Every human being in every society results from reproduction, and most American men and women will have a child at some point in their lives. Even those who do not want to have children must contend ...with strong cultural presumptions around parenthood and, if they are sexually active, take steps to ensure they do not reproduce. In this review I discuss recent research on pregnancy, birth, abortion, contraception, infertility, and assisted reproduction. I argue that social scientists have conceptualized reproduction as a series of events that occur primarily in women's bodies. To stimulate theoretical and empirical research in this area, I develop a new conceptualization of reproduction as a biological and social process. I conclude by pointing to areas in need of further research, including reproductive aging, men, and the integration of qualitative and quantitative research.
Emily Martin’s landmark article— “The Egg and the Sperm” —demonstrated that cultural beliefs about masculinity and femininity led scientists to construct a “fairy tale” romance between active sperm ...and passive eggs, a biological metaphor that influenced the process of research in scientific labs and descriptions of fertilization in textbooks. In the decades since, there have been significant shifts in cultural beliefs about sex, gender, and sexuality, including challenges to the conceptualization of sex as a binary category, growing social acceptance of a wide variety of gender identities and sexualities, and an increasing proportion of people who subscribe to gender-egalitarian views. While Martin’s focus was on the scientists producing knowledge, here I pivot to individuals recruited from the general public in a northeastern American city, using a sociology of culture approach to ask whether shifting beliefs about gender and sexuality are associated with different biological metaphors about fertilization. Through qualitative interviews (N = 47), I find that the traditional metaphor of active sperm penetrating passive egg is still commonly used, but that another metaphor is also circulating, one that positions gametes as more similar than different, as two halves of a whole. I conclude by discussing the implications for debates about the relationship between biological stories and social beliefs.
Sex cells Almeling, Rene
2011., 20110821, 2011, 2011-09-20, 20110101
eBook
Unimaginable until the twentieth century, the clinical practice of transferring eggs and sperm from body to body is now the basis of a bustling market. In Sex Cells, Rene Almeling provides an inside ...look at how egg agencies and sperm banks do business. Although both men and women are usually drawn to donation for financial reasons, Almeling finds that clinics encourage sperm donors to think of the payments as remuneration for an easy "job." Women receive more money but are urged to regard egg donation in feminine terms, as the ultimate "gift" from one woman to another. Sex Cells shows how the gendered framing of paid donation, as either a job or a gift, not only influences the structure of the market, but also profoundly affects the individuals whose genetic material is being purchased.
For more than a century, the medical profession has made enormous efforts to understand and treat women's reproductive bodies. But only recently have researchers begun to ask basic questions about ...how men's health matters for reproductive outcomes, from miscarriage to childhood illness. What explains this gap in knowledge, and what are its consequences? Rene Almeling examines the production, circulation, and reception of biomedical knowledge about men's reproductive health. From a failed nineteenth-century effort to launch a medical specialty called andrology to the contemporary science of paternal effects, there has been a lack of attention to the importance of men's age, health, and exposures. Analyzing historical documents, media messages, and qualitative interviews, GUYnecology demonstrates how this non-knowledge shapes reproductive politics today.
Eggs and sperm are parallel bodily goods in that each contributes half of the reproductive material needed to create life. Yet these cells are produced by differently sexed bodies, allowing for a ...comparative analysis of how the social process of bodily commodification varies based on sex and gender. Drawing on interview and observational data from two egg agencies and two sperm banks in the United States, this article compares how staff recruit, screen, market, and compensate women and men donors. Results show how gendered norms inspire more altruistic rhetoric in egg donation than in sperm donation, producing different regimes of bodily commodification for women and men. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for debates in sociology of gender about biological differences among women and men and the cultural norms attributed to these differences; debates in economic sociology about how social factors shape the expansion of the market; and debates in medical sociology about the intersection of the market and medical practice.
In this commentary, I argue that attention to intersecting social inequalities is crucially important for any scholarly analysis of the relationship between transhumanism, markets, and consumption. ...Drawing on my sociological research about egg and sperm donation, genetic testing, and men's reproductive health, I discuss how social beliefs - particularly those around gender, race, class, and sexuality - become embedded in biological, technological, and medical approaches to human bodies, profoundly shaping how they are categorised, studied, treated, and commodified. On their own and in combination, these social processes both reflect and produce devastating inequalities. This is where futuristic flights of transhumanist fancy meet sociological realities, and debates about transhumanism must grapple with the persistence of such inequalities.
Historically, medical sociologists have used the interrelated concepts of objectification, commodification, and standardization to point to the pathologies of modern medicine, such as the ...depersonalization of care and the effects of bureaucratic control. More recent work in science studies, economic sociology, and sociology of health and illness, however, has begun to explore how the social processes of objectification, commodification, and standardization produce a wide variety of biomedical achievements. We provide a theoretical synthesis of this emerging body of scholarship centered upon the intended and unintended consequences of objectification, commodification, and standardization to improve health. We then outline a research agenda that would result from a more comprehensive assessment of how these processes manifest themselves in clinical care.
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