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were framed as sexual disorders and infertility, and published on these issues. 2 As was the case with the development of medical knowledge of birth control, working in women's welfare centres and birth control clinics provided women doctors with a privileged position from which to observe, learn, acquire and develop new skills. Among these new skills were the handling of sexual difficulties and infertility. Birth control clinics and women's welfare centres therefore constituted spaces for experimentation in these new
to equatorial Africa, of course. Topoi of degeneration and sterility had been kindling demographic disquiet in Europe for decades, and these anxieties were easily transposed and refigured as they moved echo-like between national and imperial registers and situations. Infertility scares emerged in several African locations perceived to have low birth rates, and colonial anxieties
Women’s medicine explores the key role played by British female doctors in the production and circulation of contraceptive knowledge and the handling of sexual disorders between the 1920s and 1970s at the transnational level, taking France as a point of comparison. This study follows the path of a set of women doctors as they made their way through the predominantly male-dominated medical landscape in establishing birth control and family planning as legitimate fields of medicine. This journey encompasses their practical engagement with birth control and later family planning clinics in Britain, their participation in the development of the international movement of birth control and family planning and their influence on French doctors. Drawing on a wide range of archived and published medical materials, this study sheds light on the strategies British female doctors used, and the alliances they made, to put forward their medical agenda and position themselves as experts and leaders in birth control and family planning research and practice.
different because certainly in South Africa it was more of a legal, arbitrary definition that people made. That's why it became so problematic because they couldn't fit some people in the boxes, in the terms of what the heck race is this person (Laughs). And they tried all these ridiculous ways of trying to figure it out (Laughs). (Participant 9) The social science literature on infertility treatments or Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) has been growing since the 1980s after the
9 Children of Men: the limits of Âradicalism Children of Men (2006) is Alfonso Cuarón’s greatest filmic achievement to date and constitutes an auteurist statement in the way that it demands that its director be taken seriously. It addresses weighty issues and sets out to provide an account of the most pressing problems facing humanity: environmental destruction (symbolised by infertility), mass migration, and the tyranny within democratic states. It has its own specific look and applies a grimy desaturated realist aesthetic to a fantasy premise: the fact that
sources of information, arguably supplanting them at times because of the interactive format. They also offered a safe space for the articulation of questions that were driven by anxieties or fears, or just a need for further information more closely aligned to a personal situation. Though modern in their outlook – advocating for the legalisation of artificial contraception, for instance, or referencing examination of sperm mobility in cases of infertility – they also maintained continuity with traditional values. The expectant mother was automatically assumed to be a
infertility, it seemed that the war had sterilized vast swathes of northern and eastern France. The violent language of novelist William Arthur Dunkerley conveys the deep emotional response that he felt when confronted by the replacement of ‘smiling countrysides’ with ‘stark, black, bristling wastes’ where trees had been reduced to ‘blasted trunks’ complete with ‘dud shells protruding from their carcasses’.13 Even allowing for the restrictions imposed by wartime censorship and the difficulties of travelling within the war zone,14 the thoroughness of sterilization penetrated
neoliberalism that rejects alien scapegoats, as happens in other contemporary titles such as The Happening , The Road , Never Let Me Go , Snowpiercer and Elysium . 9 Cuarón’s film portrays an undeniably dystopian future set in the year 2027 in London, a megacity afflicted by armed violence, pollution, anti-immigration policies and governmental surveillance. One of the most recognisable global cities in the world, the British capital in the film stands for an ecocidal neoliberal society that has turned infertile and is now
Many questions present themselves when considering the historical relationship between anthropology and empire following the Scramble for Africa. These include the extent of imperial fortunes in Africa, rising and falling with officials' knowledge of the people under their jurisdiction. This book looks at the institutional frameworks of anthropology, and shows that the colonial project to order Africa, intellectually and politically, was a messy and not-so comprehensive endeavor. It first considers the roles of metropolitan researchers and institutes such as the colonial ethnographers active in French West Africa, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in Berlin, and the British-based International Institute of African Languages and Cultures. The book deals with the role of African ethnograpghers for their study on African teaching assistants and schoolmasters-cum-ethnographers, and the study of Jomo Kenyatta's journey to produce
shaped by assumptions concerning family, fertility and reproduction. Research towards ever more sophisticated medical technologies for the purpose of the relief of infertility has raised relatively few concerns, provided the procedures were proven to be satisfactorily safe, and insofar as they were used to facilitate and reinforce existing norms about family structure and relationships. Ideas of what a family is (or should be) have a powerful influence on determining which potential technological innovations in human reproduction are developed and funded, and who can