Happy Futurity on Ice: Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Frozen Ovarian Tissue as ‘Quality of Life’ Insurance

• In Event: Well Years, Good Years, Quality Years – Calibrations and Aggregations of Daily Living: Temporalities

Abstract

As chemotherapy is likely to damage the ovaries, and hereby the reproductive ability, female cancer patients are increasingly offered to preserve their fertility by freezing ovarian tissue. Paused in time, the frozen tissue awaits the recovery of the patient after which it can be thawed and implanted into the remaining ovary or the abdominal wall of the patient. As it revascularizes, the tissue restores the possibility of genetic motherhood as well as it promises ‘natural’ relief from symptoms of premature menopause. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among biomedical professionals and qualitative interviews with Danish women who had ovarian tissue cryopreserved, this paper analyzes how freezing of ovarian tissue is ascribed value as a technology that offers a better ‘quality of life’. Combining science and technology scholarship with feminist cultural analysis, the paper employs the concepts of sociotechnical imaginaries and reprofuturity to analyze how the frozen ovarian tissue emerges as a form of bio-insurance that promises the repositioning of the cancer patient as a (re)productive citizen. The paper shows how ovary preservation, as an act of biopreparedness, is imagined not only to protect cancer patients from the unhappy future of infertility, but also to shield women from the discomfort and risk of menopause, a bodily state increasingly understood as a detrimental condition. Accordingly, the paper discusses how the potentiality of ovary freezing destabilizes the distinction between medical and social freezing as (premature) menopause is medicalized and becomes reversible.

Authors

• Anna Sofie Bach, University of Southern Denmark

• Stine Willum Adrian, Aalborg University