ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I begin by highlighting a growing cultural anxiety about sperm quality and quantity. Time and again, we read that men’s sperm production is in trouble. These reports are no longer limited to scientific journals but appear in The New York Times and other popular media. Inherent to these articles, then, I argue is a growing concern about the state of masculinity, and especially its relationship to virility, fecundity, and reproduction. This article thus accounts for the ways in which semen analysis has become yet another biomedical technology that measures masculinity, now at a microscopic level. In so doing, I also argue that ejaculation has consequently taken on new meanings. To do this, I provide a close reading of a scene from the Spanish film, Embarazados, in which the protagonist must go to the fertility clinic and deposit his sperm after learning that his initial sample is described as “pocos, vagos, y anormales” (few, vague, abnormal). Inherent to this space, I argue, is a braiding together of the pornographic and the biomedical, for instance, to assist in producing a sperm sample, he is provided with pornographic texts. Drawing on Paul Preciado’s work on the “pharmacopornographic,” I argue that the fertility clinic has become a space in which the pornographic money shot is being rewritten and, consequently, so too are the ways in which masculinity is regulated, measured, and scrutinized.
