The same brave world: Eugenic discourse in contemporary narratives of reproductive technology

In the last forty years, narratives about reproductive technologies have increased exponentially in the United States. Fast-paced medical innovation and increasing availability on the consumer market have made processes like gamete donation, surrogacy, and in vitro fertilization significant presences in our cultural consciousness that are often reflected upon and negotiated with in popular fiction and non-fiction representations. These late twentieth and early-twenty-first-century technologies have been consistently approached as unquestionably new and unknown territory for human experience, kinship, and social relations because the technologies themselves have only just come into existence. While medical innovations enabling new forms of conception and birthing of children might themselves be new, however, the discourse that surrounds them is often hauntingly familiar. In this dissertation, I argue that contemporary narratives of reproductive technology in the United States are actually strongly imbued with key components of modernity that coalesced into the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. This movement operated on a set of ideological assumptions about progress, race, and the role of science in reproduction that coupled desire to produce a normal child with conscious choices to choose a fit spouse and to involve medical professionals in planning and birthing children. While the eugenics movement ended in the United States with the discovery of the atrocities in the Nazi Holocaust, I argue that current discourse about reproduction and technology supports a normative desire to use such technologies that often privileges the white, middle-class, gender conforming body, encouraging its reproduction while omitting or negatively portraying bodies and families outside this paradigm.