Ova provision is understood in this thesis as a set of social and medical practices centred around women’s bodies. Consequently, I draw attention to the materiality of these practices, as well as the human agencies enacting them. My focus on the material-discursive aspects of practices is theoretical, epistemological, and political in character in that it underlies my desire as a feminist researcher to deliver academically sound work, while at the same time being accountable to the participants who have informed this thesis by acknowledging their ‘nomadism’.
Treating people as ‘nomadic subjects’ (Braidotti, 1994) allows for a freedom of becoming that some of them cannot experience in everyday life. By saying this, I do not claim that I am able to ‘set people free’
through writing, for surely writing, and especially writing from a certain perspective, comes with its own boundaries. However, what I do strive to achieve is an account that brings to light the fluidity, the instability of
identities, of borders, of knowing, departing from processes of
categorisation that leave marks on bodies (Barad, 2007). It is to this end that I will constantly return to women’s identities and experiences
throughout this thesis in an attempt to balance out their absence both from scholarship and public arenas of decision-making, which is the main commitment that renders my work feminist.
The ontological status of women, ova, ova providers, as well as the intra-actions they engage in, is not given, nor is it stable, but it emerges from their entanglement. According to Mol (2003, p.5),
“ontologies are brought into being, sustained, or allowed to wither away in common, day-to-day, sociomaterial practices”. And yet, it is mostly in these day-to-day practices that ontologies are taken for granted, as readily accessible for individuals to use them for normative purposes, assigning people and practices into morally laden categories. Gender, class, and race are such categories that require an adequate
performance in accordance with a socially-accepted ‘script’ (Mol, 2003) which, if not followed accordingly, produces anxiety and possibly
symbolic or physical backlash. It is the centrality of gender, class, and race to the subject of ova provision that requires starting from, and returning to women’s experiences (Throsby, 2004, p.23) and motivates the choice of both feminist and STS methodologies.
Braidotti (1994) urges feminist scholars to employ new feminist figurations, or new ways of envisioning and writing about agents (especially women), so that they escape the fixity of an essentialised identity, together with the hierarchies embedded in it. Nomadic subjects are those allowed to inhabit multiple identities at the same time without being called to account for the vagueness of their situatedness, but rather invited to celebrate and make use of the political potential offered by these spaces of in-betweenness. There is a tension between
embracing one’s nomadic identity and being fixed in place by others through means inaccessible to those classified, which draws attention to practices by which identities are constructed in the first place. Interviews helped me to contrast people’s efforts to legitimise their stances with the setback effects of “being called” (Probyn, 1996).
Prompted by Barad (2007), I approach the concept of identity through the more encompassing concept of boundaries, so in this thesis identities are understood to contain one’s individuality and also position a person as a discrete element in the social matrix. In the previous chapter I have already explained that boundaries for Barad are not fixed, but constantly in motion together with the matter making up the world.
Materiality, then, becomes an indivisible part of one’s identity,
irrespective of the symbolism attached to it. Consequently, “the body or the embodiment of the subject is to be understood as neither a biological nor a sociological category but rather as a point of overlapping between the physical, the symbolic, and the sociological” (Braidotti, 1994). Identity is not a theoretical abstraction, nor is it an illusion or a metaphysical essence, but the constant becoming of an embodied person engaging in intra-actions with the surrounding social and physical environment.
Limiting my fieldwork to collecting interviews would have reduced my analysis to one of discourses, disregarding the material agencies that shape people’s identities. Observation and documentary analysis have aided me in bringing to the fore the way in which non-human agents participate in shaping both ova provision and the identities of those concerned.
Performativity lies at the centre of my research, which does not attempt to unravel some underlying truth about ova provision, nor does it attempt to relativise all stances as equally legitimate and ethical (Stacey, 1994). Performativity brings practices to the fore, focusing not on what things and people are, but how they are materially and discursively constructed in intra-action (Barad, 2007). Ontologies are no longer taken for granted, or black-boxed (Latour, 2005), but opened up to inquiry and interrogation. Barad (2007) argues that any attempt to render a
phenomenon or an entity comprehensible involves the use of an
apparatus. It is under the action of an apparatus that boundaries emerge and the world is rendered intelligible and coherent. However, what the apparatus retrieves is not the image of ‘reality’ that exists ‘out there’
irrespective of somebody making an observation. The apparatus itself interferes with that which is observed, and is in turn acted upon, in other
words the apparatus becomes part of the phenomenon observed (Barad, 2007).
It is not only participants in a research that wield apparatuses in their everyday interactions. I, as a researcher, employ my own academic apparatus in order to give meaning to ova provision and in so doing I am responsible for the way in which my acts of ‘observation’ affect those involved. Indeed, I am not an observer but a participant, since any delineation between subject and object is illusory. What I do does not merely reflect ‘reality’, but it affects it and leaves a mark that is more than symbolic. Barad’s (2007) work has deep ethical commitments in that it constantly reminds readers that they are responsible for the marks they effect, or allow to be effected, on others’ bodies. She urges readers and researchers to be not reflexive, but attentive to patterns of diffraction. If reflexivity presumes that a mirror image can ensue out of the intra-action of the apparatus and ‘reality’ and that one can have direct access to the world and its representations, employing a diffraction methodology means focusing on the relevance and the consequences of using a certain apparatus, or frame of analysis and interpretation. This is even more important since apparatuses draw boundaries that effect
exclusions and establish what and who is considered important in
contrast to what is marginal. As I will explain in a forthcoming section, my choice of methods was not able to compensate all by itself for the
absence of certain narratives on ova provision. In wielding my research apparatus I had to pay attention not to reproduce the same exclusions as those that I analyse. I therefore used interviews, observation and
documentary analysis in order to shed light on the experiences of those I could not reach, constantly paying attention to the diffractive effects of these secondary sources of knowledge.
Just as IVF patients willingly engage in ontological choreography (Thompson, 2005), researchers as well as all those involved in policy making must become part of an ethical choreography, defined by
Thompson (2013) as “the greater articulation and mitigation of problems of distributive or other injustice”. Focusing on the social-scientific
practices in the biotechnological field, Thompson contends that bioethics are largely unprepared to tackle the challenges brought about by
scientific discoveries and technological developments, or to properly mediate competing normative perspectives. She argues for the taking up of ‘good science’, understood not as scientists following strict standards, or undertaking sound research projects of high academic quality, but as science that develops its ethics as it goes along, and which remains accountable in terms of distributive justice and inequality. Such a perspective counteracts the perception of science ‘racing ahead’ while ethics drags behind (Franklin and Roberts, 2006; Thompson, 2013), replacing it with an understanding of society and science as co-constituted and constantly in intra-action. An ethical choreography should also welcome disagreement and use dissenting points of view as fuel for democratic engagement with science (Thompson, 2013). ‘Good science’ then is compatible with Barad’s (2007) diffraction methodology, for it encourages researchers to constantly cater to the means through which their work affects those it engages with, and challenges them to question the premises that structure their work and what comes to matter.
Numerous other academics have highlighted that feminist methodology is characterised by ethical and political commitments that primarily pertain to avoiding harm towards research participants,
especially to the most vulnerable (Gill, 1995, 2008; Ramazanoğlu and Holland, 2002; Skeggs, 2001; Tyler 2013; Stacey, 1988, 1994). Tyler (2013, p.13) states that, in the latter’s case, the acts of resistance
against classification and abjection can go largely unnoticed for the large majority, but the work of researchers can constitute a “mediation of resistance” through which the revolt of the abjected can be documented and contextualised. Thus, I envision my own research as not only
enriching a field of knowledge, but also acting as a political mediator by offering “an intersectional account of marginality and resistance” (Tyler, 2013, p.8). It is to those that are often invisible in research and public discourse that I now turn.