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

Introduction: masculinities, infertility and socio-bodily engagements in transformation

Taking reproductive technologies as technology of gender, anthropological research has largely focused on women’s experiences and bodies, demonstrating how – no matter what the infertility diagnosis – the female body is systematically subjected to medicalization and ‘assisted reproduction.’ Anthropologists have further discussed how men and their social and embodied experiences were ‘ignored,’ for instance in theorizing medicalization (Rosenfeld & Faircloth, 2006), considered as ‘second sex’ (Inhorn, Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, Goldberg, & Mosegaard, 2009) and ‘missing’ (Culley, Hudson, & Lohan, 2013) subjects. Men’s biological, social and embodied ‘marginalization’ and invisibility was seen as an expression of how and to what extent men attempted to reflect ‘hegemonic masculinities’ (Connell & Connell, 2005) or deal with cultural and biomedical norms about reproduction, sexuality, and ART’s both in clinical and social-conjugal settings (Inhorn, 2003; Thompson, 2005; Inhorn et al., 2009; Dudgeon & Inhorn, 2003; Culley et al., 2013; Marsiglio, Lohan, & Culley, 2013; Reimann, 2016; Dolan, Lomas, Ghobara, & Hartshorne, 2017). Scholars demonstrated how medical science, institutional structures, and culturally shared gender stereotypes have consistently contributed to the constitution of men’s role and reproductive bodies as ‘peripheral’ (Barnes, 2014), thereby justifying and shaping how men occupy those peripheral positions, often with little objection or complaint (Barnes, 2014; Bell, 2016).

Yet, more recent anthropological research explores ART’s as a particular biomedically and biopolitically uncharted terrain for masculinities. By demonstrating ‘gender work’ (Barnes, 2014) done by men this research explores the diverse ways in which heterosexual men understand ‘themselves as procreative beings’ (Marsiglio et al., 2013, p. 19) or ‘do not fit gendered expectations of masculinity’ (Bell, 2015, p. 440). Scholars highlight men’s situated practices of un/doing gender and biosocial selfhood as they struggle to ‘enact’ a masculinity recognizable as able-bodied selves, fathers, subjects/citizens in a wide range of socio-cultural, religious and medical settings, including in Euro-American contexts (Almeling & Waggoner, 2013; Barnes, 2014), the Middle East (Goldberg, 2009; Inhorn, 2012) and countries like Turkey (Açıksöz, 2015; Demircioğlu, 2015; Polat, 2018). Rather than oppositional, alternative or hybrid, they draw attention to the ethnographic realities of men and biosocial positions that are embedded in the cultural and national transformations, without ignoring the intersectional dimensions and differences such as socio-economic background, class, religion and political views (Dudgeon & Inhorn, 2003).

Inhorn and Wentzell (2011) argue for a new paradigm that captures the ongoing, embodied processes of such (biosocial) transformations within specific contexts. In their comparative analysis of Middle Eastern and Mexican masculinities, they argue for a focus on locally embedded, dynamic and plural ‘emergent masculinities’ (Inhorn, 2012), situated within both local moral realms, and in global fertility markets (Bennett & de Kok, 2018; Parrott, 2014). Inhorn (2012) advocates to extend the anthropological perspective to the gradually emerging relationships and technologies – from reproductive technologies to digital social media. Despite this, little on new masculine engagements beyond the medical and conjugal setting, has been explored.

My paper builds on growing research on masculinities and also fills a gap to include new, online and offline supportive spaces that men utilize to renegotiate and navigate new situations – specifically infertility, reproduction, marriage and fatherhood – over the course of their lives (Bridges & Pascoe, 2014; Hanna & Gough, 2016; Jordan, 2019; Light, 2013; Malik & Coulson, 2008; Scheibling, 2018). I draw on ethnographic research I conducted between 2009 and 2013, in three fertility clinics in Istanbul and a digital self-help platform. I explore the ways heterosexual middle-class men engage with reproductive medical worlds in Turkey. I use their narratives of what I call biosocial exclusion to examine emerging engagements embedded in ‘a variety of biopolitical practices and discourses’ (Rabinow, 1996, p. 98; Rose & Novas, 2005; Roberts, 2008) and in ‘the interconnectedness of biosocial subjectivation and gender performativity’ (Mohr, 2018).¹ By biosocial exclusion I refer to men’s understandings of themselves as parts of biosocial relations such as the couple, family, and society and their experience of ‘being excluded’ from these via medical treatments where they see their role as ‘outsiders’ and/or ‘sperm providers’ during treatment. In particular, I aim to capture how these are individually and collectively experienced, negotiated, and challenged in Turkey in the context of a neoliberal-authoritarian and Islamist-patriarchal turn by JDP (Justice and Development Party).

Reproductive politics, bodies and masculinities in Turkey

Over the last two decades, masculinities have entrenched in the biopolitical nexus of ‘masculinized power’ (Açıksöz & Korkman, 2013), the JDP’s neoliberal-authoritarian turn towards a new mode of patriarchal micromanagement of reproduction, gendered bodies and biographies. Going through drastic authoritarian transitions from 2007 to present, JDP attempts to redesign ‘reproductive governance’ (Morgan & Roberts, 2012) more aggressively than before and govern both individual lives and bodies on a cellular level (Acar & Altunok, 2013; Korkut & Eslen-Ziya, 2016). These attempts operate at different scales including ‘nationalist, Islamist and patriarchal moral regime of truth’ (Özgüler & Yarar, 2017, p. 144) and Sunni-Islamic ‘moral-cultural order’ (Acar & Altunok, 2013, p. 18).

During fieldwork and more so after 2011, beginning with the JDP’s third term in government, the agenda has facilitated an authoritarian ‘patriarchal pronatalism’ (Gürtin, 2016) and familialism (Yazıcı, 2012; Korkman, 2016). It pushed a selective-pronatalist, nationalist and Islamic-informed biopolitical control of gender, family and kinship not only by promoting pronatalist discourses such as ‘three children per family’ against an alleged population decline, but also to aggressively control the private sphere, especially female bodies, through attempts at banning legal abortions and third-party donation abroad (Acar & Altunok, 2013; Mutlu, 2011). It also promotes hegemonic, gendered ideologies of reproduction and reproductive bodies as ‘new national values’ (Mutluer, 2019, p. 113), while imposing an Islamic-political image of strong, able-bodied, hypermasculine figure as a national ideal.

Recent ethnographic work on Turkey has critically examined how this biopolitical nexus addresses and transforms masculinities, highlighting the fact that masculinity has been considered – both in scholarly literature and culturally – as a monolithic category (Boratav, Fisek, & Ziya, 2017; Özbay, 2016). Hegemonic masculinity was largely described through modernization narratives where men were constituted as proactively engaged citizens transforming self and society. Also, as modern, Western, secular, and educated, the ‘Turkish man’ embodies the heterosexual, hypermasculine (eril), able-bodied and procreative figure (Sökmen, 2004).

Masculinity is not ‘a quality’ (Gutmann, 2014), rather an ‘unattainable power’, as Sancar (2008) argues in ‘Masculinity: Unattainable Power’. In the Turkish context, scholars analysed, how ‘hegemonic masculinity has become less attainable, more contested’ (Korkman, 2016, p. 115), especially over the last few decades and in reference to sexuality (Özyegin, 2018), family, urban life, and the neoliberal marketplace (Sancar, 2008), militarism (Açıksöz, 2012; Altinay, 2004), medicine and technology (Erol & Özbay, 2013), and fatherhood (Bozok, 2018). They have brought into focus men’s practices in the context of socio-political change, instead of seeing them as masculinity crisis in the face of contradictory relations with hegemonic preconceived ideologies and ‘certain judgments about what it means to be a man' (Boratav, Fisek, & Ziya, 2014, p. 313). Given the ethnic, socio-cultural, geographical and sexual diversity and heterogeneous socio-political identifications (secular-republican, Turkish-nationalist and conservative Muslims), masculinities are differently affected by the long-standing masculinized state power, and more recently by its Sunni-Islamic, nationalist, anti-feminist, and pro-(patriarchal)-family rhetoric and morality (Açıksöz & Korkman, 2013; Babül, 2017; Boratav et al., 2017; Kandiyoti, 2016; Özbay, 2016).

In this respect, Açıksöz’s (2015) ethnography on veteran bodies and ‘In Vitro Nationalism’ provides important insights on the operations of medicalization of infertility, pronatalism, nationalist reproductive body politics and hegemonic gender ideologies. It demonstrates ‘how the bodies, gendered subjectivities, sexualities and reproductive capacities (…) are made, unmade and remade through the complex relations of multiple technologies’ (2012, p. 19) at the nexus of the nationalist-militarist state, in vitro fertilization, medicalized manhood and fatherhood. In this nexus, manhood is constructed with the motto ‘actively strive to achieve’ by men defined as heterosexual citizens, husbands, breadwinners and caretakers of their families and nation. Thus, manhood is largely embedded into a variety of discursive, institutional and medical practices that form ‘being an able-bodied man’ as a recognizable, full citizen of the nation, but also ‘of expulsion from hegemonic masculinity' (Açıksöz, 2015, p. 23). As such, it is also embedded in the dominant narratives of reproductive ‘normalcy’ (Becker, 2000) that shape men’s commitment to participate in the biomedical regimes of reproduction.

Promoted as a ‘tüp bebek paradise’ (test-tube baby paradise), the booming economy of ART’s, has played in Turkey, especially since the 2000s an important role in ‘ … the propagation of traditional families’ and of ‘the heteronormative reproductive unit’ (Gürtin, 2016, p. 40). It is constantly related to ‘hetero-bionormative’ (Leighton, 2013) order that constitutes biological, e.g. genetic relations and heteronormativity as the central trope of family and parenthood (Demircioğlu, 2015; Gürtin, 2016; Mutlu, 2011; Polat, 2012). Further, it codes ART’s as ‘legitimate’ (meşru) and ‘proper’ (makbul) ways of procreation, of being parents and reproductive selves/citizens. Nevertheless, ART’s simultaneously became a stage for the struggles of coexisting notions of social order and morality (Polat, 2018), especially when women and men make their way to an ‘own’ child through treatments prohibited in the country, like egg, sperm, and embryo donation. During my research, in more than 120, and by 2016 148 clinics approximately 40,000 treatments were performed yearly, 98% per ICSI,² (direct injection of a single sperm into the egg) which has contributed significantly to the cultural and clinical calculations of men’s role in the ‘reproductive equation’ (Almeling & Waggoner, 2013; Inhorn et al., 2009). Thus, it also continues to propagate heteronormative ‘ideologies, norms of, anxieties about, and individual performances of gendered identities’ (Thompson, 2005, p. 7). In the nexus of contemporary biopolitics of JDP, clinical and regulatory frameworks, various pronatalist-patriarchal matters and individual desires, masculinities, whether emergent or hegemonic, are ‘made’ negotiable and (in)visible on the level of reproductive/cellular bodies.

Yet, I understand ART’s as ‘socio-technical arrangements' (Knecht, Klotz, & Beck, 2012) that is an assemblage of clinical practices, people and substances, things, discourses, moralities, regulations and knowledge, both globally and locally, including the Internet (Kahn, 2006; Polat, 2012; 2018; Speier, 2011). I am interested in men’s engagements and biosocial selves in these assemblages through a variety of discursive, biopolitical, institutional and societal changes. In what follows, I present some details on ethnographic fieldwork and data that yield insight into these questions.

Fieldwork and sites of men’s engagements

The fieldwork for this paper was carried out between 2009 and 2013 as part of a larger, multi-sited and longue durée research project in Berlin, Germany.³ I moved between three ethnographic field sites by combining online and offline research methods (Hine, 2015; Miller & Slater, 2000). More specifically, I collected, combined and interpreted data from different, online and offline settings, fieldwork observations and semi-structured in-depth interviews with more than 40 couples seeking treatment, doctors (N-10) and clinic personal, policy makers (N-4) and concerned group activists (N-7) (in some cases recurring).⁴

The first site was three private clinics in Istanbul, where I repeatedly spent several days ‘hanging around’ in waiting and operation rooms, including in the laboratories. I shadowed the medical staff through all possible steps and procedures. I participated in medical counselling as well as medical procedures such as egg retrieval, cell processing and the final embryo transfer. The second field site was the platform www.cocukistiyorum.com , the first and still one of the biggest platforms in Turkey, launched in 2000 by ÇİDER (Çocuk İstiyorum Derneği – ‘I want a Child’ Association), the Turkish NGO for and by concerned people. It gathered exclusively heterosexual middle-class women and men, but also less well-off, from urban and rural regions. I participated, like the protagonists, in different forums and chat rooms which were predominantly described as a ‘female space' and clearly occupied by women and women’s issues. Internet is a ‘messy' context with an immense and thick data flow (Horst & Miller, 2012), yet as a research site on masculinities it provided me access to data produced by men, about their emotional and bodily experiences as well as narratives of different ways of biosocial being as they disclosed them in a semi-public, anonymous, online ‘community of experience' (Akrich, 2010). Data collection was performed mostly on the public accessible forums by ‘theoretical sampling’ based on Grounded Theory (Glaser and Strauss, 2006[1967]) which allowed for certain keywords (e.g. gender, sperm, manhood, etc.). The third site was the public events organized by ÇİDER on ART’s I attended in different cities. These bring women and men, and couples together, and function as ‘a site of anticipatory socialization’ where they are ‘initiated into the choices, language and practices’ of ART’s (Thompson, 2005, p. 130) and narratives to assist men in their ways of being active.

In all these sites, I revealed my identity as a researcher, even though mostly ‘socio-naturalized’ (Thompson, 2005, p. 130) into the scene. I told interlocutors the aim and methods of my study and also clarified possible usage of the data. Participants provided oral consent. All names have been changed and other identifying features are disguised to protect the confidentiality of research participants. The field of ART’s is interpenetrated by paternalistic, gendered, (hetero)normative and patriarchal-nationalist power relations. These have affected the research process in various ways. As a female anthropologist living and pursuing an academic carrier in Germany, my presence was a matter of negotiations as my interlocutors associated it with insider/outsider status, sometimes cultural/national belonging or expertise, sometimes not-sharing similar biosocial/medical embodied experiences with ART’s or ‘child-wish’.

 The research included mostly middle-class couples and men between 25 and 53 years of age, with various repro-medical issues and diagnosis (like male- or female-factor infertility or ‘azoospermia’, defined as the absence of semen in the ejaculate) and at different stages of treatments. More than half of the couples had gone through several treatments and surgeries like TESE, a testicular operation to extract sperm directly from the testicles, or varicocele. Few had experience with a ‘third-party-donation-abroad’ or adoption. Some of them defined themselves as conservative Sunni-Muslims, others as modern, secular Kemalist-Republicans. A comparatively small number of men were from political, religious and ethnic minorities such as leftists, Alevis or ethnic non-Turkish.⁵ In a fast-changing, heterogeneous and vibrant society in Turkey, these intersectional factors are crucial both in access to treatments and for the individual understandings of masculinity as it relates to procreation, biosocial position and fatherhood. Nevertheless, as I want to explore in detail, many of these men narrated a perceived biosocial exclusion by referring to deeply rooted gender differences of bodily, social and moral engagements and concerns ‘in the matter of having children and reproduction’.

‘Being a man does not depend on a sperm cell'

ART’s bring up new challenges and requirements for men. They also enable a reassessment of reproductive agency that is shaped by ‘sperm tales’ (Kampf, 2013) and perceptions of what is constituted as ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ reproductive male bodies (Barnes, 2014; Goldberg, 2009; Moore, 2007). As elsewhere, these are rooted in the biomedical norms that emphasize women’s and men’s bodies differently in stereotypical categories of fertile, active and passive. In Turkey, as Delaney put it, ‘the male is said to plant the seed and the woman is said to be like a field' (1986, p. 496). These construct perceptions of ‘able-bodied man' (Elliot, 1998), since there is a strong association between men’s ability to ‘plant the seed into the womb', virility and masculinity. In the case of a diagnosis for infertility, a complex web of biographical desires, self-image and perceptions of masculinity may be destabilized. Diagnosis triggers associations of being ‘a real man (gerçek erkek)' and a ‘manly man (adam gibi adam)' (Demircioğlu, 2015) that is considered as an achieved status which requires ‘achieving procreation' and the proper fulfilment of his gender proficiency. Against this background, several men I met in the clinics and in online forums face additional challenges. Like men elsewhere, they feel that is ‘different for men’ (Throsby & Gill, 2004), not because it is a ‘threat to masculinity’ (Hinton & Miller, 2013). Rather, because they feel challenged to cope with the hegemonic ideals, in words of an interlocutor, ‘that most figuratively or directly fixate manhood on sperm’. These are present in expressions like ‘tohum’ (plant the seed) in the petri dish or bodies. The spermiogram – sperm analysis for investigating level of male fertility – and the requirement from men ‘to deliver sperm’ in ‘a forced and unnatural situation’ bring them to the fore. As an interlocutor said, ‘you have the proof … like the quality of the semen, the velocity, even morphology of it shows how much of a man you are (ne kadar erkeksin).’

Hamza, a man in his early thirties, takes a critical view on this. He blames ‘the notions of masculinity in patriarchal society’ and its normative ideals of ‘having a normal manly life’. This includes not only having children, but also idealizing able-bodied and robust men, not concerned with sexual and reproductive issues and care practices. After Hamza’s diagnosis, he didn’t blame himself or feel ‘less manly’, but did feel challenged. He refused, like many others, to talk about the diagnosis in terms of ‘being a man’. Rather, he seemed to be convinced that it was about ‘naming the problem’. He perceived kısır (barren) as ‘repulsive’, not only because it is stigmatizing, but because depicted sterility. Instead, he prefers ‘the medical language’ and says ‘infertile’ or ‘not being able to have children’. Such stories highlight the reflexive and critical work men do.

Similarly, Ucankus and his wife, in their mid-twenties, shared with me an empowering story of their own. They had a double diagnosis: polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and azoospermia. Ucankus experienced this ‘like a blow’ against his masculinity, wouldn’t accept that he ‘is the one with a serious issue’, even if he, a practising Sunni-Muslim, appreciates it as a ‘trial’ (imtihan) and ‘destiny given by Allah’. At the very beginning, he was concerned about TESE ‘if he might be left like a half man’. He felt challenged by the fact that his ‘bodily perception and self-perception as a man’ changed. In order to cope, the couple did ‘a lot of reading on the subject found mostly on the Internet, but also some medical guidebooks’; they also visited several information events organized in their region. Ucankus went from being ashamed of the problem to re-framing it as ‘being a man who does not depend on a sperm cell’.

Men’s sense of selfhood seems to be disconnected from their bodies, as Barnes puts it, ‘men do not perceive the body to be as intrinsically tied to the self, and men can more easily exculpate themselves from their bodily defects’ (2014, p. 107). I would however suggest that this disassociation/association depends on how men deal with reproductive treatments and to what extent they rely on the biomedical knowledge regarding reproductive male bodies. As the above examples demonstrate, men are actively concerned with perceptions that change or persist socially. What the technologies do, from their point of view, is not fix a ‘deficit’, rather ‘a little assistance’ by procreation.

In what follows, I will provide ethnographic insight into the ways of how heterosexual, middle class men experience, negotiate and occupy the peripheral positions in their own words as ‘outsiders’ and ‘onlookers’.

‘In the backseat': male narratives of biosocial exclusion

the woman is programmed for it. The woman makes the decision [and] leads this thing. […] the man is only a sperm supplier; the man has no other special feature.

No matter what the diagnosis, treatments are performed on the women’s body. It routinely is defined as ‘to be medically treated’, from hormonal stimulation through daily self-injection, to egg collection and embryo transfer. In the clinical procedures, male physical and molecular bodies are mostly ‘choreographed as ejaculatory extensions of their partners’ (Thompson, 2005, p. 128). Pointing out that women ‘bear the whole burden during the treatments’, men complain of the ways that they are made social and physiological ‘outsiders’ and feel ‘reduced to a sperm provider’. Some men described their role as ‘companion/care giver (refekatçı)’ to their wives and the reproductive treatments metaphorically as ‘a long journey, but you are sitting in the backseat’.

Neither in the clinics nor in the online forums where I have done my research, men have been around much. Men’s bodies are not missing completely, rather matter in most cases in the context of a spermiogram. Their presence (or absence) is basically presumed as being optional, since as some men said, they are ‘needed at the moment of giving a sperm sample’ which requires ‘just having to masturbate’. During lengthy treatments, this leads to a ‘profound sense of losing control’ over their sexuality, reproductive autonomy and privacy. ICSI, take over the ‘main job’ from body to the laboratory, namely ‘penetrating the egg with tweezers’. Thus, treatment contributed both to decoupling of the cultural link between seed and man and substantiating the perception that ‘only one sperm is enough’. For men, it felt like that their role is reduced to a ‘micro-gender work’ at a molecular level in the laboratory (Polat, in press). One man complained on an Internet forum about facing ‘little bit a loss of control over what happens in the petri-dish’.

These expressions are part of the dominant narratives over the peripheral role of men within the reproductive realm – as infertile men, reproductive actors or fathers. I call them narratives of biosocial exclusion, because they are expressive of how some of the heterosexual, middle class men I met in my fieldwork experience and perceive their own reproductive agency and position not only as peripheral due to ‘gender asymmetry’ (Mikkelsen et al., 2013, as cited in Bell, 2015, p. 708), but also excluded – socially, biomedically and institutionally. They are significant for the biosocial subjectivities of men and how men might reconsider their role as negotiable. In several cases, men utilize them for overcoming their perceived biosocial exclusion, and thus strive for readjusting their own narratives of biosocial selves, reproductive (in)visibilities and absence. Indeed, the ways in which men use these narratives vary from time to time depending on reproductive aspirations, oppressions, ideologies and biosocial relations that affect their reproductive lives in general.

‘Being actively part': management of reproductive biographies

Men, like their wives, experience an enormous pressure to ‘manage’ their reproductive path ‘properly’ within the highly commercial and dynamic repro-medical regime in Turkey. For Serkan, a business manager living in an upscale district of Istanbul, it felt ‘somehow like a navigator’, as his wife had gone through ten rounds of fertility treatments, even going so far as having an ‘egg donation’ in Cyprus as the ‘last resort’ in the hope of conceiving before adoption. He felt ‘lost, helpless’, since he mostly ‘had to just look at how her anatomy has changed’ because of being ‘pumped full of a hormone punch’. He ‘had to seek support and information from different sources; he couldn’t stand that his wife would risk her body under hormonal treatments, suffer emotionally or even ‘question her own being a woman.’ He participated in every step of the treatments, not only as sperm provider, but by ‘monitoring the hormonal and bodily fluctuations of his wife’s body’, ‘helping out with injections’ etc. He learned ‘the language of medicine, of hormones, of the body’ of his wife and calculated, in consumerist terms, rationally, consciously, critically, several risks and predictions about the so-called ‘baby take home rate’, ‘success’ and ‘fails’. He also anticipated in prospective able-bodied masculinity and impending fatherhood. When I met the couple, they had already adopted a son. At the beginning they aimed to have their ‘own, genetically related child’. As they decided for a treatment with egg donation abroad, Serkan felt ‘relatively comforted.’ He said ‘to be honest I would be the father, right? That wasn’t a big issue for me, but for her’. During our interview, he stated, as if he was trying to convince me, that the ‘genetic ties’ don’t count anymore, but the feeling of being like a ‘real father or mother’ did. Rhetorically he asked: ‘am I a Pharaoh or a Sultan? Where does such an obsession for genes come from?’. Talking about his paternal feelings towards his adoptive son, he revealed euphorically, ‘now I think I finally deserve to put on a pair of trousers’ – a symbol of masculinity that simultaneously connotes fathering/fatherhood as the only possible way to be a biosocially recognizable man.

It was similar for Pomak, a man in his early forties, who I met at an information event organized by the support group ÇİDER on the Black Sea region, a region of a higher estimated rate of male infertility as a consequence of the explosion in Chernobyl. Years ago, he got a diagnosis of ‘dead sperms, zero sperm’. Afterward, ‘a world broke apart’, he felt as if it was ‘the end of everything’. Looking back, he complained about his ‘ignorance (cahillik)’ or naivety, but also about the society at that time, in which it was difficult to live as a ‘childless man with a desire to have children, while keeping his head up.’ Later, it was possible to gain fertile sperm from the testicles, but they had to face the age-related problems of his wife. In a traditional, rural and ‘slightly grumpy’ neighbourhood, he said, his wife was blamed by having the ‘default’. She has been ‘exceptionally caring’, although he had asked her not to, she protected him by ‘taking the blame’ for infertility. He sees himself as modern, progressive and a ‘pioneer’. They have limited social and economic resources, as he said, ‘to manage the treatments and all the burden that comes with them’. But he would use everything he could afford and would be willing to challenge his own limits and those of society. Although he had no computer at home, he tried to check information online and ‘stay connected with people like in ÇİDER’. During the meeting he aimed to inform himself about ‘the very last resort’: third-party donation abroad. He said that he learned to be ‘open-minded’ on the issue. He does not regard it as ‘adultery’; ‘one takes the sperm, transfers it. It is entirely a technical thing’. In the lives of many Muslim interlocutors (whether practicing or not), Islamic rules play a significant role in their reproductive decision-making that priorities nesep (lineage) and genetic kinship. However, some men, like Pomak, considered Islamic ethics flexible. When explicitly asked, they expressed criticism of the government that used religion as a pretext to interfere with family privacy and individual autonomy, for example in the case of prohibition of sperm and egg donation.

Making up ‘not so common' masculinity on internet – beyond

Being active and communicative is largely conceived, similar to other contexts, as ‘a little unmanly’ (Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, 2009). After posting an online announcement about my research, I got in touch with Sefa, a man in his early thirties from the East part of Turkey, seeking support on the Internet. He said:

women are more communicative than men. For them, especially here in the East, it is quasi equivalent to showing a weakness. Men are actually glad if they are left out of the whole thing.

Men, like him, blame the patriarchal configurations by which men are socialized to be ‘ashamed’ of talking about the sexual and reproductive issues they might have. They describe their feelings more frequently as ‘not being able to cry out of the soul’, ‘ashamed’, and ‘vulnerable.’ Usually, if at all, they reveal their own reproductive experiences carefully, as a way of being active (it is a ‘rational thing to get information’) rather than as being emotional. Mehmet, a man in his mid-thirties, said for instance that he would ‘eat everything inside,’ instead of showing himself irritated by his reproductive experience. This is considered as ‘the masculine way’, as in the following statement from a chat with one of the men shows:

Even as a man, you go through a lot. But to be honest, as a man you don’t get as involved in this thing as women do. It is not in the nature of the man (erkeğin doğasında yok).

However, the same men point out that they do the opposite by ‘opening one’s self to others’ and ‘talking about it’ and ‘voicing’ men’s issues. Thus, some of them claim to navigate their reproductive trajectories proactively, in particular by taking active part in online spaces and communities. Especially since 2000s, Internet and anonymous platforms – like www.cocukistiyorum.com – offer such opportunities. They became important ‘sites’ (Schmitz & Kazyak, 2016, p. 3) where masculinities are experienced, performed and challenged. There are various men’s online groups and platforms that mobilize embodied experiences, and as in cocukistiyorum.com advocate for self-help and ‘voicing’ infertility issues and rights. There are also fathers’ rights platforms (e.g. Divorced Victim Fathers’ Association, Masculine Struggle) that mobilize anti-feminist and pro-(patriarchal)-family rhetoric, to advocate for paternal rights, which, in their view, are not recognized and protected in existing Turkish family laws. In my fieldwork, I observed how and to what extent men utilize them as such, especially to do socially and culturally recognizable gender work and to renegotiate these ideals both within emerging biosocial situations and the larger gendered constellations. This includes the perceived biosocial exclusion and men’s invisibility.

Being active in internet platforms for reproductive purposes is still new for most of the men. It is largely a phenomenon for the educated middle class with socio-technical capabilities and access, but I also met men from lower social strata and rural areas. Although still in very small numbers, men look for and share personal, intimate and embodied experiences related to physiology, procreation and fatherhood in the context of infertility and reproductive biomedicine. There are no male-only groups; there are a few online forums for male related issues such as ‘men’s matters’ and ‘azoospermia’. In these forums, men disclose their most intimate and unvoiced experiences. These forums do more than providing a ‘therapeutic’ outlet, as scholars have shown they extend psychological, social and emotional support (Malik & Coulson, 2010; Hanna & Gough, 2016).

The digitally enabled connections to a broader community of experiences make men reconsider their own experiences. Most men said that they feel encouraged to share their intimate problems and also to see it as medical conditions and ‘as a common problem rather than an individual failing’. An example is the forum where men share their experiences of ‘being azoospermic’. They support each other regarding the ‘impasse’, where ‘you don’t know what to do’. If ‘the sperms are dead’, one man wrote, ‘there is a little hope’. One of the several answers ‘we are waiting for a major breakthrough in reproductive medicine, that they will eventually be able to develop sperm from stem cells, perhaps in vain’.

Hamza, who I introduced earlier, was one of the founding members of www.cocukistiyorum.com He shared his ‘lengthy journey to the child’ on the Internet in detail. Just after his wife’s diagnosis of polycystic ovaries, he started to share and write down his emotions also regarding his low sperm count diagnosis and the several operations to fix varicocele, a vein abnormality in the testicles. As a man engaged in advocacy and guidance for infertility, especially ‘men’s issues’, he knew that it is ‘a difficult task’ in a pronatalist and conservative environment. For men, he said, ‘writing is easier. At least, you don’t have to look someone in the eyes’. It was ‘a phase’ where he has to learn how to talk about intimate and emotional experiences like male infertility or ‘type of sexual intercourse prescribed by. Now Hamza feels ‘so relaxed like a doctor’, ‘more informed’ and ‘like an expert’ in talking about ‘child- and other issues’. He represents himself as a new type of man who ‘don’t keep the intimate matters in silence’. After several failed treatments, an adoption and the birth of a genetically related child he sees himself competent to give advice to couples. His own commitment would be perceived as ‘unmanly’ and ‘absolutely unusual for a man’:

Most people are surprised or even astonished that I, as a man, am interested in such things. It’s a not so common (çok da alışılmadık) attitude for men, you know. That someone like me happens to share his experiences without feeling ashamed or knows more than a woman is supposed to know about reproduction, reproductive treatment, hormones, eggs or sperm or whatever.

Such male narratives are uncommon and signal negotiation processes with masculinities. Seeking and offering support as well as being part of a community of experience are largely considered ‘a little bit awkward’ and it is about ‘managing everything well, like a man should do’, not only in medical treatments, but also in social environments to protect conjugal privacy and autonomy. This awkwardness is being transformed into a moral narrative of altruism: ‘If you help others, you help yourself.’ Forums are spaces to participate in the public discussions towards the reproductive technologies including their public image, bioethical regulations, governmental control and surveillance etc. In different forms, such as postings and ‘letters of experience’, men share intimate experiences, know-how and perceptions. By doing so, they perform and narrate an active masculinity that advocates for making infertility ‘speakable’. They barely claim to be activists, rather to act ‘as mouthpiece for men’, ‘pioneers’ and ‘living role models’ by ‘carrying it into society as a common and shared problem’. Seemingly, there emerges a community feeling, as Hamza put it: ‘Because, the problem that we go through is a common one … after all, it’s a common problem shared by all, so it’s our problem.’ In a society where hegemonic masculinity is fragile and contested, such experiences facilitate, as Özyegin (2018) put it, ‘to actively disinherit traditional masculinity and pursue self-consciously unpatriarchal selves’ (p. 246). Moreover, such attempts, I argue, are about pursuing new biosocial selves.

Conclusion

Drawing on the growing body of research on masculinities, this paper explores how middle-class heterosexual married men design emergent forms of being ‘responsible’, ‘not stigmatized’ and ‘not less masculine’ persons/bodies. In different sites, I illustrate their attempts to engage in a variety of bodily, emotional, socio-political and communicative processes. This process leads them to transform and to articulate experienced biosocial exclusion, reproductive desires, and agency. What I describe is hardly representative for masculinities and men’s reproductive biosocial selves – given the sociocultural and geographical heterogeneity in Turkey. Nevertheless, these are important to trace anthropologically, retrospectively in the context of my research and also in the current given authoritarian changes under a ‘masculinist restoration’, especially ‘at a point in time when patriarchy is no longer fully secure’ (Kandiyoti, 2016, p. 109). Such practices don’t necessarily oppose the hetero-bio-normative gender order of the Islamist-authoritarian turn of JDP rule. Rather, they facilitate to enact masculinity as a socially acceptable ‘not-so-common’-manhood, and as emphasized in the term of ‘emergent masculinities’ being ‘technoscientifically and morally agentive’ (Inhorn, 2012, p. 226). The term shifts the view from hegemonic to emerging practices in ‘an ongoing, relational and embodied process of change’ (Inhorn, 2012, p. 31) in Middle East and beyond. I was attentive to new practices, considering the complex biopolitical nexus where the bodies, biosocial roles and responsibilities are experienced and negotiated differently.

My paper contributes twofold to current theoretical approaches of and on masculinities. First, it shifts the empirical focus away from men’s perceptions of infertility as a threat to masculinity, and masculinity as peripheral. Rather, it shows how men renegotiate their gendered positions and biosocial roles – as men, husbands, would-be-fathers and reproductive actors – generally defined in ‘hierarchical pairings’ (Potts, 2014) of included/excluded, passive/active, visible/invisible, rational/emotional, manly/unmanly. The narratives of ‘being excluded’, ‘outsiders’ or ‘sperm providers’ – what I called narratives of biosocial exclusion – are significant to these renegotiations of emerging active masculinities. Indeed, these are embedded in a variety of social, institutional, and medical contexts. While men insist that masculinity cannot be reduced to sperm, they also know that ‘sperm’ represents the male body in laboratories. The ethnographic vignettes I presented demonstrate how sperm is individually and socially (re)imagined, and how masculinities are practiced and challenged. Second, this paper expands the ethnographic attention from the medical and conjugal settings during the time of the treatments to men’s long-term engagements. It offers an insight into how men in Turkey engage new spaces of ‘taking action’ (Becker, 2000) and in relationships emerging via Internet communities. These are utilized to actively perform, renegotiate and readjust their masculinities within the conservative-patriarchal society that code their bodies as a ‘failure’ and impose ‘learned ways’ of being a man. Still, in the Turkish context and beyond, there is a need for more research on emerging, reproductive masculinities and Internet settings, especially on men-only groups and how they produce and challenge traditional, hegemonic ideas within historically and socially situated concepts of gender, reproductive bodies and moralities. I argue that anthropological research on emergent practices of masculinities must capture how these are individually and collectively experienced, negotiated, and challenged in the context of current biopolitical changes.

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).

Additional information

Funding

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

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.