Managing kinship, ensuring variation: the production of population diversity in assisted reproduction's gamete exchange

ARIZA, LUCÍA

Londres

Conferencia; 9th Annual NYLON Graduate Student Conference; 2011

New York University, London School of Economics and Political Science; Goldsmiths, University of London

In this paper I look into gamete "donation", the practice of exchanging ova and sperm between a "donor" and a recipient as a means to help to achieve conception, to understand the particular risk scenarios, and the types of population phenomena that are constructed through it. My methodologically informed focus is on the work that techno-scientific devices (statistical measures, personal profiles, institutional registers, medical guidelines, etc.) are summoned to perform in the material regulative arrangements that I study. Exploring the role acquired by such normative "dispositifs", I provide an account of how the order of family relations usually alluded to as kinship enters into a regulative domain of (post)disciplinary surveillance where it is managed artificially according to what is believed should be the "natural" occurrence of biological variation. By following practitioners in their daily decisions regarding how many times a donor should be allowed to donate without jeopardising the so-called fundamental law of biological variation, this paper examines how the construction of population inbreeding as a risk arising from an uncontrolled use of gamete donation entails the normative instantiation of natural selection as a prerequisite of a healthy population. Exploring how such unquestioned laws of biology are instantiated in the context of gamete donation, this paper makes a contribution to understanding how the use of numeric and recording devices do not only "calculate risks" upon given populations, but how rather it is the very calculation that enables the specific living features of a population to become as such.