Abstract
In 2006, the US Center for Disease Control rolled out guidelines for ‘preconception care,’ institutionalizing the use of the public fetus as a fetish object in relation to which the cultural body can disavow and contain the post 9/11 contagion of annihilation anxiety. Integrating Bergson's ideas of duration with cultural and psychoanalytic theories of time and subjectivity, this article will examine these guidelines and the ways in which they become alluring as forms of traumatic repetition instilling hypervigilance as normality. The preconception care guidelines are a perfect example of Clarke's ideas of biomedicalization, as women's bodies emerge through practices of self and biomedical surveillance and risk management strategies in relation to the future fetus. This future orientation functions not only to disavow, displace and contain vulnerability, but also creates a future in order to attempt to go on being in the face of trauma and humiliation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Our concepts of temporality emerge through the embodiment of asymmetric institutionalized power relations (Freeman, 2007). As such, heteronormativity shapes temporality by conceptualizing the future primarily through production, in particular, a heterosexual notion of human reproduction. Halberstam (2005) and others (see GLQ: Queer Temporalities, 2007) critique this notion of ‘reprofuturity’ while acknowledging its centrality as a form of asymmetrical temporalized power.
The CDC's expressed mission is to collaboratively ‘create expertise, information and tools that people and communities need to protect their health’ and prepare for ‘new health threats.’ As such, one of the roles of the organization is to set procedural protocols for doctors and national standards for treatment. Although this article focuses only on one website, this site is one of the most influential websites in the United States, see www.cdc.gov.
See, for instance, Butler's (2004) use of psychoanalytic theory to explore social responses to mourning, loss and violence, Oliver's (2007) use of Kristeva's (1982) ideas of abjection and splitting to understand forms of misogyny in wartime, and Kaplan's (2005) use of psychoanalytic theories of trauma to examine cultural forms of expression post 9/11, to name only a few theorists who utilize psychoanalytic theories to examine cultural and social phenomena.
Certainly, Riska (2010) for one observes the ways in which biomedicalization operates on male and female bodies. However, even Riska notes much of the biomedicalization around male bodies has a focus on what is defined as sexual health, versus the focus on reproductive health apparent in the PCC guidelines, as will be described. Casper and Moore (2009) and Daniels (2006) have observed the invisibility of male vulnerability or risk in certain biomedicalized discourses. This article is not arguing that male bodies do not come into being through biomedicalized technologies of surveillance, but instead it is highlighting the ways in which female bodies exclusively are identified as containing reproductive potential and risk. In this specific area of biomedicalization, traditional notions of gendered embodiment do not appear to be challenged or deconstructed but instead are rigidified.
References
Adams, V., Murphy, M. and Clarke, A.E. (2009) Anticipation: Technoscience, life, affect, temporality. Subjectivity 28 (1): 246–265.
Ahmed, S. (2007/2008) The happiness turn. New Formations 63: 7–14.
Baraister, L. (2009) Maternal Encounters: An Ethic of Interruption. London: Routledge.
Bergson, H. (1913/2001) Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc.
Berlant, L. (2008) The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Berlant, L. (2010) Cruel optimism. In: M. Gregg and G.J. Seigworth (eds.) The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 93–117.
Blackman, L. (2008) Affect, relationality and the ‘problem of personality’. Theory, Culture & Society 25 (1): 23–47.
Bourdieu, P. (1978) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, W. (2005) Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso.
Campbell, J. (2006) Psychoanalysis and the Time of Life: Duration of the Unconscious Self. London: Routledge.
Casper, M.J. and Moore, L.J. (2009) Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility. New York: New York University Press.
Clarke, A.E., Mamo, L., Fishman, J.R., Shim, J.K. and Fosket, J.R. (2003) Biomedicalization: Technoscientific transformations of health, illness, and U.S. biomedicine. American Sociological Review 68 (2): 161–194.
Clarke, A.E., Shim, J.K., Mamo, L., Fosket, J.R. and Fishman, J.R. (eds.) (2010a) Biomedicalization: A theoretical and substantive introduction. In: Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–44.
Clarke, A.E., Shim, J.K., Mamo, L., Fosket, J.R. and Fishman, J.R. (eds.) (2010b) Biomedicalization: Technoscientific transformations of health, illness and U.S. biomedicine. In: Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 47–87.
Clarke, A.E., Fosket, J.R., Mamo, L., Fishman, J.R. and Shim, J.K. (eds.) (2010c) Charting (bio)medicine and (bio)medicalization in the United States, 1890-present. In: Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 88–103.
Clough, P. (2008) The affective turn: Political economy, biomedia and bodies. Theory, Culture & Society 25 (1): 1–22.
Daniels, C.R. (2006) Exposing Men: The Science and Politics of Male Reproduction. New York: Oxford University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1995) Postscript on control societies. In: Negotiations, 1972-1990, Translated by M. Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 177–182.
Edelman, G.M. (1989) The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books.
Foucault, M. (1988) Technologies of the self. In: L.H. Martin, H. Gutman and P.H. Hutton (eds.) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst, MA: University of Massachussetts Press, pp. 145–162.
Franklin, S. (1997) Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception. London: Routledge.
Freeman, E. (2007) Introduction to queer temporalities. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13 (2–3): 159–176.
Gentile, K. (2007) Creating Bodies: Eating Disorders as Self-Destructive Resistance. New York: Routledge.
Gentile, K. (2011) What about the baby? Baby-philia and the neo cult of domesticity. Studies in Gender and Sexuality 12 (1): 38–58.
Grewal, I. (2006) Security moms’ in the early twentieth-century United States: The gender of security in neoliberalism. Women's Studies Quarterly 34 (1&2): 25–39.
Grosz, E. (2004) The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Halberstam, J. (2005) In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press.
Haraway, D. (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge.
Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Howson, A. (1998) Surveillance, knowledge and risk: The embodied experience of cervical screening. Health 2 (2): 195–215.
Jeanjot, I., Barlow, P. and Rozenberg, S. (2008) Domestic violence during pregnancy: Survey of patients and healthcare providers. Journal of Women's Health 17 (4): 557–567.
Kaplan, E.A. (2005) Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.
Layton, L. (2010) Irrational exuberance: Neoliberal subjectivity and the perversion of the truth. Subjectivity 3 (3): 303–322.
Layton, L. (2012) Something to do with a girl named Marla Singer: Capitalism, narcissism, and therapeutic discourse in David Fincher's. Fight Club. Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics 62: 111–133.
Lifton, R.J. (2003) American apocalypse: How ‘superpower syndrome’ is ravaging the world. The Nation, 22 December.
Loewald, H.W. (1980) Papers on Psychoanalysis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Longhurst, R. (2008) Maternities: Gender, Bodies and Space. London: Routledge.
Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Massumi, B. (2010) The future birth of the affective fact: The political ontology of threat. In: M. Gregg and G.J. Seigworth (eds.) The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 52–70.
Mamo, L. (2010) Fertility, Inc.: Consumption and subjectification in U.S. lesbian reproductive practices. In: A.E. Clarke, J.K. Shim, L. Mamo, J.R. Fosket and J.R. Fishman (eds.) Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 173–196.
Mundy, L. (2008) Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction is Changing Our World. New York: Random House.
Oliver, K. (2004) The Colonization of Psychic Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Oliver, K. (2007) Women as Weapons of War. New York: Columbia University Press.
Reith, G. (2004) Uncertain times: The notion of ‘risk’ and the development of modernity. Time & Society 13 (2/3): 383–402.
Riska, E. (2010) Gender and medicalization and biomedicalization theories. In: A.E. Clarke, J.K. Shim, L. Mamo, J.R. Fosket and J.R. Fishman (eds.) Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 147–172.
Rose, N. (2001) The politics of life itself. Theory, Culture & Society 18 (6): 1–30.
Shaviro, S. (2011) The universe of things, http://www.shaviro.com/Othertexts/Things.pdf, Downloaded, November.
Stoeri, J. Analyzing emptiness, deadness, and non-symbolic functioning: A case illustration. Unpublished paper.
Williams, S.J. (1998) Health as moral performance: Ritual, transgression and taboo. Health 2 (4): 435–457.
Wilson, E. (2004) Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Winnicott, D.W. (1971) Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock/Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gentile, K. Biopolitics, trauma and the public fetus: An analysis of preconception care. Subjectivity 6, 153–172 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2013.2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2013.2