Surveying the State of Natality: Technologies of Assisted Reproduction and the ‘structure of feeling’ of the 1980s.

• In Event: Critical Cultural Analysis of the Body: Technology, Medicine, Space and Gender

Abstract

In this paper, I suggest that the introduction of in vitro fertilization in 1978 creates a fundamental shift in cultural conceptions of natality. To this end, I read fictional accounts of motherhood alongside theoretical interrogations of reproductive technologies, ultimately arguing that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child express cultural anxieties about fetal personhood, the maternal imagination, and monstrosity in the 1980s.

Author

• Erin Arizzi, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill