Bering a sperm donor is often framed as an easy job. Men only have to masturbate into acup and receive money in return, at least that’s what many people assume. Turning to theexperiences of Danish sperm donors, I argue that this conception of sperm donation asselfish pleasure and commodified practice offers only a limited understanding of what itmeans to provide semen samples for reproductive donation. While sperm donors’affective investments are most of the time taken for granted and not discussed, they areactually important to consider analytically if biosocial subjectivation—the persistentinvocation of the subject in terms of biomedical registers and biopolitical valuations—is tobe understood properly. Attending to masturbation as important in its own right, I will lookat the making of sperm donors as biosocial subjects through their affective investmentswhen producing semen samples. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at Danish spermbanks and interviews with Danish sperm donors, I will thus explore how men performatively (re)constitute their gendered and sexualised subjectivity in terms ofbiomedical registers and biopolitical valuations through masturbation.
While the semen of Danish sperm donors is very mobile - Danish sperm banks export donor semen globally - the donors themselves are rather immobile. In fact, for donor semen to be globally mobile health regulations restrict donors from being mobile to minimize the risk of disease transmission from sperm donor to donor semen recipient. Regulations, for example, mark certain regions and countries as unsafe due to calculated possibilities of contracting sexually transmitted diseases or other illnesses when travelling there. In addition, the global mobility of donor semen relies on the intimate immobility of sperm donors as they are asked to restrict themselves sexually - both in terms of the number of potential partners as well as the frequency of sexual contacts. Living up to this regime of intimate (im)mobility in order to secure the global mobility of donor semen, sperm donors continuously (re)construct themselves in terms of reproductive masculinity, that is, ways of being men that aspire to biomedically accountable and biopolitically responsible modes of reproduction. This presentation will explore the making of reproductive masculinity by giving an ethnographic account of how regimes of intimate (im)mobility at Danish sperm banks lead men to aspire to the norms and logics of contemporary reproductive biomedicine. Based on interviews with sperm donors in Denmark and participant observation at Danish sperm banks, this presentation gives insights into how reproductive politics and governance become part of sperm donors' ways of being men through regimes of intimate (im)mobility.
What does it mean to be a man in our biomedical day and age? Through ethnographic explorations of the everyday lives of Danish sperm donors, Being a Sperm Donor explores how masculinity and sexuality are reconfigured in a time in which the norms and logics of (reproductive) biomedicine have become ordinary. It investigates men’s moral reasoning regarding donation, their handling of transgressive experiences at the sperm bank, and their negotiations of gender, sexuality, intimacy, and relatedness, showing how the socio-cultural and political dimensions of (reproductive) biomedicine become intertwined with men’s intimate sense of self.
This paper, analyzing interviews with men that donate their semen in Denmark, explores what it means to be a sperm donor. Breaking with the assumption that men have a specific and clearly identifiable motivation to become sperm donors, this paper leaves the confinement of such an accountable actor model implied in asking for men's motivations to donate semen. Instead, the author describes the experiences of sperm donors to show how the moral, organizational, and biomedical-technological context of sperm donation in Denmark makes for enactments of moral selves as well as specific embodiments of masculinity. Instead of looking for motivations that can be accounted for, the author engages with the question of how donating semen affords men the experience of moral and gendered selves This paper, analyzing interviews with men that donate their semen in Denmark, explores what it means to be a sperm donor. Breaking with the assumption that men have a specific and clearly identifiable motivation to become sperm donors, this paper leaves the confinement of such an accountable actor model implied in asking for men's motivations to donate semen. Instead, the author describes the experiences of sperm donors to show how the moral, organizational, and biomedical-technological context of sperm donation in Denmark makes for enactments of moral selves as well as specific embodiments of masculinity. Instead of looking for motivations that can be accounted for, the author engages with the question of how donating semen affords men the experience of moral and gendered selves
The governance of assisted reproduction in Denmark through legislation regards semen as a reproductive substance and thus restricts donor semen’s reproductive potential by setting terms for its use. What is not addressed in legislation is semen’s status as an ambiguous male bodily fluid that also carries other meanings. Making semen into a governable and exchangeable substance happens instead on the practice level. Based on qualitative interviews with Danish sperm donors and ethnographic fieldwork at Danish sperm banks, this article explores how material-semiotic practices at Danish sperm banks contribute to the legitimacy of sperm donation by making donor semen into a governable reproductive substance. Inspired by the containers that are used at sperm banks, in order to handle donor semen, these practices are understood as containment practices. By managing donor semen’s lust and disgust potential, containment practices help to secure donor semen’s conversion into an exchangeable means of donor-assisted reproduction.
Throughout the last ten years, the Danish Armed Forces has prided itself as an inclusive and diverse workplace, an organization that actively works towards a welcoming environment for all of its employees. In 2011, the Danish Institute for Human Rights awarded the Danish Armed Forces with the so-called MIAPRISEN, an award given to organizations that actively work towards more equal and diverse work environments. Yet this story of being an inclusive and diverse workplace changes to one of an organization engrained with gendered injustices when female veterans of the Danish Armed Forces tell their stories. In their stories, the persistence of sexism and sexual violence paints a legacy of structural gender discrimination within the Danish military. Based on biographical interviews with Danish veterans, this presentation will look at the (re)constitution of gendered injustices in military culture. Exploring these injustices, the presentation will focus on the self-authoritative spaces that female veterans use to formulate resistances and build grounds for activism against gender discrimination in the Danish Armed Forces. As such, this presentation will thus take point of departure in the political efficacy of vulnerability that informs feminist activism as a project of persistent societal change.
Danish sperm donors face a particular kind of kinship trouble: they find themselves in a cultural and organizational context that offers different and contrary ways of how to make connections to donor-conceived individuals meaningful. Whereas Danish sperm banks and Danish law want sperm donors to regard these connections as contractual issues, the dominant kinship narrative in Denmark asks sperm donors to also consider them as family and kinship relations. Based on interviews with Danish sperm donors and participant observation at Danish sperm banks, I argue that Danish sperm donors make sense of connections to donor-conceived individuals as a particular kind of relatedness that cannot be reduced to either contractual or kinship relations. Making sense of these connections, sperm donors negotiate their social significance and thereby participate in opening a space which offers avenues for new kinds of sociality.
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.
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.
In a time and age in which the use of reproductive technologies has become ordinary, masculinity and sexuality are reformulated by the logics and politics of reproductive biomedicine. While sperm donors are certainly a group of a few selected men even on a global scale, their experience of living with the effects of reproductive biomedicine’s ordinariness is epistemologically speaking important. Their lives provide insights into how reproductive biomedicine becomes an ordinary and unquestioned part of men’s daily lives. They capture how biosociality remakes masculinity and sexuality in both a moral and an embodied sense, and they show how what some would deem immoral and/or unnatural – sperm donation and donor insemination – becomes a mundane part of men’s gendered and sexualed selves. Based on an ethnography of what it means to be a sperm donor in Denmark, in this talk I will consider how sperm donors’ bodies and identities become intertwined with the socio-cultural and political dimensions of reproductive biomedicine. Asking how the making of biosocial subjects happens through an incitement to gender in terms of biomedical registers and biopolitical valuations, I will theoretically and empirically reflect on the biosociality of gender and its repercussions for contemporary scholarship.
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.
This presentation will explore the performative effects of being diagnosed with PTSD in Danish war veterans’ intimate and sexual lives. Based on biographical interviews with veterans from Denmark, the focus is on how medical diagnoses interplay with veterans gendered and sexualed self-perceptions leading to changes in how they enter and live intimate relationships.
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.
In Denmark, special partnership counselling is offered to soldiers and war veterans and their partners. These courses build upon peer-to-peer communication: military personnel trained as partnership counsellors educate soldiers and their partners about proper communication in loving relationships. I was allowed to follow these courses as an ethnographer during 2016 and 2017 as part of a project on Danish war veterans’ understandings and experiences of intimacy. Building on this research, in this presentation I want to explore the affective economies of gender and sexuality in the intimate encounters between trained counsellors, course participants, and the observing ethnographer. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s analytics of affect and emotion, Arlie Hochschild’s work on emotional labor, and feminist notions of vulnerability I will look at how transference of intimacy opens up spaces for understanding the vulnerable “Other”. In particular, I will focus on how ethnographic understandings of gender and sexuality are immersed in the transference of vulnerable gendered and sexualed subjectivities from counsellors and participants on the one side to the ethnographer on the other. Reflecting on my ethnographic fieldwork in this sense, this presentation thus engages with the embodied and affective dimensions of knowledge production about gender and sexuality