ABSTRACT
The heterocoital biological origin thus remains a necessary condition for individuation, and this frame of reference is considered by most western cultures necessary for cultural (self)recognition of the person who deserves inclusion into the system of human relatedness as a legible and legitimate human subject. The growing cultural understanding of "nature" not as given and immutable but as open to human manipulation seems to create cultural anxieties that are met by attempts to tether technologically managed life processes to familiar ideas about kinship based in blood ties. While biogenetically based reproduction may no longer be strictly heterocoital, the normalizing cultural script with which the authors describe these procedures still calls for imagining kinship and personhood through a conventional metaphor. Alternative methods of reproduction and kinship-making inevitably give rise to complications if they insist on thinking of technologically mediated kinship through heterocoital metaphors.
