In this article, we look at how the politics of reproduction take form in Denmarkwhen people are denied access to IVF. Approaching IVF as a selectivereproductive technology, we explore IVF’s selective potential in terms ofreproductive governance and reproductive citizenship by analyzing decisions bythe Danish State Administration about whether people get access to IVF or not.For that purpose, we had access to assessments of people’s inability to parent thatare required by law in case doubts about a person’s ability to parent arise whenthey seek treatment with IVF in Denmark. Through this analysis, we identifythree parenthood and citizenship ideals that characterize reproductive governanceand the politics of reproduction in Denmark: (1) the medically sane/sober selfwhose parenting and societal decisions are not influenced by self-alteringmedical diagnoses and/or treatment, (2) the independent, capable, and productiveself that pursues a meaningful life in societal terms, and (3) the responsible selfthat actively invests into reproductive futures. Based on this analysis, we arguethat people are unduly excluded from reproduction if they are identified as notliving up to these ideals because of the intersections of their gendered, bodily,social, and economic positioning.

The existing research on war veterans and sexuality comes overwhelmingly from four disciplines – medicine, psychiatry, psychology, and public health – and is in most cases carried out in military related contexts. This research, though limited in its scope, nevertheless shows the impact that the military institution, deployments to war, and physical and mental injuries from these deployments have on the intimate lives of current and former military personnel. Being diagnosed with PTSD for example increases the likelihood of sexual dysfunction, relationship conflicts, and emotional distance to intimate others. What is more, female military personnel and LGTBQI soldiers are likely to suffer more severely from PTSD, anxiety, and depression due to sexual harassment and homo- and transphobia as part of military service. Yet, what it actually means to live intimacy in light of these chronic conditions and how intimacy is shaped as well as shapes the life of veterans and soldiers impacted by chronic conditions due to their military service is still mostly unknown. This presentation attempts to shed light on militarized intimacies by exploring how Danish war veterans live their sexual lives in light of chronic conditions resulting from their military service. Based on interviews with Danish war veterans and participant observation at a home for veterans as well as relationship courses for current and former military personnel in Denmark, this presentation thus attends to the meaning of sex for coping with chronic conditions as well as the meaning of chronic conditions for the experience of sexual encounters.

Reflecting on the troubled relationship between anthropology and the military, we do so by discussing the underlying epistemological, methodological, and moral claims of the distinction between an anthropology of and an anthropology for the military. Through the term ethnography of things military, we propose to reposition military anthropology as intense engagements with militarisation through empathic immersion in things military. We develop this term through feminist critiques of militarisation and compassion, through discussions of critique and empathy as part of (critical) ethnographic scholarship, and through anthropological debates about the relationality of fieldwork and ethnographer-interlocutor relations. Suggesting that an ethnography of things military relies on empathic engagements with military lifeworlds, we argue that the relationship between empathy and critique in military anthropology should be understood as a continuous collaborative (and not always predictable) process of interrogating military lifeworlds’ frames of reference without necessarily sharing compassion or sympathy for them.

Turning to the experiences of Danish sperm donors, I argue that the conception of sperm donation as selfish pleasure and commodified practice offers only a limited understanding of what it means to provide semen samples for reproductive donation. Framing masturbation at sperm banks only in light of selfishness, since it involves sexual pleasure and monetary compensation, ignores the intricate interplay between biomedical regulation, modes of production, and men’s gender performativity. As the accounts by Danish men of masturbation at sperm banks show, reproductive donation as both a moral and economic endeavor relies on the control of male masturbation. Rather than only being a selfish undertaking, providing semen samples becomes understandable as a site of biopolitics altering men’s gender identity. The global supply of donor semen is enabled by regulating the affective spaces of male masturbation in which men remake their masculine self-images.

In this article, I suggest the performative effects of diagnosis as an analytical tool to explore the transformations in people’s intimate lives that being diagnosed brings with it. As an analytical term, I understand the performative effects of diagnosis to describe trajectories in people’s intimate lives that emerge in the interplay between a person’s intimate sense of self, that is, their gendered and sexualed self-perceptions, and the logics and norms contained in medical diagnoses. I develop this term in the context of ethnographic research on Danish war veterans’ understandings of and experiences with intimacy and extrapolate it conceptually in this article through scholarship in feminist theory, trans studies, STS, and medical anthropology and sociology. The argument that I make throughout is that the performative effects of diagnosis allows scholars to explore transformations in people’s intimate lives without a foreclosure about the normative dimensions of these transformations. In that sense, rather than only asking how biopolitical and cis- and heteronormative normalcy constitutes itself, the performative effects of diagnosis provide the opportunity to explore how these dimensions are (re)configured and (un)done in and through medicalized intimacies.