finished the second phase of collecting conversational data for this project, I stated that the field in which I was conducting research was a discursive mess (Rothmüller 2005a). From a nearby location in the UK, I observed developments in the field of genetic research, especially stem cell research, being publicly discussed and medically performed.19 Within the same timeframe, I participated in conversations with women about their experiential and theoretical encounters with RGTs. I took part in international conferences and became involved in an interdisciplinary discussion about how to ethically frame and understand these developments in the social sciences, hoping that my involvement would leave the components of my research in an orderly and clearer relationship to each other. Yet, at the time, discussions at conferences or symposia pointed to the fact that while technologies were expanding, the development of terminology that could tackle (in an inclusive manner) social and cultural impacts of the global fabric of inequalities that these technologies create was yet lacking. During this time, I also became a member of the activist group Reprokult, which, during meetings with its interdisciplinary and activist members, worked intensely on “naming” practices and thus on developing a language that can point to complex dynamics.20 [37] I came to understand that I was gaining much medical knowledge about genetic research. Nonetheless, I also became aware that in aiming to know more about women’s embodiment and identity in RGTs and biomedical practice, I would need an open and innovative approach that could integrate the analysis of new developments as they emerged and facilitate an analysis of the connecting links between new developments, individual experiences, and societal challenges.
I’ve stated in the last chapter that I wish to acknowledge the interrelatedness of techniques and that I aim to examine the different meanings and understandings they hold. In order to ensure a clear centering of the study, yet also to work from the margins of arising issues, the two checkpoints onto which I have positioned my analysis are: the focus on women, and the introduction of notions of Leib into the conceptual approach to this study. Although this study has a focus on women, it purposefully includes the analysis of stories and developments with male protagonists at their center.21 These serve, for example, the task to extract information on how biomedicine applies to human kind in a gendered manner. Including these stories will furthermore provide insight into how biomedical practices increase complexities as far as “gendering” and “hierarchically ordering” people, technologies, materialities, and outcomes go. Hence, although the analytical sections within this study include the analysis of data that at first seems not to match the focus on women, including such data serves to gain a better understanding of global, political, cultural, ethical, and historical developments in the field of biomedicine that are crucial to developing a better understanding of how biomedical practices affect us as humans, but oftentimes create different challenges on various levels for women. In sum, I chose to involve and embrace messiness as discursive strategy aiding inclusive analysis. For example, to include stories with male protagonists and not to focus on a single technology are outcomes of this choice.
The borders of various medical practices, as well as the legal framing of the same, became “frayed” during the time of data collection and in the context [38] of fast developments in the field of RGTs and biomedicine. The frayed “ends” are interesting, as they are also the connecting points of practices or legal framings. It is also in light of this, that my research connects the analysis within the field of RGTs and biomedicine with developments in related medical practices and research areas that similarly rely upon research or medical practices that mobilize and replace bodily substances in space (for example, from one person to another) or in time (for example, egg cells from a 2005 cycle that are used in a 2006 treatment cycle for the same individual’s fertility treatment) or add non- organic components into a body to “enhance” future performances of bodily functions (such as “prosthetic” memory microchips).
The inclusion of developments in related research fields permits a broader perspective within the analysis, and facilitates furthering understanding of how developments in the field of RGTs and biomedicine potentially hold specific meanings for women during what is often referred to as their “reproductive years.” This approach, moreover, allows to maintain a focus on developments in the UK and Germany, but also to highlight the fact that biomedical practice and research take place within a context of globalizing developments that change the historicity of relationships between countries and influence “new” forms of competition and injustices between them and their citizens. This broader perspective can address the various ways in which these developments and responses to them give rise to new ethical practices and forms of governance and how these practices feed back on the level of individual experience. For example, in what ways do ethical approaches espoused in one country come to travel within this globalizing context, such that ethical frameworks are both mobilized and demobilized by contemporary practices in quite different spheres? On an international level, art exhibitions, created by the use of medical practices that don’t serve the treatment of a person, but involve the very same techniques (e.g. the amputation of a limb) travel the world and, in doing so, compel people in other countries to find an ethical base on which to show (or not show) such exhibits, thereby establishing some degree of a relationship between the ethical approaches of both the host and home country. On a private level, German fertility patients are travelling to Spain to receive fertility treatment, which is not available in Germany because of different legal and ethical framings (Orobitg and Salazar 2005, Spiewak 2003). It is important for this study, as it is concerned with embodiment, to acknowledge the interconnectedness of the movement and travel of people, bodily substances, technologies, medical practices, and body parts.
[39] 2.2 Body/Körper and Leib – an Attempt to Define Relationality through Translation, Time, and Meaning
“Das System ist nahezu geschlossen, nahezu,
denn an den Rändern des Diskurses taucht das
Monströse auf, das nicht in der Verschmelzung
mit der Technik lauert, sondern auf der
menschlichen Sterblichkeit beruht”22 (Wenner 2002: 100).
“Embodiment is a concept in constant motion”
(Harris 2016).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak states in an interview: “[…] if one really thinks of the body as such, there is no possible outline of the body as such. I think that's about what I would say. There are thinkings of the systematicity of the body, there are value codings of the body. The body, as such, cannot be thought, and I certainly cannot approach it” (Spivak 1989: 149). This has to be seen not as a limitation to the engagement with the issue, with the body, but rather as a delimitation of any engagement. If the body cannot be thought, then what I am aiming to do in this study is to look at individual, societal, and medical “narrations and materialities,” connected to experiences and theoretical encounters with bodies and embodiment. With the awareness of the body as not “thinkable” in Spivak’s terms, the motivation of this study is to find innovative ways of understanding the multi-layered experienced and theorized locality of women’s bodies in the field of biomedicine. Using visual data, artwork, practice, and written text, in addition to the verbal data collected during the course of this project, provides insights into the discursive relatedness of different ideas which arise in public reflections and (inter-) disciplinary discussions. I will begin the following section by looking at exemplary spaces of public reflections in media coverage and art related to biomedical developments before turning my attention to disciplinary discussions.
[40] 2.2.1 An Introduction to Spaces of Public Reflections: On Erasing and Connecting “Semi-real” Bodies
“For if the skin is a border,
then it is a border that feels”
(Ahmed 2000: 45).
“But there is no such thing as the human.
