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國立臺灣大學社會科學院

活動資訊

【活動資訊】2019.05.10「台大社會系演講系列」—Subversive Practices of Donor Sperm –Ethics on the Border

【台大社會系演講系列】

主講人:Stine Willum Adrian (Aalborg University, Denmark)

講題:Subversive Practices of Donor Sperm – Ethics on the Border

主持人:吳嘉苓(台灣大學社會學系教授吳嘉苓)

時間:2019年5月10日(五)12:30-14:00(前三十位入場聽眾可領取餐盒一份,敬請準時入座)

地點:台灣大學社會學系319室

丹麥的精子銀行以全球輸出著稱,然而各國規範不一,要如何協商倫理規範?來台訪學的丹麥社會學家Stine Willum Adrian,將探討這個新生殖科技如何進行國界管制的重要現象,歡迎大家5/10(五)中午來聯誼。

演講介紹:
Sperm donation is an old reproductive technology. However, as it challenges preconceived understandings of family, sexuality, race, normality, kinship and relatedness, the technology continues to create political, ethical and regulative controversies globally. Questions such as to whom should sperm donation be available, how should sperm donors be categorized and selected, how can issues of kinship and relatedness be organized, and how can donation be performed without health risks, continues to be raised. As Danish private sperm banking has emerged; these negotiations are entangled with the global sales of sperm across national borders, and fertility travelers crossing of borders to obtain treatments.

Drawing on two ethnographic fieldworks ten years apart in a Danish sperm bank and in Danish fertility clinics, this presentation will inquire into how normative negotiations, that in public debates are perceived as ethics, takes place through subversive practices of sales and uses of donor sperm a cross the Danish border. Methodologically, I have followed the sperm in the bank from cryopreservation and categorization, to the global sales of sperm as little Vikings. These sales and the production of sperm has emerged as the bank has had to navigate in changing regulations in Denmark, the EU and abroad. The regulative changes has also played an important role in how sperm donation is used in the Danish fertility clinics, where I have carried out fieldwork and interviewed staff and fertility travelers seeking treatment. Drawing on this empirical material, I show how negotiations of sperm donation enable us to understand how normativity constantly becomes reconfigured in the meeting of bodies, technologies and norms of making babies, or what Karen Barad has termed material-discursive practices. At the same time as this presentation is illustrative of how reproductive technologies include discriminatory potentials, conceiving the world through reproductive technologies also raise questions that show that worldings may take place in promising and less discriminatory ways.