Motherhood & Technology

Project Co-Directors: Rishi Goyal, Arden Hegele

Graduate Coordinator: Niyati Shenoy

The Motherhood and Technology working group will explore how technological innovations have radically transformed the biological and social experience of motherhood in recent decades. Advances in genomic and reproductive care, the circulation of novel kinship structures, the entrenchment of existing global networks of power and privilege, and the politics of contested bodily sites mark this emerging constellation. Technological progress and development is often seen as the driver of these changes, but the revolution in motherhood is as much a product of changes in other domains: ethics, social structures, aesthetics, and lived experiences. Our group is motivated to understand how medical technologies have changed—and have been changed by—the experience of motherhood in a global context.

The field is rich with paradoxes. Cryogenic technologies, such as egg freezing and embryo storage, have afforded women new freedoms in choosing when to become mothers, yet the changing demographics of motherhood also raise troubling questions about the pressures of capitalism and the extension of worklife. Surrogacy has become a mainstream technology that affords biological parenthood to couples who might not otherwise have a child, yet the technology operates in a financial market that creates sharp global inequalities, with the burden of surrogacy often taken on by women of color in the developing world. Laboratory and biotechnical developments have produced unprecedented means to edit genetic material, but the unexamined use of new technologies (such as CRISPR) has led to ethical violations around the world. Meanwhile, advanced reproductive technologies have created new social forms that effectively evolve cultural norms, including new social and legal categories of parent and family – yet such technologies also reproduce market pressures and heteronormative family structures, perhaps vitiating counter-cultural practices. These and other dilemmas inform our group’s work in exploring and informing scholarship around motherhood and technology.

Foremost to our exploration is our strong conviction that technology is not neutral. Rather, we believe (following Heidegger) that technology operates as a form of “un-concealment” that reveals the “forcing into being” of culture. Thus, we are particularly interested in how the production of and access to such first-world biomedical technologies of motherhood both index and create broader cultural trends across what Arlie Hochschild has called “global care chains,” in which the burden of care is borne disproportionately by women of color and women in the developing world. We are motivated, then, to consider how technologies of motherhood operate among poor and working class women, both internationally and within the first world. While India has emerged as a global nexus of commercial surrogacy, in New York City and at the US southern border alike, technologies controlling motherhood, including monitoring technology, are used to regulate incarcerated and paroled women. Fundamental to our exploration is our conviction that these very different forms of technological intervention are working together to produce a global reimagination of motherhood.

As we explore these questions, we are guided by the interdisciplinary approach of the medical humanities. Medical humanities offers both a set of methodological approaches to address such challenges, and a broad umbrella under which to study the mutual influences of medico- scientific ideas and cultural/aesthetic practices. Medicine, from intimate care to public health policymaking, has much to contribute to a humanistic understanding of the social role of motherhood; meanwhile, approaches that emerge from a humanistic framework can enrich those coming from the physician’s black bag. The expansive view of the medical humanities will allow the group to develop a scholarly intervention into debates around technology and motherhood, while also producing a cultural artefact that narrativizes these dilemmas, and their solutions, for the public.

Bibliography

This bibliography gathers sources relevant to the topic of motherhood and technology as each sphere has come to impact the other in dimensions personal, social, political and financial. The bibliography represents mostly recent publications, and the sources range in discipline from the social and hard sciences, to journalism and literary nonfiction, to fiction, poetry, and film. Finally, the document concludes with a list of keywords that might simultaneously guide readers as they choose where to begin reading and as they start to connect readings from across the list.

Review the working group bibliography here.