Making Healthy Families: The Biomedicalization of Kin Marriage in Contemporary Turkey

This fellowship aims at following up on my PhD research by making it available to wider audiences through different pathways of engagement. This research focuses on the impact of reproductive genetic health services on the making of "healthy" families in Turkey by exploring how kin marriage is being conceptualized, managed, and negotiated as a genetic risk factor and reproductive health concern within intersecting biomedical and genetic spaces in contemporary Turkey.

It asks how notions of "healthy" reproduction and "healthy" familyhood inform the health policies, discourses and practices surrounding the biomedical management of kin marriage, and how couples practicing kin marriage respond to and negotiate concepts of "risky reproduction" and "genetic risk" in their experiences with genetic services. Although kin marriages as close as first cousin marriage are legally accepted and comparatively frequent in Turkey, these marriage patterns have long occupied a contested position within Turkey's society.

Modernist nationalist discourse depicted kin marriages as a remnant of the Ottoman past signifying the lingering presence of internal "non-modernity", "traditionalism" and "Oriental" otherness. These existing legacies of otherization and stigmatization of kin marriage have gained a new biomedical quality with the emerging re-conceptualization of kin marriage as a reproductive health problem following the spread and routinization of reproductive genetic health services in Turkey from the 1980s onwards.

This "biomedicalization" (Adele Clarke) of kin marriage has shifted the question of how future citizens should be brought up in a socially and politically desirable familial environment to the question of how these future citizens should be conceived and born in the first place.

Based on a critical reading of relevant government issued texts on reproductive health, family making and kin marriage, 37 qualitative interviews with medico-genetic professionals as well as couples practicing kin marriage, and observations during a two-and-a-half months stay at a public genetics clinic in Istanbul, this research explores the (bio)political implications of this "biomedicalization" process. It reveals how the redefinition of a formerly socially stigmatized practice (such as kin marriage) as a medical concern does not necessarily end but may intensify stigmatization.

It also sheds light on how the expansion of reproductive genetic health services opens up new sites for the (self)surveillance and (self)management of family making and reproduction at the molecular/genomic level while perpetuating existing legacies of state intervention into the intimacies of family life and reproduction. This research thus emphasizes the need to investigate not only the transformative potential of technoscientific innovation in healthcare but also its capacity for extending enduring, unsettling affinities between medicine, nationalisms and state governance into the 21st century while rendering these more sublime through an emphasis on individualized genomic medicine and voluntary choice.

Finally, this research cautions against notions of genetic health services as a panacea for improving reproductive health by foregrounding these services' potential for unequal targeting as well as the stratified and stratifying context within which they become employed.