the Female Body GOVERNING

10
“Doing What Comes Naturally . . .”
Negotiating Normality in Accounts of IVF Failure
KAREN THROSBY
University of Warwick
The new reproductive and genetic technologies constitute a broad
and dynamic technosocial domain within which new social relations
are produced. Implicit in this process of the forging of new relations is
the production of new bodily norms and regulatory practices. Writing
from a Foucauldian perspective about the new reproductive technologies,
and particularly in vitro fertilization (IVF), Jana Sawicki (1991)
identifi es these new technologies as disciplinary techniques, which
operate by “creating desires, attaching individuals to specifi c identities
and establishing norms against which individuals and their behaviors
and bodies are judged and against which they police themselves” (p. 68).
While the new reproductive and genetic technologies provide new forms
of knowledge and opportunity, they also function to govern the body
in novel ways. Carlos Novas and Nikolas Rose (2000) have described
this governance in terms of “somatic individuality,” where, for example,
knowledge of genetic risk produced through the availability of genetic
testing produces new responsibilities around the body and the self.
Individuals, according to Novas and Rose, are not rendered passive
by the diagnosis of disease (or the risk of future disease), but rather
are produced as new types of subjects, becoming “skilled, prudent and
active, an ally of the doctor, a proto-professional” (p. 489). Paul Rabinow
(1996), elaborating Michel Foucault’s (1978) concept of biopower, articulates
these new social relations and obligations in terms of “biosociality,”
where identity groupings are formulated in relation to biomedical and
technological knowledge and practices, and new forms of identity in
turn produce their own norms and responsibilities in relation to bodily
governance and health practices.
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