10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17220
application/pdf
2038-3460
17220
2
en
Giulia Zanini
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Sarah B. Franklin, Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells and the Future of Kinship, Duke University Press, 2013
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
5
Book Reviews
2015-01-29
2023-06-14
2015-01-29
2023-07-27
113-116
TS
Giulia Zanini
2014
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17220
113
University of Padova
2038-3460
2
en
116
Sarah B. Franklin, Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells and the Future of Kinship, Duke University Press, 2013
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17220/16099
5
Book Review                                                               113
cerning methods. The strongest contribution that this book offers the
field is precisely the introduction of an effective tool for the study of this
epochal change, conceived within a conceptual framework that is clearly
inspired by Foucault. Here I am referring to the authors who developed
aspects of the “molecularization/geneticization thesis” (in particular Rab-
inow, Rose and Novas), but also materialist analysts of biomedicine (such
as Sunder Rajan and Cooper), or biopolitical philosophers (such as
Agamben and Esposito). According to this perspective, the present must
be read in the light of an epochal change displaying the intensification of
control over life. This search for belief and power systems (épistémé) is
useful for drawing connections between laws, epistemic apparatus, gov-
ernance, economic circuits, social relations, representations, and so forth.
Simultaneously, the willingness to find out the spirit of an epoch express-
es a tendency towards the whole and the structure. A willingness that is
complemented with a sensitivity, proper of Science and Technology Stud-
ies, toward objects, their agency, their ability to mediate, as well as their
discursive and material trajectories. The conceptual framework of bio-
objects is an analytical tool that is as malleable, flexible and generative as
the forms of life (or non-life) that it aims at studying. Above all, it is ca-
pable of combining a detailed analysis of case studies with a broader per-
spective on the transformation of life within and beyond biomedical re-
search.


                                      ***


    Sarah B. Franklin
Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells and the Future of Kinship
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013, pp. 376

Giulia Zanini University of Padova

    Thirty-five years after an In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) procedure has
for the first time lead to the birth of a living human being and five mil-
lions test-tube babies later, ethnographic accounts witnessing how IVF
has spread around the globe proliferate. In the meantime, a flourishing
reproductive transnational industry has emerged and the use of human
reproductive substance for regenerative medicine has become so much
desirable and legitimate as it is profitable for global pharmaceutical and
health services market.
    Among this collection of works, Sarah Franklin's Biological Relatives:
IVF, Stem Cells and the Future of Kinship surfaces to wisely refocus on the
very scope of ethnographic accounts in theorizing socio-biotechnological
dynamics and to make a point about the way in which the normalization
114                                                          Tecnoscienza – 5 (2)

of IVF plays a role in the current reciprocal understanding of biology and
technology.
    The book has the urgent ambition to explore how we might think
about reproductive substance as a technology, and technology as a repro-
ductive substance; and the ways in which we might combine these ap-
proaches to make sense of the contemporary “age of biology”. Franklin's
approach resists and goes beyond the presumptive separation of domains
characterising the theories of social embeddedness of IVF. To reverse
such an approach, she elaborates a definition of technology that cuts
through diverse disciplines and that emerges in its ambivalent and co-
constitutive relationship with biology.
    The author investigates the very meaning of “being after IVF” in its
temporal, spatial, logic and qualitative terms. Without eluding the com-
plexities of analysing IVF production and reproduction processes, Frank-
lin rather scrutinizes contingent ambivalences, illustrating their cultural,
political and technological powers. By exploring IVF socio-
biotechnological life and legacy Franklin spans across a variety of con-
temporary pressing phenomena, including PGD, stem cells research,
mithocondrial DNA, regenerative medicine, feminist reproductive poli-
tics, cybrid human-animal embryos, synthetic biology.
    The introduction of a Marxist approach to highlight the very substan-
tial value of the “hand-tool-embryo” allows Franklin to unfold and re-
compose one of the very mechanisms by which biology is technological
and technology is biological and to illustrate how new kinds of kinships
are crafted through such mechanisms.
    By investigating the IVF-stem cells interface, presenting the reader
with an extremely accurate ethnography of the stem cell derivation lab at
Guy's Hospital in London and analysing some crucial moments of the
history of embryology, Franklin wisely retraces the process through which
IVF has set the cognitive and practical grounds for transforming human
reproductive substances into a tool, establishing a new paradigm of biol-
ogy as a technology which has gained increasing support in contemporary
UK and which promises to be crucial to upcoming health industry.
    Franklin successfully illustrates how IVF is a technology that exists
and is thinkable and practicable through the work of other technological
apparatuses, such as the technology of kinship and of sex. The author
navigates across feminist literature on IVF to examine how IVF is simul-
taneously produced by and produces technologies of sex and gender; and
how IVF is called to artificially create the facts of life that are thought to
naturally ground sex and gender themselves. The resulting picture is one
where technologies of sex and gender, more than biology, appear as driv-
ing the process of naturalization of reproduction.
    Biology displays instead its relativity insofar as IVF is used to produce
and reproduce biological relatives while the very content of biology is
both taken as an a priori and reinvented by IVF. IVF owns a paradoxical
mimetic character, which makes it both 'the same' and 'not quite the
Book Review                                                              115
same' as the process it has been created to imitate and substitute.
    The ambivalences emerging from IVF understandings and applica-
tions are multiple and strategic. While they allow its perpetuation as a
technology that reproduces gender and sexual norms, they also create bi-
ological relatives, and favour its affirmation as a creative technology that
bring about unprecedented biotechnological relativities (i.e. the condition
of being “a little bit pregnant”).
    From this perspective, kinship is also looked at as a technology which
organises and facilitates human reproductive capacity as much as IVF is a
technology of kin making. If the very concept of kinship is a technology
designed to chart and discipline human reproductive substances and out-
comes, the process by which these substances are “taken in hand” in the
lab produces new kinship in a double way: it both introduces new kinds
of biological relatives and new modes of being biologically related. The
way in which Franklin uses the term “substance” in this book is a very
productive one, which includes the specific reference to gametes and em-
bryos as well as the more extensive one which recalls the outcome of “re-
lationships between embodiment, sociality, identity, material objects, and
technology” (p. 17). The technological creation of biological reproductive
substances and the technological use of reproductive substances for dif-
ferent scopes (i.e. stem cells derivation) leads to a blurred and wider
meaning of the concepts of biological relations and biological relatives. In
this context, where reproductive substances are biotechnological prod-
ucts and their relationships with people, tools and scopes vary, potentiali-
ties exist for the emergence of new kinships.
    The mechanisms that make the technology of kinship work in the field
of IVF are spectacularized through the diffusion of the iconic image of
the ICSI procedure, which represents “not only the logic of IVF, but the
biological relativity implicit in making biological relatives. The relativity
of the biological and the technical […] in which substance and tool en-
gage in the complex intercourse of merging with a purpose” (p. 254).
    Aware of the aesthetic value of diverse IVF-related images and visual
forms, Franklin also dedicates very captivating pages to bioartistic inter-
pretations of IVF ambivalences and presents a very detailed ethnographic
account of the works by Gina Glover inhabiting the transition spaces of
IVF clinical encounters at the Guy's Hospital in London and offering an
aesthetic extract of the combined experience of IVF by different actors.
    Franklin conceives her book as a mosaic, where a number of ethno-
graphic encounters, historical inquiries, bioartistic displays and theoreti-
cal sources provide the instruments for the development of a thoughtful,
composite and extensive analysis of the landscape of IVF.
    The argument is not a circular one. Instead, Franklin’s acute and de-
tailed analysis unfolds and expands along a spiral path, which navigates
across different domains of IVF history to explore the socio-
biotechnological circumstances of its development and the development
of the socio-biotechnologies that have emerged in its presence. Such a
116                                                         Tecnoscienza – 5 (2)

distinct approach to the study of IVF as a lens through which the copro-
duction of biology and technology can be unpacked, owns the creative
power of extending its hermeneutical validity beyond the boundaries of
the past and present of IVF to the future of kinship.
    The author retraces the multiple intersecting meanings of reproduc-
tion in its historical and eclectic manifestations and interrogates the dy-
namics of intellectual academic knowledge dissemination and reproduc-
tion. As much analytic and precise as evocative and inspiring, the skilful
assemblages of ethnographic evidences with literary sources, the percep-
tive combination of Marxist, Foucauldian and Latourian conceptualisa-
tions with feminist approaches and the narrative juxtaposition of chapters
that Franklin elaborates constitutes itself an original written reproductive
formula which develops along complex and non-linear trajectories.
    This book constitutes a reference for all those who approach the study
of technology or kinship and is inescapable for those who adventure into
the intersections between these two concepts.
