shivers-mcnair: failure to produce #cwcon #j5

failure to produce

Ann Shivers-McNairUniversity of Washington

@a_shiversmcnairasmcnair@uw.edu

an involuntary fertility test

“I went ahead and did a tubal patency test on the remaining fallopian tube while I was in there, and it looks good.” (my OBGYN to my partner, immediately after a surgery to remove a serous cystadenoma that also resulted in a salpingectomy and partial oophorectomy)

“…another kind of horror for us is lack of production: the disused factory, the failed business, the idle machine.” (Martin, 1997, on how medical literature describes menstruation and menopause)

app orientations

“Objects may even take the shape of the bodies for whom they are ‘intended,’ in what it is that they allow a body to do.” (Ahmed, 2006)

“The failure of something to work is a matter of a failed orientation: a tool is used by a body for which it was not intended, or a body uses a tool that does not extend its capacity for action.” (Ahmed, 2006)

discourse and mattering

“You’ll change your mind.”

“We need to preserve the possibility for fertility.”

“There are so many women who would be grateful to have even your quasi-fertility.”

“If you care so much about infertility, why don’t you use your fertility to be a surrogate?”

“Intra-active practices of engagement not only make the world intelligible in specific ways but also foreclose other patterns of mattering. ... Therefore, accountability and responsibility must be thought of in terms of what matters and what is excluded from mattering.” (Barad, 2007)

What and who do the technologies of in/fertility (the medical procedures, the apps, the discourse) enable to matter and exclude from mattering?