p2297 -
Governing Assisted Reproductive Technology in Canada: Feminist Influences and Queer Analytics
Friday, June 2, 2017: 8:30 AM
BRESL 100 (Hofstra University)
The story of Canadian regulation in the field of assisted human reproduction is a remarkable one, uniquely inflected by feminist voices and involving decades of struggle to develop a clear regulatory framework for the governance of a range of biotechnologies. As it stands today, more than twenty-five years after the first government commission was struck to examine the issue of new reproductive technologies, Canada still lacks many basic guidelines. This paper will canvass these decades of effort to develop and approve a comprehensive regulatory scheme in relation to assisted human reproduction and genetic research. This is well-traveled terrain, with many other academic and popular commentators tracing this story. Instead, I will instead seek to apply a queer lens to this history, locating the ways in which heteronormative frames and binary formulations of nature/culture (and their absences) have underscored its rationale and rhetoric. I will attend to the moments in which queer bodies do emerge from the debates, and analyze these spaces of anxiety and inclusion as produced within the larger frameworks of both feminist and ‘mainstream’ ideological positions. In particular, I use Janet Halley's framework of 'governance feminism' as well as a queer analytic lens to understand the ways that certain notions of the body, reproductive materials, ethics and biopower entwined to produce the present Canadian legal regime. This emphasis on how theories of the body, and bodily autonomy, translated to the legislative process, will give us vantage on the relationship between politics, law and feminist ideology.