The Temporalities of Cryo-Insurance: Frozen Ovarian Tissue, Folded Futurity and Past Selves

• In Event: Cryo-innovations: Life in the Age of Artificial Cold

Abstract

With the innovation of cryo-technologies, more people are presented with options to preserve their fertility by freezing eggs, sperm, embryos and lately ovarian tissue. Stopped in time by being stored in liquid nitrogen at -196° C, reproductive cells and tissue serve as a new type of cryo-insurance against infertility in the future. Combining critical scholarship on temporalities with feminist STS, this paper discusses the folding of time constituted by the cryopreservation of ovarian tissue. In the context of cancer, ovary freezing is increasingly offered as a remedy not only to preserve the chance of genetic offspring, but also as a way to restore the hormonal cycle often compromised by chemotherapy. Based on 41 qualitative interviews with Danish women who had ovarian tissue preserved, the paper analyzes how frozen ovarian tissue entangles multiple temporalities through novel linkings of presents, pasts and futures. The paper shows how, when initially stored, tissue freezing reinscribes the patient in reprofuturity (Edelman 2004) offering not only the hope of children, but also the vision of a future in a situation of prospective death. While a future-oriented act of anticipation (Adams et. Al 2009), frozen ovarian tissue however also folds (Mansfield 2017) an embodied past into the present and future in ways that frozen eggs and embryos do not. While on the one hand complicatedly connected to risk and disease, the tissue also embodies younger ‘selves’, untouched by the hardship of serious illness, which are brought into the future providing security as well as restoring normality.

Author

• Anna Sofie Bach, University of Southern Denmark