“M like Mother”: A Social Grammar of Assisted Reproduction in Iranian Infertility Clinics

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Shirin Garmaroudi Naef (International Centre for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW), University of Tübingen)
• Tuesday 27 April 2010, 17:00-18:30
• CRASSH Seminar Room 17 Mill Lane.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Zeynep Gurtin-Broadbent.

Focusing on the social uses of assisted reproductive technologies in Iranian infertility clinics, this seminar will explore how the legal and cultural meanings ascribed to physiological facts and bodily substances explain the construction of kinship relations in Iranian society and the emic concept of reproduction in this context. Different methods of assisted reproduction such as gamete donations and surrogacy are offered by Iranian IVF physicians within a Shiite Islamic jurisprudential framework in order to enable infertile married couples to conceive. Based on extensive ethnographic data, this seminar will address the social implication of this juridical permissibility. How reproductive technologies are understood by men and women who experience it, and how the idea of assisted reproduction is conceptualized in their narratives. The major contribution of this seminar lies in the voices of gamete donors and recipients, gestational surrogates and intended mothers, their husbands, their doctors and medical consultants, women donating eggs and embryos and being surrogates, women giving birth to the child of their brother or sister to explore how in the sociologically defined area of reproduction the grammar of kinship is used to experience reproductive technologies? How the affinal ties established by marriage are reinforced and regenerated through productivity of siblingship? And how, without any connection to incest or incestuous adultery in emic thought, the transfer of substance between siblings or in-laws, as well as strangers or friends is considered ethically and morally neutral? The theoretical aim of this seminar is to go beyond Euro-American naturalistic and ‘biogenetic’ assumptions in order to contribute to a better understanding of reproduction as a cultural achievement in which the foundational structures of a society and its dynamics are reproduced and contested.

This talk is part of the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Reproduction Forum series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Biology
• CRASSH Seminar Room 17 Mill Lane
• Cambridge Interdisciplinary Reproduction Forum
• Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit Special Seminars
• Department of Public Health and Primary Care
• History and Philosophy of Science long list
• Life Sciences
• Life Sciences
• ME Seminar
• PublicHealth@Cambridge
• my_list
• other talks

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.