What is in a Sperm Deposit? Imaginaries of masculinity, reproduction and kinship

Aktivitet: Foredrag og mundtlige bidragGæsteforelæsning

Beskrivelse

Why do men freeze and store their sperm for their own use, and what does the stored sperm mean to those men having deposited sperm for years? Although cryopreservation of sperm is the oldest cryo-technology of human gametes dating back to the 50´ie, sperm depositing have not previously been addressed in the ethnographic literature on reproduction. This paper draws on 30 semi-structured narrative interviews with men that have sperm deposits for their own use, in a large Danish sperm bank. The sperm deposits turned out to be an excellent prism to men´s imaginaries of masculinity, reproduction and kinship. Drawing on Jasanoff´s concept of socio-technical imaginaries this paper asks: What socio-technical imaginaries are at stake in men¿s narratives of sperm depositing, and how do they (re)configure understandings of masculinity and reproduction? In this paper I show, how well-known understandings of masculinity, reproduction and kinship are reproduced, reconfigured and sometimes displaced in surprising ways, as the socio-technical imaginaries entangle with temporalities of the cryopreservation of sperm.
Periode27 sep. 2019
Sted for afholdelseUniversity of Gothenburg, Sverige
Grad af anerkendelseInternational