Productive and Reproductive (Bio)Power: Thinking over Reproductive Medicine in the Czech Republic
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| Year of publication | 2011 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The ambition of the proposed paper is to present a work in progress research concentrating on Czech praxes in the field of reproductive medicine. Particularly it introduces its subfields of assisted reproduction, embryo and DNA manipulation and practices concerning childbirth. The team is at the beginning of a four year research project (supported by the Czech Science Agency 2011 - 2014) thematising the concept of biopower in relation to the contemporary Czech reproductive medicine. The researchers concentrate on analytical tools grasping the means by which hegemony of modern western medicine (biomedicine) and its power are applied and negotiated in the fields of human reproduction, and they offer them for critical discussion here. These concepts/tools encompass biopower and biopolitics as analytical images of means of governance and administration of modern population Foucault 1999, governmentality Foucault 1999, medicalization Conrad 1992, Illich 1976 and authoritative knowledge Jordan 1997. The authors understand biomedicine as a manifestation of the normalisation of a contemporary society, identical to western approach to health and illness or the idea of technological progress, and concentrates on analysis of reproductive medicine as one of the key fields of contemporary forms of biopower Rabinow a Rose 2003, 2006. The normative character of reproductive medicine and its consequences in the broader social context (realted to intimacy, sexuality, institutions of kinship, heteronormativity of reproduction, gendered identities etc. ) are, in the context of biopower, of key analytical interest. The presentation will illustrate these selected concepts on several examples of Czech data and praxes in the proposed subfields: assisted reproduction, embryo and DNA manipulation and practices concerning childbirth. The ambition of the proposed paper is to present a work in progress research concentrating on Czech praxes in the field of reproductive medicine. Particularly it introduces its subfields of assisted reproduction, embryo and DNA manipulation and practices concerning childbirth. The team is at the beginning of a four year research project (supported by the Czech Science Agency 2011 - 2014) thematising the concept of biopower in relation to the contemporary Czech reproductive medicine. The team is at the beginning of a four year research project (supported by the Czech Science Agency 2011 - 2014) thematising the concept of biopower in relation to the contemporary Czech reproductive medicine. The researchers concentrate on analytical tools grasping the means by which hegemony of modern western medicine (biomedicine) and its power are applied and negotiated in the fields of human reproduction, and they offer them for critical discussion here. The presentation will illustrate these selected concepts on several examples of Czech data and praxes in the proposed subfields: assisted reproduction, embryo and DNA manipulation and practices concerning childbirth. |
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