the Female Body GOVERNING

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karen throsby
Drawing on a series of interviews with 15 women (whose male partners
chose not to participate) and 13 couples, and using discourse analysis
(Gill, 1996, 2000; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Wood & Kroger, 2000), this
chapter explores the ways in which the participants both deployed and
resisted discourses of nature and the gendered body in relation to the
engagement with IVF to locate themselves as “normal.” The participants
had all had IVF unsuccessfully at least once with their most recent cycle
having failed and having taken place at least two years prior to the
interviews. The participants were recruited through the dormant patient
records at a specialist fertility unit in a large National Health Service
(NHS) teaching hospital. However, importantly, a relative paucity of
NHS funding for IVF means that approximately 80% of all IVF cycles
in the United Kingdom are self-funded by the patients, either in NHS
units or within the private sector. There are long waiting lists for funded
treatment, and patients, therefore, commonly undergo treatment in
several clinics, moving between the private and the public sector (as
was the case for many of the participants in this study). The number of
cycles undergone ranged from 1 to 13, and the amount of money spent
on treatment ranged from nominal amounts up to well in excess of
$30,000. The participants were predominantly (although by no means
exclusively) White, middle class, and educated to degree or professional
level—an outcome that has been well-documented by other studies in
this fi eld (Daniluk, 1996; Franklin, 1997; Sandelowski, 1993).
This chapter is divided into two sections: the fi rst section argues
that IVF produces an imperative to engage with it, but that this can be
mobilized, post-IVF failure to produce a new, technologically mediated,
legitimized form of childlessness; the second section looks at the ways in
which women surveilled and disciplined their own bodies to maximize
their chances of treatment success and minimize their own sense of
responsibility for its failure. The analysis explores the ways in which
this discursive work is both produced by, and productive of, gendered
bodily governance in ways that impact deleteriously, but asymmetrically,
on both men and women. The chapter concludes by arguing that IVF,
for all its rhetorical “newness,” is predicated on deeply entrenched
problematic discursive resources and practices around the gendered
body, motherhood, and nature, which are both resisted and deployed
by women in the management and negotiation of IVF failure.
‘Our consciences are clear’
The rise of IVF as a relatively mainstream reproductive technology has
been swift and widespread. In the 31 years since the birth of the fi rst