Business of Being Made

Katie Gentile is Professor and Director of the Gender Studies Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is author of the Routledge title Creating bodies: Eating disorders as self-destructive survival, editor of the Genders & Sexualities in Minds & Cultures book series, also from Routledge, and co-editor of the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality.

"In this unique, and insightful set of essays edited by Katie Gentile, the experience of assisted reproductive technologies, ARTS, is given a multi-disciplinary treatment that brings cultural criticism and psychoanalysis into an encounter that transforms them both. Taking account of the cultural, political, economic and psychological contexts of ARTS, The Business of Being Made refuses a simple taking-sides in debates around biomedicalization and reprofuturisum. It not only gives an in-depth view of the potentialities as well as the risks, the disappointments, the trauma for those who engage with these technologies; it does so without forgetting the implications of ARTS for sex, gender, race and class differentiations. The essays are a must read for those concerned with the affects of biotechnology on every aspect of life now and in the near future." - Patricia Ticineto Clough, Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, Editor of The Affective Turn "Technology is no longer some thing we hold in our hand or a machine that sits on a desk. It threads our minds, it bends our spines. And as this remarkable collection of essays demonstrates, technological bio-power unconsciously pulses, reproducing reproduction and the new world to come. Read and get ready." - Ken Corbett, Author of "Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities" and "A Murder Over A Girl" "Drawing on the resources of both psychoanalytic and cultural theories, Katie Gentile and her co-authors spotlight the dynamic interplay between neoliberal risk management and cultural narratives of reproductive "failure" and "success." The Business of Being Made offers a fascinating, urgent, and – dare I say -- timely exploration of the sometimes contradictory ways assisted reproductive technologies are remaking kinship, subjectivity, and the experience of temporality itself."- Ann Pellegrini, Director, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University

• Section one: Setting up the context by integrating cultural and psychoanalytic theories to explore ARTs Chapter 1: Introducing the Business of Being MadeKate GentileChapter 2: Bridging Psychoanalytic and Cultural Times – Using Psychoanalytic Theory to Better Understand how Reprofuturity and Biomedicalization Produce SubjectivitiesKate GentileChapter 3: Situating ARTs in the Cultural ImaginationKatie GentileChapter 4: Producing Temporalities through Assisted Reproductive TechnologiesKatie GentileSection two: Filling in the Gaps of ARTsChapter 5: The Bodies and Bits of (Re)Production: Dilemmas of Egg ‘Donation’ under Neoliberalism.Michelle LeveChapter 6: Male Infertility: The Erection of a Myth, The Myth of an ErectionAdam KaplanChapter 7: Baby Making: It takes an Egg and Sperm and a Rainbow of GendersDiane EhrensaftChapter 8: The Shadow Side of ART– Babies and Parents in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU)Zina Steinberg and Susan KraemerSection three: Looking Closely, A Case Study of Egg DonationChapter 9: Spoken Through Desire – Maternal Subjectivity and Assisted ReproductionTracy SimonChapter 10: On Viability and Indebtedness – Or, "Get Away from her you Bitch!" (after Roberto Bolaño)Stephen HartmanChapter 11: Teleplastic Abduction: Subjectivity in the Age of ART or Delirium for Psychoanalysis: Commentary on Simon’s "Spoken Through Desire"André LepeckiChapter 12: Zen and the ART of Making Babies: A Discussion of Tracy Simon’s PaperOrna GuralnikChapter 13: Reply to Commentaries: Lepecki, Hartman and GuralnikTracy SimonChapter 14: Epilogue – Embodying the Gaps in the Face of Catastrophe and Hyperobjects.Kate Gentile