Ontological Choreography: Agency through Objectification in Infertility Clinics

Abstract

This paper is about the interaction between patients and medical technology, and uses ethnographic data drawn from fieldwork in infertility clinics to question the humanist argument that selves need to be protected from technological objectification to ensure agency and authenticity. It argues that objectification is only antithetical to personhood in specific circumstances. Non-reductive manifestations of objectification make possible a notion of agency not opposed by, but pursued in objectification. The dependence of science and technology on social, individual and political factors has been quite extensively worked out in the science and technology studies literature. The dependence of selves on technology has received less attention. In other literatures that take the construction of the person seriously, the role of technology in that process is typically under-emphasized. This paper attempts to link the initiatives of these literatures by adding an ontological connection between technology and selves. A notion of `ontological choreography' is developed to describe the processes of forging functional trails of compatibility that create and maintain the referentiality between things of different kinds — like persons and reproductive technologies.