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Negotiating Conception

Lesbians' Hybrid-Technological Practices

Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, lmamo{at}socy.umd.edu

Drawing on in-depth interviews with thirty-six lesbians, this article offers a feminist qualitative analysis of lesbian conception practices. The article examines the ways lesbian actors negotiate biomedical discourse in ways that reveal the co-constitutiveness of nature and culture, bodies and technologies, and biomedical and subjective knowledge. The article offers the concept of hybrid technologies, which are described as lesbian pragmatic negotiations of shifting control loci of technoscience. The author argues that lesbians' pathways to pregnancy are characterized by a negotiation of discursive elements from alternative health discourses and biomedical knowledge, of various forms of technology, and of what is often termed the authoritative, objective, and scientific with the subjugated, subjective, and the embodied. In doing so these actors complicate through multiple agencies what is often interpreted as a totalizing force of biomedicalization.

Key Words: biomedicalization • assisted reproduction • lesbian reproduction • feminist health • medical knowledge

Science, Technology & Human Values, Vol. 32, No. 3, 369-393 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0162243906298355


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