AGENCY THROUGH OBJECTIFICATION: SUBJECTIVITY AND TECHNOLOGY

Abstract

The article turns to the ethnography of infertility clinics to answer the question: To what extent and in what situations do the technologies that objectify the bodies of patients in these clinics in fact not reduce the agency and selfhood of the patients but, on the contrary, enable them to reveal their capacities? The author engages in an argument with the tradition in feminist studies of regarding those technologies as harmful and as an objectification of the patients and their bodies. On the basis of her fieldwork (participant observation of pelvic exams, ultrasound procedures, surgical operations, etc.), the author cogently shows that certain forms of objectification that are expressed in the patient’s submitting to technical procedures and to epistemological and bureaucratic discipline in fact enable activation of capacities of parts of the body and self that cannot be exhibited outside the clinic. However, these forms of objectification are applicable and relevant for women patients only to the extent that they are in line with an overall progression of the patients from infertility to restoration of fertility. Otherwise, they turn into mechanization and alienation of the patient’s body and self. The author’s conceptual and political aim in this article is to point out the possibility of preserving compatibility between the objectified body parts or selfhood of the patient, the tools and reproductive technologies, the bureaucratic and epistemological discipline inside the IVF clinics, and the “I” of the patient with which she will live before and after the infertility procedures regardless of the outcome. The process of arranging a functional zone where this compatibility is possible is what the author calls ontological choreography.