In the previous chapter, a consideration of the ways in which relations that apparently have no basis in kinship may be cast in an idiom of kinship, or transformed over time into kin relations, led me to touch on processes of naturalization. The political salience of discourses about the nation that invoke naturalized images of the family would be hard to exaggerate. In this chapter, however, I look at naturalization from a different angle – that provided by recent advances in technologies of assisted reproduction.

Developments in reproductive medicine – including sperm and egg donation, surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, and cloning – have assumed a common currency in popular renditions of science and the family. The “technologization” of nature apparently has the potential to shake our most fundamental assumptions about kinship as a domain in which relations are given rather than produced through technological intervention. And this too gives rise to concerns that are publicly articulated and politically contested. It is not difficult to understand why recent studies in the sociology of science, as well as the anthropology of kinship, should have given so much attention to reproductive technologies. In this chapter, I take up some of this recent work and consider the significance of technological advances in reproductive medicine both for academic knowledge practices and for everyday notions of kinship.