Dissertationsprojekt
The project examines transnational feminist resistance to assisted reproduction during the 1980s and 1990s at the intersection of political history, social movement history and the history of ideas. Focusing on the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE), it investigates how assisted reproduction became a site of substantial feminist mobilization at a time when the fertility industry was still in its formative stages. The network’s future-oriented anxieties around the growing “industrialization of reproduction” and the possibility of “female erasure” are situated in the longer tradition of utopian and dystopian feminist imaginaries of reproductive technology and studied against the backdrop of multiple interrelated contemporary transformations: the neoliberal re-structuring of healthcare, the shifting paradigm from population control towards reproductive health and rights, and the transformations in feminist theory associated with the shift from women’s studies to gender studies. Particular attention is paid to how transnational exchanges shaped the network’s interventions and global analysis of reproductive politics, as well as how the insistence on naturalist conceptions of sex and gender fueled anxieties over the changing biological possibilities of reproduction.
The project further investigates how debates over assisted reproduction became entangled with the particular political and discursive landscape of West Germany, where they intersected with debates about the legacies of the Nazi euthanasia murders, the disability rights movement, and the environmental movement.
