ABSTRACT
In this essay, I want to consider three cultural artifacts: an ad campaign that ran in 1993 for Evian spring water; a 1993 Supreme Court ruling, Bray v. Alexandria Health Clinic, and a 1994 CD-ROM produced by A.D.A.M. Software, Inc., titled Nine-Month Miracle. At first glance, this grouping of artifacts may seem contrived, and in some respects, of course, it is. Beyond a shared cultural and historical frame, these artifacts circulate within distinct discursive arenas and could be said to both reflect and enact a diverse set of agendas with quite different effects. What nevertheless interests me about these three texts is the unmistakable resonance that sounds between them: the modes of seeing and literacy that each presumes, requires, and produces along with the shared fantasies and anxieties that organize and are organized by their ostensibly different purposes and visions. Although meaning production in social life is neither orchestrated nor necessarily cohesive, in juxtaposition these texts tell a riveting, at times humorous, and often disturbing collection of stories about the organization of gender in late-twentieth-century North America. Situated in a reproductive landscape that has gradually been transformed over the course of the last decade through a proliferation of new forms and practices of life, these texts are also constitutive components of that landscape and, in the end, this is what makes them both interesting and significant. More interesting than the commentary they may provide on contemporary cultures of reproduction are the ways in which they operate as technologies of reproduction—technologies “that turn bodies into stories and stories into bodies” (Haraway 1997:179) in ongoing cultural contests over how (and which) reproductive bodies will signify.
