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E-book Freezing Fertility : Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Aging

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Penilaian

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When I imagine my eggs, I think of them as grey and shiny, like slippery helium balloons clustering in the thousands within organs lit up and awake. I think of eggs enfleshed in follicular cavities, folding again and again into a sponge of cells and yellow bodies, pulsing patiently with only an occasional burst: membrane breaking at the touch of engorged fimbrae, fallopian fingers brushing the ovarian skin. After stories and statistics, after computer animations and camera registrations of organs shining against surgical light, my eggs become palpable within two pulsing opals, shielded by hipbones, roused with embodied symbolism. Hypnagogic, I dream them into being—a fiction of the body.Celebrated as empowerment and criticized as exploitation of women, egg freezing is a contested new reproductive technology that has brought the human egg into the public eye with renewed prominence. The technology, and the eggs and bodies it pertains to, have been widely featured in popular culture and public debates about whether or not women should (be allowed to) freeze their eggs and, if so, at what ages. Eggs have become some of the most culturally determined cells in the human body, represented in declining fertility statistics and referenced in tropes of the “biological clock” and “ticking ovaries.” Egg freezing has made headlines throughout the mediascape—from the Guardianto Cosmopolitan—particularly when egg freezing cocktail parties and Apple’s and Facebook’s offer of egg freezing as an employee benefit provoked international media hypes. More broadly, frozen eggs have become a familiar sight in popular culture. A giant egg floated above the dancing nurses and gynecologists of Amsterdam’s first egg bank at the Amsterdam Gay Pride, and millions watched Kim freeze her eggs in the popular reality show Keeping up with the Kardashians. As more women began freezing their eggs, they encountered them through medical imaging techniques like ultrasound or photomicrography and made new types of reproductive choices about the extracted cells in informed-consent contracts. In each of these ways, and many more, eggs are brought into discourse in ways that affect not only the women who freeze them but also the wider public.The egg has a rich symbolic history, in which it has figured as a sign for life, death, and regeneration in many civilizations around the world. Long before human eggs were described within the tradition of Euro-pean biology, creation myths across the globe identified the “cosmic” egg as the origin of the world, or humankind—from the ancient Greek cosmogonies in which the world springs from an egg, to Finnish epics that sing of an egg that broke in two and created the earth and the sky, to the numerous legends in Oceania that ascribe the birth of the first human to birds’ eggs.1 This cosmogenic significance of the figure of the egg was also referenced in the first medico-scientific postulation that all animals are conceived from eggs, described in William Harvey’s On the Generation of Animals (1651).

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

304.632 VAN f

Penerbit

USA : New York University Press., 2020

Deskripsi Fisik

345 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781479868148

Klasifikasi

304.632

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Births

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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