the Female Body GOVERNING

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karen throsby
want to be . . . I mean, we did get obsessive, but I didn’t want to be
one of these completely obsessive people that that’s all they live for.
And we had to have some sort of . . . reality. You know, we had to
have some sort of life. Although it did take over, that sort of three
seemed . . . I don’t know. Three just seemed a good control number,
a good sort of, you know, that’s your best shot.
The hyperbolic caricature of the aging woman doggedly pursuing
endless cycles of treatment featured regularly in the accounts, and
her rhetorical function here is as the irrational, out-of-control Other
against which Susan’s moderation can be defined. Importantly, what
actually constitutes desperation is indefinable in objective terms;
instead, what matters is the discursive mobilization of the excessive “not
me.” Therefore, for some of the participants, three was posited as excessive
and desperate; for another of the participants, Katy, on the other
hand, her plan to undergo six cycles was a sign of strength, not
weakness, describing herself as “not a giver-upper,” with far higher
numbers of cycles signifying desperation. Desperation, then, constitutes
a discursive resource through which the participants were
able to construct their own engagement with treatment as enough,
but not too much—a fine balance to strike, and one that is not at
all stable, requiring constant maintenance and negotiation. That this
discursive work is necessary highlights the surveillance and discipline
to which the women were subjected to, both by themselves and by
others.
The number of treatment cycles was not the only site for this discursive
work, and particular kinds of treatment were also mobilized as
signifying desperation, leading to an unnatural degree of intervention. 7
In this context, “designer babies,” sex selection for social reasons,
large multiple births, and the use of IVF by postmenopausal women
constituted abnormal uses of the technology, which were perceived to
be sullying their own more “normal” uses of it:
Robert: It was natural . . . it was just the mechanics of it that were
assisted. It wasn’t like cloning a sheep, or growing ears on the backs
of mice, or things like that.
Tim complained that the more newsworthy cases “give us IVF-ers a
bad name,” laying claim to a biosocial community of “normal” users of
IVF to shore up the construction of his and his wife Katy’s own engagement
with IVF as normal, natural, and morally unproblematic.
Importantly, no male counterpart correlates to the desperate infertile