ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Between experiential knowledge and medical knowledge: the collaborative case of male contraception in France, late 1970s-1980s

• In Event: Invisible Actors in Biomedical and Environmental Sciences (I) & (II)

English Abstract

In contrast to “male contraception,” there are numerous works on the history of female contraception. From the late 1970s onwards, France played an important role in the development of male contraception. Male contraception’s development was short-lived but highly publicized by activists in the media. French doctors experimented with two main methods, the hormonal method and the “heat-induced method”, which consisted of pushing the testicles up in the body for fifteen hours a day to force the organs into an environment believed to be too hot sperm production. The “heat-induced method” was only promoted by French doctors, and it was used by male activists who called themselves “aware users” and refused to be treated as “cavies” (guinea pigs). In this talk, I examine the changing relationship between doctors and activists working to develop knowledge about male contraception. I argue that this was initially a knowledge in which experience and medicine co-constructed each other, with doctors and male activists working hand-in-hand with and through the social authority of doctors. Then, I show how male activists emancipated themselves from medical authority to develop their own contraception device based on the “heat-induced method”. By tracing the case of French male contraception from medical contexts to activist ones, I hope to cast new light on the asymmetrical relationships between experiential knowledge and medical knowledge that so often characterize our histories of sexuality.

Author

• Maureen Morlet, SAGE