transformations in ‘materialities of social, biological, and technological reproduction’ for queer and lesbian women in Canada since the 1980s Luce (2010: vii).

2. For international adoptions, the destination of the adoption, whether China or Mali, figures more centrally as social and cultural settings of reproductive meanings, i.e., kinship and relatedness, (Howell 2009) in comparison to destinations as merely sites of fertility treatments, but even this is more complicated as Speier’s ethnography of Czech Republic fertility clinics shows (Speier 2016).

3. I use gender binary language here, i.e. woman and mother, to reflect my cis-gendered interlocutors’ discourse and meanings of their bodies and reproductive subjectivities and not to dismiss the reproductive experiences of trans people.

4. Some interlocutors talked about not being fully aware of their body’s ability to conceive because they had not ever been pregnant.

5. Interviews were conducted in a mix of English and Spanish, in a very multilingual context. I am grateful to Susana Schick and Carolina Meneses who both helped me with Spanish interpretation and translation.

6. I use ‘tourist women’ here not unproblematically as a category that was used within the community to reference almost all women from outside of Costa Rica and Central America, which produced a critical slippage between groups that I might want to differentiate, such as expats, short-stay tourists, long-stay tourists, and retirees. This slippage is important to how we consider more broadly the ways tourism mobilities influences ‘new relational orderings of culture, economy, and society’ (Franklin 2014, 77) and, for my research, more specifically how relationality with the place was durably defined through tourism processes.

7. The larger project addresses the various complexities of tourism and reproduction based on my ethnographic case study and addresses issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class that underpin and are thoroughly entangled in foreign tourist women’s cross-border pregnancies, which this paper touches on but does not fully address.

8. I use pseudonyms when referring to interviewees.

9. See https://brittanydfair.com/current-projects/.

10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8FHDSbbMPU. Downloaded 20 May 2017.

11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g7-4gf76s4. Downloaded 4 June 2017.

12. In the larger project I look at a wider range of reproductive trajectories, including abortion and still birth.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant [435-2014-1997], a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Connection Grant [611-2017-0280], and funding from the University of British Columbia and the University of Manitoba.