the Female Body GOVERNING

“Doing What Comes Naturally . . .” 235
of “meddling with nature,” with each new announcement or scientifi c
development seen as (potentially, at least) undermining what it means
to be human (see Fukuymama, 2003; Gosden, 1999; Silver, 1999). For
IVF to be “normal,” then, the engagement with it must necessarily be
located within the domain of “natural” reproduction. When treatment
is successful, the presence of a reassuringly “natural” baby performs
much of the work of alleviating anxiety about “meddling with nature,”
with the “natural” order restored through reproduction. However, the
reality of IVF in the United Kingdom is that almost 80% of all treatment
cycles started are unsuccessful, leaving those for whom treatment is
unsuccessful to negotiate not only what it means to have technologized
the “natural” reproductive process, but also to be living either without
children or without the desired number of children.
Those for whom IVF fails and who subsequently stop treatment fi nd
themselves ambiguously and liminally located in relation to reproductive
norms: they have tried to conceive, but have been unable to; they desire
(genetic) children, but are no longer actively pursuing that desire
through IVF, and they have brought technology into the reproductive
process without the counterbalancing “natural” baby. This liminal location
is what Elspeth Probyn (1996) has described as one of “outside
belonging”—a state of “ongoing inbetweenness” (p. 6) that is full of both
possibility and risk. As Rosi Braidotti (1994) observes, “it is crowded
at the margins, and nonbelonging can be hell” (p. 20). The patients,
and particularly the women, have to do the work of negotiating the
“ongoing inbetweenness” of their experiences. This burden of work can
be described as the “negotiation of normality” (Throsby, 2002, 2004)
and is performed through a panoply of profoundly gendered disciplinary
techniques, which extend both temporally and spatially beyond the
confi nes of the clinical encounter. This multiplicity of “techniques
for achieving the subjugation of bodies” (Foucault, 1978, p. 140) can
be seen as a manifestation of biopower, which Foucault describes as
“everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes
from everywhere” (p. 93), emerging through disciplinary practices over
individual bodies and regulatory practices over populations (p. 140). In
the engagement with IVF, women’s bodies become the intense focus of
medical and social surveillance, which is matched by women’s rigorous
policing of their own bodies, constituting a panoptical “trap” (p. 200)
whereby the individual “who is subjected to a fi eld of visibility, and who
knows it, assumes the responsibility for the constraints of power . . .”
(p. 202). The material-discursive work of locating the self as natural/
normal, post-IVF, then, is ongoing, and the achievement of watchful
docility is hard work.