the Female Body GOVERNING

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male factor infertility being relocated within the “couple.” Angela, for
example, described her and her husband as “a pair of old duffers,”
even though the fertility problem appeared to lie with her husband’s
low sperm count. Ann Woollett (1992) also notes that in the treatment
context, men experiencing fertility problems are repeatedly assured by
doctors and their partners that their infertility does not refl ect on their
masculinity, although no such assurances are offered to women who are
infertile in relation to their feminine identity (p. 169).
Conclusion
In this brief discussion, I have demonstrated some of the ways in
which the unsuccessful engagement with IVF produces new forms of
governance of the female body. The very availability of IVF produces
an imperative to engage with it because it offers the possibility of a
novel, technologically mediated form of socially authorized childlessness
that is (morally) distinct from that which is chosen. However, this drive
toward treatment refl ects a more pervasive assumption that women,
in particular, should “do everything possible” to have a child. This, in
turn, produces an imperative to engage in an array of bodily disciplinary
practices oriented not only toward maximizing the chances of a positive
outcome, but also toward demonstrating to others that “everything
possible” (although not too much) has been tried. These practices are
profoundly gendered, with the responsibility falling primarily to the
female partners.
Importantly, however, this analysis is not intended to constitute a case
against IVF; on the contrary, it demonstrates clearly the extent to which
IVF is replete with both risks and possibilities for those engaging with it,
and that those undergoing treatment are active (if always constrained)
agents—or users (Saetnan, Oudshoorn, & Kirejczyk, 2000)—in the
production of IVF and its meanings. Instead, the critical argument here
is that for all its “newness,” IVF is both produced by, and productive of,
perniciously familiar discourses about the female body as “naturally”
reproductive, and unpredictable and liable to failure. This construction
results not only in the female body being rendered as an object
of medical surveillance and intervention in ways that are easily made
invisible through the naturalization of those interventions, but it also
means that the female body can be held responsible for the failure of
those interventions. This burden of responsibility becomes lost in the
construction of “the couple” as the IVF patient—a construction that is
sustained by assumptions of reproductive labor as a “natural” part of