Reproductive Technology, Gender and Bereavement in Germany

<strong>Centre for the Study of Social Systems School of Social Sciences </strong> <strong>CSSS Colloquium </strong> <strong>Dr. Karin Polit</strong> (South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany) a talk on <strong>Reproductive Technology, Gender and Bereavement in Germany</strong> Date : <strong>November 5, 2015 </strong> <strong>Abstract:</strong> How are advancements in reproductive technology connected to gender roles and bereavement? In this talk I will show that modern medicine's promises, like enabling couples to control when and how they will be having children, to ensure painless births, and to make sure that the babies born are healthyare illusions that produce certain forms of bereavement in cases or reproduction going awry. In contemporary Germany, couples expect to successfully reproduce until they are middle aged. Public discourse, advertisements and the medical discourse that makes it into the public sphere seem to be making first pregnancies possible for women for a rather long time. Unsuccessful reproduction – voluntarily or involuntarily is absent in this public discourse. It seems that advancements in reproductive technology have increased the pressure on German women to reproduce. Accordingly treatment to assist reproduction is typically found to be practices on and in the female body. And it is the lifestyle of women that is criticized when a couple fails to reproduce leading to feeling of loss and failure that are connected to a certain morality produced by the very technology that claims to come to their aid. <strong>Bio-Data:</strong> Karin Polit is a social anthropologist and Margarete-von-Wrangell Fellow at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany. She has done extensive fieldwork on health, gender, inequality and cultural heritage in Uttarakhand North India and on education, stress and violence in New Delhi and other parts of North India. She has taught at the universities of Heidelberg and Münster and is currently involved in research on reproductive health and technology in Europe and India and violence, youth and mental health in Jammu and Kashmir. She has published widely on various topics such as ritual studies, heritage, Dalits in India, and medical anthropology, including her monograph on Dalit women in Uttarakhand "Women of Honour". Her current book, "When Gods set out to wander" deals with the politics of cultural heritage and performance as resistance in India.