Dr Rachel Berger, Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada
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Wednesday 13 March 2013
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4.00-5.00pm
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NAB.1.07, New Academic Building, LSE
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Chaired by Dr Sadie Wearing
Open to all - no booking required.
Abstract
This paper explores the moral pragmatics and possibilities of making families outside the bounds of conventional reproduction as represented in popular cultural production. Taking as a starting point 2010’s trifecta of films focused on children conceived with the help of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) -- The Kids are All Right, The Switch, and The Back-up Plan, – I explore the ways in which discourses of unconventional reproduction are made morally acceptable and politically benign through the affective narratives of “love” that serve as the impetus for said parents to (pro-)create their children within the civically acceptable bounds of the (homo)national family. Together, these films normalizes ART as a key factor in new discussions of reproductive ‘choice’: questions of timing, planning and the ideation of the ‘right’ moment for reproduction reconstitute the notion of choice on neo-liberal grounds. This provides the impetus for addressing the ‘othered’ mothers – the teen mom, the reproductive immigrant/alien mom, the welfare queen, the ART abuser (octomom), – all of whom reproduce outside of this discourse of choice, without direction or control over their overly fecund bodies, thus rendering them abject subjects of neo-liberal governance. Ultimately, I argue that the “loving” imperative to make family in the face of unconventional circumstances is anything but a quirky retelling of an older story full of new possibilities for social enlightenment; instead, these narratives further entrench tropes of acceptable citizenship, (homo)national belonging, and the imagined community of American Empire, and in so doing limit the possibilities of truly radical futures of kinship, social configuration and networks of care.
Biography
Rachel Berger is Associate Professor of History at and Fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She is, by training, a historian of medicine and the body in South Asia, and has worked on the history of Ayurvedic medicine in the context of late colonial biopolitics, Hindi-language discussions of gyneacology and reproductive medicine in interwar India, and the visual culture of consumption in the subcontinent. Her current South Asia-based research project takes up the history of food and nutrition in interwar and early post-colonial India, focusing on the emergence of new food economies, a shift to preventative medicine and the evolution of consumption in North India. A second project explores the concept of intimacy as it is deployed in Indian vernacular representations of sexuality and the body, focusing particularly on recovering the subject from its abstraction into the greater work of nation-building. Rachel has long-standing scholarly and activist interests in queer lives (in theory and practice), reproductive politics, and questions of power in relation to the formalization of political and activist practices. As such, she is excited to use the opportunity of being in feminist community at the LSE to begin new research on evolving discourses of 'choice', especially with regards to questions of reproduction and coupling set against the backdrop of homonationalism and neoliberal economic life.