the Female Body GOVERNING

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karen throsby
who policed their own behavior (and were policed by others) rigorously
even where there was doubt as to whether it made any difference to the
outcome, as this quote illustrates:
Alice: And [the doctors said] don’t have hot baths, which he loves, so
he still has hot baths. And erm . . . they talked about sort of putting
a bag of frozen peas on appropriate areas [both laugh]. And he did
try a dash of cold water once, and he said, “Never again!” I won’t
show him this transcript! But he does . . . Still, I think . . . sometimes
he’ll come out of the bath and say, “Cor, boiling hot, that was !” And
I say, “Don’t tell me!” Because to me, that’s like saying, “You won’t
get pregnant in 6 weeks’ time.” And I said to him a couple of times,
and he was going, “No, no, no, the doctor doesn’t know what he’s
talking about.”
Karen: Was he just disregarding the advice? He just didn’t believe
the advice?
Alice: No, and he didn’t see why he should change, just on the
doctor’s say-so. Even though it’s come up in programs since, but he
just doesn’t change anything, so I just think, “Well, it’s down to me
then.” You know, “I’m the one that’s got to do everything—you just
carry on as you were before.”
Importantly, this lack of compliance should not be read as the male
partners not caring about the outcome of treatment; indeed, the men
in this study undoubtedly experienced the grief of childlessness and
IVF failure profoundly—a grief that normative gender relations and the
assumptions of reproduction as the “natural” domain of women render
inexpressible. To use Bernadette Susan McCreight’s (2004) term, writing
in relation to male experience of pregnancy loss, this is “a grief ignored”
and one about which very little research has been done to date. 8 Instead,
this lack of compliance can be seen as a product of normative (and
naturalized) gendered social relations. In particular, the disinterest on
the part of the men in engaging in sperm improvement regimens can
be explained by two key factors: fi rst, the evaluation of sperm quality
according to fertilization capacity; and second, the normative association
of virility, fertility, and masculinity in popular culture.
Irma van der Ploeg (2004) highlights the ways in which IVF discourse
produces “the (normal) oocyte as a troublemaker” (p. 165), with eggs
providing obstacles to sperm, which are represented as “the active agents
in fertilization” (p. 166), even in cases of male factor infertility. However,
once male fertility has been confi rmed by fertilization (or predicted by a
positive sperm count), the focus falls onto the female body in the case of