ABSTRACT
Our focus in this chapter is on women’s bodies and how they have been constituted as the subjects and objects of the discursive and material practices of cloning. We examine how technoscientific cloning is being made through the discursive and material mobilisation of women’s bodies. We highlight the historical contingency of the gendering of genomic science by tracing the mediation of human cloning in relation to reproductive technologies as well as genomics. We look particularly closely at developments since 2000 as cloning experiments and licences/consultations around the sourcing of human eggs have become practices in the global technoscience of cloning. This chapter constitutes an analysis of the ways in which women are empha-
sised or obscured, in news stories, policy documents, and films, as the source or carriers of eggs and embryos. This involves explicating how this varies within genres and tracing the differences between representations of reproductive and of therapeutic cloning. We explore how particular visual and textual discourses around cloning may destabilise or undermine particular understandings of gendered social relations, scientific enterprise and desirable futures. Our investigation also considers how specific figures and tropes, such as the embryo, travel across different genres and the way meaning is constituted through continuities and intertextualities between film, news and science and policy communication. The chapter concludes with an examination of the feminist frameworks
with which we have engaged. We reflect on our attempts to bring together an analysis of current discourses of human cloning with debates about new and assisted reproduction, the boundary-making processes of science and the global iconography of the life sciences.
