The (M)other Within: Uterus Politics and Technology as Lived Experience (LIFE(M)OTHER)

At the frontier of research in assistive reproduction technologies (ARTs) and organ transplantation, motherhood is being reconceived.

Uterus transplantation (UTx), pioneered in Sweden in 2014 and now in clinical trials in 16 countries including the United States (US), is among the newest experimental ARTs for people pursuing gestational and genetic motherhood.

As UTx moves across borders into different sociopolitical conceptions, and contentions, of gender, reproduction, and motherhood, it becomes a prism for exploring the stakes, practices, and meaning attributed to gender and reproductive rights in different societies.

Ultimately, this technoscientific frontier is relevant to everyone, representing the pursuit of not only reproduction but also of a particular form of gendered embodiment by way of a thoroughly gendered organ.

LIFE(M)OTHER examines how the technological pursuit of mothering life via UTx moves across borders and into different healthcare systems and lifeworlds, opening to other arrangements of gender, the body, motherhood and reproductive rights.

The overall aim of LIFE(M)OTHER is to develop a person-centered theoretical framework for understanding the interplay of three elements: (1) frontier technoscience (2) cultural politics of the body, reproduction, and gender, and (3) lived phenomenological experience. This aim embeds methodological contributions for studying the social impacts of frontier experimental science.

I ground this framework in an interdisciplinary, comparative ethnographic study of clinical and domestic (home) sites of four UTx clinical trials in the US and Sweden, tracing the technological development alongside its lived experience by studying the practices and discourses of healthcare practitioners, advocacy groups, patients, donors, and families.

I supplement this with archival research to map, compare, and contextualize shifting cultural politics surrounding the uterus, reproduction, gender and the body in the US and Sweden.