ABSTRACT
One of the “technologies” that profoundly affects the contemporary experience of reproduction is the very language of biological science. The imagery and metaphors that are the organizing features of scientific accounts are as real in their effects on the way doctors and patients act in the world as the effects of an antibiotic or a scalpel. For example, the science of reproductive biology includes in its inner core, its very language and concepts, deeply cultural assumptions about males and females. The standard medical accounts of a woman’s body going through menstruation, birth, and menopause depict her as engaged in various forms of industrial production: when she menstruates instead of getting pregnant, it is interpreted as failed production. (Menstrual fluids, which one author of a standard text used in medical schools described as “the uterus crying for want of a baby,” are seen negatively, as the result of breakdown, decay, necrosis, or death of tissue.) When a woman gives birth, it is regarded as successful production, but only if it adheres to a rather strict timetable reminiscent of assembly-line production. And when she reaches menopause, the central control apparatus of her body’s bureaucratically organized production system is thought to undergo a devastating breakdown (Martin 1987). For another example, the standard medical account of fertilization (as well as accounts in popular science) see the egg metaphorically as a damsel in waiting, or a damsel in need of rescue, and the sperm as her seducer, rescuer, or violator, depending on whose account you read (Martin 1990).
