Exploring the Multiplicity of Embodied Agency in Colombian Assisted Reproduction

Abstract

Analyses of assisted reproductive technologies have demonstrated how objectification and agency can coexist in infertility centres. How objectification creates opportunities for empowerment, however, has not yet been explored. In analysing women’s narratives of assisted conception in Colombian infertility clinics, I demonstrate the complexity in women’s embodied experiences of various objectifying stages of assisted conception and argue that their experiences produced multiple forms of embodied agency. Women used diagnostic procedures to learn about their bodies and infertility complications, which augmented their authority over their bodies and treatment. They drew upon their embodied knowledge to reduce treatment anxieties, while sensations such as pain were made purposeful, and hence meaningful, as women strove to reconfigure the significance of the embodied sensations of conception in a context of medicalized reproduction. In these narratives, we see that lived bodies are productive agents of social change, generating meanings and working to reshape dominant social understandings.

Be the mother, not the daughter: Immigrant Chinese women, postpartum care knowledge, and mothering autonomy

“…Some scholars argue that class‐privileged women have come to embrace biomedical perspectives and knowledge in order to control their treatment (Bell, 2016) and demonstrate their competence as mothers (Song et al., 2012). Yet, researchers of new reproductive technologies in particular have problematised medicalisation’s destructive and disciplinary power in relation to women’s agency, documenting women’s ‘active participation’ in medical objectification (Thompson, 2005, p. 185) and their use of medical knowledge to pursue their own ends (Shaw, 2021). In other words, women can talk back to the medical authority in a medicalised environment (Apple, 2014).…”

Pregnant under quarantine: Women's agency and access to medical care under Wuhan's COVID-19 lockdown

“…All these actions enabled women to ensure their needs were met. Much like Shaw’s (2021) research on women undergoing infertility treatments, our interview data on women’s experiences with pregnancy and childbirth during Wuhan’s COVID-19 lockdown period brim with pragmatic action. These women made tremendous efforts to access medical oversight and care in an attempt to transform pregnancy-related fears and anxieties into a sense of greater certainty, assurance and stability, despite the crisis unfolding in Wuhan.…”

“…As we have noted, our case raises questions about how critiques of medicalized pregnancy and childbirth often leave little room for conceptualizing an embrace of medicine as a genuine expression of women’s interests and agency. Much like studies of women undergoing infertility treatment ( Shaw 2021 ; Thompson 2005 ), the exceptional circumstances in Wuhan provide a very particular situation through which we might understand women’s—this group of women’s—expectations about the kind of medical care they desire and feel entitled to. Their experiences also suggest that, while perhaps largely invisible in ordinary times, medical authority clearly depends on a degree of collaboration and cooperation between medical professionals and pregnant women (and, to some degree, their families).…”

“…In the case of the latter objective, we raise questions about a dominant scholarly frame that casts “compliance” with medical authority as subjection, and rejection of it as agency ( Moore, 2011 ; Rothman, 2016 ). Drawing inspiration from scholarship on the complex intersection of technology, medical authority, and women's embodied agency ( Shaw, 2021 ; Thompson, 2005 ), we recognize the complexity of women's encounters with medical care and offer more nuanced understandings of women's agency and their childbearing experiences. Our research therefore underscores the importance of anchoring theoretical and scholarly assertions in women's actions and intentions without simply viewing these women as “subjected” to medical authority.…”

“…In such a context, objectification is actually a precondition for agency. Similarly, Shaw (2021) details the active role that women receiving fertility treatments in Colombia play in their care, as they use encounters with doctors and with technology to develop new, subjective understandings of their bodies and their infertility. At times, these women called for forms of medical care in order to “redistribute…responsibility for treatment success” and actively used demands for care as opportunities to transform fear and anxiety into “pragmatic action” (67).…”