In times of reproductive biomedicine, masculinity and sexuality are reformulated by reproductive technologies and their performative effects for contemporary sociality. While sperm donors are certainly a group of a few selected men even on a global scale, their experiences with living with these effects are epistemologically speaking important since they provide insights into how reproductive biomedicine becomes an ordinary and unquestioned part of men’s daily lives. The lives of sperm donors capture how biosociality remakes masculinity and sexuality in both a moral and embodied sense, how what some would deem immoral and/or unnatural – sperm donation and donor insemination – becomes a mundane part of men’s gendered and sexualed self-perceptions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at Danish sperm banks and interviews with Danish sperm donors, in this talk I will consider how sperm donors’ reproductive bodies and identities become intertwined with the socio-cultural and political dimensions of reproductive biomedicine through the enticement of gender, the making of biosocial subjects through the incitement to a gendered praxis in terms of biomedical registers and biopolitical valuations.
Session: Reproductive Bodies and Identities