Reproductive Governance and Bodily Materiality

Flesh, Technologies, and Knowledge

Corinna Sabrina Guerzoni, Claudia Mattalucci, Corinna Sabrina Guerzoni, Claudia Mattalucci

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781800714397
• eBook ISBN: 9781800714403
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Reproductive Governance and Bodily Materiality explores the growing centrality and power of the medical professional and lay practices within the field of human reproduction as they entangle with political economic processes, providing examples from multiple countries.

Throughout the collection the authors address the issues of abortion, sterilization, 'natural' childbirth, breastfeeding, surrogacy, pregnancy loss, IVF, disability and parenting, whilst focusing both on the mechanisms through which reproductive behaviours are shaped and controlled, and on the socially and culturally constructed bodies' materiality. The chapters analyse how reproductive governances are inherently attached to different social life aspects, such as gender, industry, and religion, residing within complex political domains and how these features are embodied through practices, care, rituals, and gestures. Rather than assuming corporeal materiality - the 'flesh' - as something stable and pre-given, this collection shows how different bodies are defined and shaped by local biologies, institutional practices and reproductive subjects inside and outside the Euro-American space.

This is essential reading for researchers of social, cultural and medical anthropology, sociology, and education.

Chapter 1

When the Body Comes Back to Strengthen Identity and Communities

Dominique Memmi

Abstract

Height, weight, fingerprints: the body is, as is well known, an important marker of identity. However, since the 1980s and 1990s, it has provided new services to the process of attesting individual identities.

During this period, the development of molecular biology created new means of identification thanks to DNA tests; in addition, certain children (adopted, born of artificial procreation) began to demand to be able to meet their biological parents ‘in the flesh’ to ease their ‘identity’ suffering; Finally, around birth and death, new practices have emerged that aim to reinforce – through breastfeeding, skin-to-skin contact, haptonomy, the exposure of corpses – the identities of father, mother and child… Are there common points to these different practices? If so, what might their cultural meanings be? And what lessons can we learn from them about the history of the certification of individual identities?

Through these new practices, a great collective narrative – a narrative in practice – is taking shape. It tells of the importance that the body, biology and nature are supposed to play today in fortifying identities and social ties. What emerges behind these new – or renewed – devices and discourses is a whole definition of the subject?

Keywords: Identity; identification; body; biology; naturalization; belonging

The mention of height, eye color, ‘particular signs’ and the digitization of fingerprints on our passports is enough to testify to the fact (and this is not new) that the body is, among others, an important marker of identity (Fine, 2008). However, a number of changes have occurred over the last three decades that encourage us to return – here, in an essentially questioning form – to the current modalities and potential cultural meanings of the services that the body renders today in terms of social function.

New means of social identification were created at a time of increasing international migration and sensitivity to it. This is evidenced, for example, by DNA verification (introduced in Switzerland in 2004 and discussed in France in 2007) of the truth of family reunification, which in its wake led to other practices such as the assessment of the age of a minor through an x-ray of their bones. But molecular biology, its possible applications, and its intense popularization of knowledge about DNA, by arousing a real social craze, have also allowed individual recourse to biological data in the quest for oneself. In the space of 10 years, the ability to identify, through DNA, one's potential genetic disease or one's ‘original’ genetic group, has gone from a mere idea in the 1990s to a fully realized process (Ducournau, 2018).

Secondly, since the 1980s, efforts have been made throughout the world to reconnect in all ways the ‘original’ filial link of which certain children are increasingly deemed to have been deprived: adoptees in general, or more specifically those given up for anonymous adoption at birth or those born of anonymous sperm or oocyte donation. This undertaking is opposed to the deconstruction of the link of origin which had taken place 20 years earlier, the French case being particularly relevant in this respect by its adoption model, which erased the biological link by means of a new birth certificate. The increasing return to biological origins may be due to the arrival in adulthood or adolescence of the first children born from donated gametes. But why did abandoned children and children born under X – a much older practice – also wait until the early 1990s, at least in France, to express their suffering in terms of identity? (Memmi, 2014, p. 71).

During the 1990s finally, new practices around birth and death emerged, without those who introduced them really giving themselves the word. After 10 years earlier urging fathers to cut their newborn's umbilical cord and give them care, mothers were then encouraged to breastfeed, and look at or even take home their placenta. Haptonomy has encouraged fathers to touch and speak to their babies. During the same time period, in many Western countries, whenever a child dies just before or just after birth in hospital, both the father and mother are encouraged to look at and touch the baby's body (Memmi, 2011, p. 206). More generally, a new theory of mourning very different from the Freudian theory has spread like wildfire: everyone should ‘mourn’, and such mourning would be ‘difficult’ or even ‘impossible’ without confronting a body or, failing that, ‘traces’ of it. One would only really mourn ‘by body’: literature, cinema, the press and even library cataloguers have contributed to popularizing this materialistic, physical concept of mourning and restrictions on the mobility of ashes, and even on cremation itself, have been put in place in several European countries (Memmi, 2014).

Are there common points between these different practices? And if so, what lessons can be drawn about the recent history of our collective representations? In attempting to bring together social practices that are simultaneous but apparently very different, this text constitutes a step-by-step proposal for a reflection on progress: a discussion proposal launched like a message in a bottle. ¹

Traits and Variations of a Common System

All these practices have a common dimension of mobilizing the body, in its entirety (body, corpse) or one of its parts, in a biological (DNA) or physiological form (body parts) to get closer to something. This something is an idea, an abstraction (the truth of the individual, their physical and/or psychic identity, their risk of genetic disease, their belonging to an ancient community, their social or family ties). This is a question of finding or intensifying reality for the individual. It can also be a question of underlining something that is not yet completely there (proximity with a newborn baby) or that will soon no longer be completely there (proximity with a dead person). In short, in all these cases it is a question of ‘presentifying an absence’ (Marin, 1981), real or presumed, of saying what should be more present. The bodily dimension behaves here as a ‘reminder’, a ‘pense-bête’ (Bourdieu, 1972), a thought at the same time essentially metonymic aiming at saying the whole (the idea) via one of its parts (the body) and a materialist thought, turned towards concreteness and the physical to articulate the abstraction or the psychic.

It is also a thought that is essentially action-oriented. It can be directly performative: the use of the body part is supposed to make something happen directly. The skin-to-skin contact, the putting to the breast and the milk circulating between mother and child translate and reinforce at the same time the desirable maternal closeness; the cutting of the cord says and ‘makes happen’ the symbolic cut in this fusion, both feared and desired; the touch of the father through the maternal womb translates and reinforces his early attachment to the future child; the presentation of the corpse prolongs the presence of the deceased. When this thought is not directly performative, like the practices that mobilize DNA, it aims at concrete effects: to know if the migrant is a minor or belongs to that family (for the forced use of DNA), to know who one is ‘really’ (for the voluntary use of DNA).

There are, however, some notable differences in these practices. For example, the tools for these operations are not the same: the use of DNA is a relatively abstract representation of the dimension, albeit physical, of the individual. This is not entirely negligible in this universe that seeks in every way to make present something that is absent. Moreover, this is a scientific approach, mainly carried out by two learned disciplines (biology and biomedicine), while the connection with the biological parents or the pedagogical manipulation of body parts in hospital is done with the help of practical do-it-yourself projects, reinvented and carried out by often modest professionals (nurses, midwives, funeral professionals, hospital psychologists, adoption social workers). The use of DNA represents the most abstract, scholarly version of this whole system: this is not trivial in its media success.

Further, it seems that two types of practices must be dissociated here: those that focus on the past and aim to understand who we are from through where we come from (such as the reconstitution through DNA of our historical haplogroup or the efforts of the adoptee to find a biological parent) and those that focus on the future, aiming to create, by touching or looking at the child, a good quality bond with the living or dead child, for the benefit of good future parenthood. This kind of tension between the two types of practices seems more important than their unequal degree of scientific rigor, because their oppositional relationship to time reflects different ideological tonalities. In recourse to DNA or the search for the ‘original’ parent, the DNA says who you are drawing upon all eternity (someone from a particular group, root or region; some researchers even attribute a disposition to sport (Gaudin, 2017; Martin-Breteau, 2017), addiction, or even, in the most extreme cases, homosexuality or deviancy to the genes) (Perbal, 2011). DNA ‘traces’ identity to the deepest level of biological data but also to the deepest level of origins (‘roots’), far beyond the biographical time of individual lives. Those individuals are then free to identify themselves with these origins in order to eventually rebuild a new future (Doron, 2016), but this is not the immediate aim of the process.

For its part, procedures of recourse to the body to establish or re-establish a link with a loved one can lead to thoughts about ‘origins’ (the original link between mother and child can be found, for example, in the placenta, ‘the baby's first home’) and about the warm ‘primitive’ or ancient communities supposed to know how to maintain a beneficial physical contact with their babies and their dead. But the insistent solicitation of this bodily given is not less fundamentally turned towards the future. It is intended to facilitate a process of becoming (father, mother, widow etc.). It is not a question of bringing subjects back to their lost essence, nor to ancient communities, but of helping them to better occupy their place in their current community.

The nature of the knowledge sought, thirdly, is not the same from one practice to another: hence a slightly different ideological tone again. The search for identity by DNA aims to attest to the truth of an individual, often through his or her affiliation to a group (a family or haplogroup). For its part, the pedagogical manipulation of bodies in the hospital or the bringing together of biological parents aim at intensifying the social links between individuals who are members of primary communities by inciting them to make these links ‘incarnate’. Here, identities are not therefore true or false, but rather more or less. We do not suggest to women that they are not ‘real’ (or even ‘good’) mothers if they refuse to breastfeed, to look at their placenta or their dead baby; we do not tell fathers that they are not ‘real’ fathers if they refuse to cut the umbilical cord or to communicate with their baby through the womb; we do not tell mourners that they do not have ‘real’ feelings of grief if they refuse to see the corpse of the deceased. We suggest that everyone engage with their identity by being more who they are in their relationship with others. The given body is less the bearer of a regime of truth than of authenticity.

The concern or even obsession with ‘tracing’ one's origins is sometimes proposed as a way to talk about these evolutions (Courduriès & Gourarier, 2020/21, pp. 257–268). But this word is a problem as it then takes on a different meaning in each case. In the case of the use of DNA, it is synonymous with ‘clues’ and attestations of truth: DNA will tell, better than an identity card or fingerprints, to which family this child belongs, to which haplogroup this adult belongs. In the second type of practice, the term ‘traces’ is synonymous with ‘marks’ i.e., testimonies characterized by their visibility, their sensory nature. In this very notion, marked by materialism and corporealism, we are dealing with a sort of redoubled demand for concreteness. One creates here from scratch ‘tests of reality’ – and not of truth – that pass through the body, its exhibition, its manipulation.

Body matter does not occupy here the same position as it does, for example, in ‘classical’ conservative discourses. When sociobiology evokes the aggressiveness gene, it credits the idea that it ‘makes’ the offender, just as German blood made the German and Jewish blood made the Jew. The same is true today when it attributes the sporting skills of black Americans to their genes. Here, the biological fact occupies the status of cause, and direct cause, without mediation. Yet in the educational practices recently put into place in hospitals, no causal relationship is inscribed in the materiality of the body itself (in the blood or the gene): it is the uses that are made of it that are decisive. The placenta makes the mother only by what she does with it. It is not the object but the action that one exerts on it that is reputed to produce or reinforce identity. The body here is only a facilitator, not the place where determinism is exercised.

However, there are still two common features to these practices. The first is simply the intensification of a thinking of subjects ‘by body’: an insistent summoning of the physical dimension of individuals (whether biological and invisible, or physiological and quite visible) to apprehend the subjects. This ‘ordinary physicalism’ (an expression used by Pierre Bourdieu), which is very widespread in common sense, certainly appears regularly in scholarly thought, as Bachelard, for example, notes when he makes of the ‘first sensation’ – this knowledge by body – the first obstacle of scientific thought. This recent re-emergence of ordinary physicalism deserves attention.

It is true that in France, until the middle of the twentieth century, the majority of children were breast-fed; some dead were still drawn or photographed; and that until the beginning of the same century in Italy, young girls engaged to be married were given placenta to consume. The origin of the present moment appears in two features. Apart from the fact that re-examining these practices after 40 years of neglect requires certain energy on the part of professionals, seeing these practices enter the increasingly rationalized world of the hospital is already singular. The fact that they dethrone hitherto respectable scholarly theories is even more so: there is no appetite, for example, for bodily ‘traces’ in the Freudian theory of mourning. Confrontation with the body does not in any way constitute a necessary and sufficient ‘reality test’ for mourning: mourning can even refuse to be accomplished after confrontation with the corpse. The Freudian ‘reality test’ is a purely intra-psychic mechanism, translating a theory that is much less materialistic and ‘corporalist’ than the floating psychological theories underlying current hospital practices.

The second common feature between these practices lies in one of their recurring functions: to put the individual back into a community (father/mother/child nuclear family; biological family likely to authorize family reunification; relatives capable of mourning one's death; ancestors carrying a genetic disease; haplogroup identifiable through DNA tests; national community through the fixation of ashes and the restitution of human remains). Sometimes this aspiration to ‘presentify’ community is extreme, as in the case of Iceland, for example,

…the only country in the world to have created a genetic-genealogical database designed to trace the totality of biological relations between its citizens [by] crossing data, some of which date back to the time of the island's colonization.

(Courduriès & Gourarier, 2020/21, p. 259)

This desire to reconstitute being-together by relying on the materiality of the body was identified by Arnaud Esquerre in connection with the increasing fixation of the dead in cemeteries or demands for the restitution of human remains: it would be a question of rebuilding the community through ancestral ties by reweaving the links between the dead and the living (Esquerre, 2011). A more general demand for the strengthening of collective belonging during the 1980s and 1990s is described by some ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Editor
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributor Biographies
• Governing Reproduction through the Matter
• Chapter 1 When the Body Comes Back to Strengthen Identity and Communities
• Part I Parents by Bodies
• Part II Body’s Imaginaries and Ontologies
• Part III Reproductive and Bodily Disruptions
• Index