The Business of Being Made: Exploring the Production of Temporalities in Assisted Reproductive Technologies

Abstract

As with other forms of biotechnology, assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) have become a normative part of women's reproductive health care with critical impact on women's subjectivities. Yet as these technologies have proliferated, feminist and cultural theories have taken up the challenges of theorizing the subjectivities produced through these interventions, while psychoanalysis has remained relatively mute, and certainly uncritical. This article uses interview research conducted by a psychoanalyst with women and men who went through some form of ART. Of particular interest is the creation of liminal and asynchronous temporalities that situate people in spaces marked by a particular futurity of being “not yet pregnant.” Within this uncertainty, temporal forms of affect regulation emerge for self-preservation, especially for survivors of sexual trauma, for whom ART interventions and a “confusion of tongues” surrounding them can be profoundly retraumatizing.