Practical information
The event is open to all, but we ask that you register:
Digital participants will receive a Zoom link close to the time of the event.
Abstract
Since the birth of the first human via in-vitro fertilization (Louise Brown in 1978) and the approval of the birth control pill for women, scholars have investigated how reproductive technologies transform our understanding and practices of reproduction (e.g. Clarke, 1998; Franklin, 2013; Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995; Thompson, 2005). Characteristic of the last forty years of social scientific theorizing has been its tendency to foreground women’s perspectives and practices with reproductive technologies. This is not surprising. Women are commonly made to appear responsible for contraception as well bodily engaged with pregnancy and birth (e.g. Almeling and Waggoner, 2013; Takeshita, 2012). While the existing scholarship has contributed with vital research findings related to the ways that reproductive technologies intervene in female bodies and has strikingly re-conceptualized our understanding of reproduction, men’s perspectives and practices have received much less attention and is only now beginning to be examined (e.g. Almeling, 2020).
In this presentation, I discuss some of the ways that Danish men become implicated as users of emergent reproductive technologies. Not only have medical scientists, for the past two decades, worried that Danish men’s sperm quality is rapidly on the decline (e.g. Carlsen et al., 1992) documenting that 40-50% of all infertility cases are attributed to “male factor infertility” (Kumar and Singh, 2015), in Denmark, fertility awareness campaigns target younger men (e.g. “Does your spunk do the funk?, 2018”) and Danish startups have become important players in a burgeoning sperm-tech industry turning men into new reproductive consumers (e.g. Kroløkke, 2020).
About the speaker
Charlotte Kroløkke is Professor in the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. She is principal investigator of several interdisciplinary research projects on reproduction and reproductive technologies such as the Ice Age project which has centered interdisciplinary perspectives on the cryopreservation of reproductive cells and tissue. She has been editor-in-chief of the Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research from 2020-2022, and author or co-author of more than 50 peer-reviewed journal articles as well as several books and book chapters.