of a reproductive-embryonic industrial complex in which the interests of a pronatalist Jewish state and a biomedical establishment—consisting of academic entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, biotech companies, and pharmaceutical giants—have coalesced” (2016, p. 5).
On a global scale, Brian Larkin has recently reignited anthropological interest in infrastructures that he defines as “built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space. . . . They comprise the architecture for circulation, literally providing the undergirding of modern societies” (Larkin, 2013, p. 328). In a similar vein, Stephen Collier and Aihwa Ong proposed the term global assemblages, which they see as “specific technical infrastructures, administrative apparatuses, or value regimes,” which facilitate the transportation of global phenomena that “have a distinctive capacity for decontextualization and recontextualization, abstractability, and movement, across diverse social and cultural situations and spheres of life” (Collier & Ong, 2007, p. 11). Building on their work, Marcia Inhorn has described a global reproductive assemblage as “involving the global diffusion of IVF and its underlying technoscience; international circuits of travelling people and, increasingly, their body parts (gametes, frozen embryos, and other biological substances); systems of administration involving both medical and tourism industries; increasing regulatory governance, on the part of both nations and professional bodies; and growing ethical concerns about various forms of licit and illicit exchange, including unprecedented evasion across national and international borders” (Inhorn, 2015, p. 22).
Although their terminology differs, each of these scholars has worked to articulate some kind of a whole comprised of an ensemble of interconnected parts that, when configured in specific ways, allow for the deployment, circulation, movement, and organization of specific forms of goods, people, capital, and/or ideas in specific ways. As such, these concepts allow us to think about and analyze historically and ethnographically situated governmental configurations (cf. Foucault 1991). A complex, then, as I define it, is a domain—systems of relations—within which we can discern heavy accumulations of patterned knowledges and practices around a distinct “aggregate problem” such as infertility, overpopulation, or low fertility. What I am calling a reproductive complex is thus in no way transient. Rather, reproductive complexes are very often nationally circumscribed (albeit with regional, if not global, overlaps), emerging over decades and involving scientists, doctors, nurses, hospitals, policy makers, laws, media, laboratories, techniques, secretaries, janitors, drivers, and more. Consequently they are rarely reconfigured overnight. Moreover, as Barbara Prainsack and I argued in “Situated Bio-Regulation,” “certain regulatory configurations [are] tied to what [i]s thinkable and sayable” (Prainsack & Wahlberg, 2013, p. 341) in a given place, at a given time. In China, over the course of the last three or four decades, a reproductive complex has coalesced around the dual objectives of controlling population growth and improving population quality. It comprises a total set of laws, regulations, family planning institutions, quotas, information campaigns, experts, hospitals, clinics, pharmaceutical companies, premarital counseling sessions, prenatal screening services, and more. Medical procedures and techniques related to birth control (population quantity) include contraception, sterilization, and abortion as well as ARTs, while those related to the health of newborns (population quality) include genetic counseling, fetal education, prenatal screening, and abortion as well as SRTs. It is within such reproductive complexes that what anthropologists Lynn Morgan and Elizabeth Roberts have called reproductive governance takes place as “legislative controls, economic inducements, moral injunctions, direct coercion, and ethical incitements . . . produce, monitor, and control reproductive behaviours and practices” (Morgan & Roberts, 2012, p. 241).
Empirically attending to how sperm banking came to fit within China’s reproductive complex has required what I have called a site-multiplied assemblage ethnography,6 which is to say a site-specific, in-depth ethnographic study of the Hunan Sperm Bank in Changsha from where I nonetheless followed and participated in national and global flows and exchanges of knowledge, people, equipment, and regulations related to sperm banking. The siting of this assemblage ethnography was essential, as it is in particular sites that we see how the knowledge-practice configurations that characterize China’s reproductive complex are manifest in the daily routines and practices that make up sperm banking. While by no means mutually exclusive, it can be helpful to contrast assemblage ethnographies with ethnographies of lived experience on the one hand and laboratory ethnographies on the other. If ethnographies of lived experience generate insight into the ways in which individuals and communities experience, navigate, negotiate, or relate (for example, to infertility and insemination with donor sperm) and laboratory ethnographies examine how specific forms of knowledge, truth, or fact are produced through practice, assemblage ethnographies generate insight into the ways in which certain problems, or better yet problematizations, take form.7 This is not to say that I have been uninterested in the experiences of sperm donors and couples undergoing AID or in the laboratory practices that generate knowledge about sperm, but rather it is to point out that the task of my ethnography has been to provide an account of the making of sperm banking in China through a heavy accumulation of patterned knowledges and practices, enmeshed within a very particular reproductive complex.8 As a result, readers will note that I have not set myself the task of explaining what is particularly Chinese about sperm banking or male infertility in Hunan;9 instead, I have been concerned with how sperm banking is practiced on a daily, routine basis in China. Mine is an assemblage ethnography of sperm banking in China rather than an ethnography of Chinese sperm donors or infertile couples. As such, throughout the book I will attend to the central questions of: How has routinized sperm banking become possible in China? What forms of problematization have allowed sperm banks a legitimate place within China’s restrictive reproductive complex? What style of sperm banking has emerged in China as a result? How has AID become an acceptable reproductive technology in China?
Figure 2. Site-multiplied, Hunan Sperm Bank provides donor sperm to fertility clinics around China.
When it comes to medical technologies I define “routinization” as a socio-historical process through which habituated regimes of daily micro-practices coalesce, thereby shaping a medical technology and its uses. Routinization indexes the transformation of a technology from frontier to mundane, as “new technologies must traverse this continuum, changing from a status of pure experiment to the standard of care” (Koenig, 1988, p. 466). Barbara Katz Rothman (1993), Marcia Inhorn (1994; 2003), Lisa Handwerker (1995a; 2002), Sarah Franklin (1997), Rayna Rapp (2000), and Gay Becker (2000) have been pioneers in the social and ethnographic study of new reproductive technologies, showing us how the development and routinization of technologies such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), amniocentesis, or prenatal genetic diagnosis (PGD), on the one hand, resulted from complex intersections within and between biomedical research, healthcare services, social policy, social movements, popular media, and more in a particular country; and on the other, turned them into an important part of the daily lives of providers, donors, patients, and family members alike. Hence, building on their work, with the term routinization I point firstly to socio-historical processes whereby certain forms of medical technology come to be (re-)produced and entrenched within particular juridical, medical, social, economic, cultural, and institutional configurations. Not only were there technical, cultural, and logistical obstacles to sperm banking in a post–Cultural Revolution China, but sperm banking also had to mold into a suitable form to fit within a reproductive complex that was otherwise configured to strictly restrict fertility. Following initial resistance, sperm banking (together with other forms of reproductive technology) has gone on to be championed by scientists, doctors, and administrators as a national project that can help not only infertile couples, but also the nation itself. Also at stake have been the multiple ways of knowing infertility that continue to circulate in China today, often leading to pluralist medical practices and therapeutic itineraries.
Secondly, I refer to all those daily practices through which certain medical technologies become an established and habituated part of health delivery, which is to say a standard of
