From Court to Clinical Trials: the Impact of New Technologies of Life on Women’s Sexual Rights in Mexico and Latin America... and Vice Versa

This presentation critically looks at clinical reproductive trials (MRTs and Uterine Lavage) and court cases involving new reproductive technologies (i.e., Artavia Murillo et al. vs Costa Rica). It asks how, during the last decades, clinical and court trials have contested, negotiated or silenced the meanings of life, human dignity, motherhood, the private and kinship and how the nation gets to be inscribed in these meanings.

The presentation revises feminists’ ambiguous stand towards technology and critically examines the troubling coupling of abortion rights and the further de/regulation of new technologies of reproduction. It argues that aiming for global governance of breakthrough technologies entails a postcolonial feminist stands that acknowledges how women and agendas are differently positioned in todays’ techno-hype.

The cyborg mother crossed by cutting edge technologies of reproduction and perfectibility and the cyborg mother whose eggs, wombs, and reproductive labour fuel the development of these technologies are, following Braidotti, two sides of the same coin – they reinstate the body at the centre of contemporary concerns, but they do so in a manner that also re-inscribes them in some of the most persistent power relations and structural exclusions’ of our time.

This is a hybrid event, with a limited number of in-person tickets. Instructions on how to join the event online, will be sent to registered guests. Refreshments will be served at the event.

Speaker

Dr Abril Saldaña Tejeda, Philosophy, Universidad de Guanajuato (Mexico)

Chair

Professor Anne Pollock, Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London