•  
  •  
 

Milena Marchesi

Document Type

Article

Abstract

This article traces discursive and political attempts to discipline the reproduction of the Italian nation by analyzing the approval of a controversial law disciplining access to new reproductive technologies (NRTs) in 2004. The restriction of new reproductive technologies in Italy reflects a contemporary re-negotiation of gender ideologies and a renewed ascendance of the Vatican in Italian politics and society. Although abortion remains legal in Italy, the NRT legislation recognizes the embryo as a subject while in political discourse demographic alarmism slides into warnings of social disintegration. The debate over the threat posed by technologically assisted reproduction to Italian families and society intersects with policies and discourses aimed at disciplining another form of "dangerous" national reproduction: immigration. The rejection of immigration and assisted reproduction as acceptable means of reproducing a nation concerned with its birth rates is consistent with feminist claims that women are the symbolic and material reproducers of group boundaries. The regulation of assisted fertilization, then, simultaneously disciplines different kinds of threatening reproductive bodies and multiple dimensions of social disorder. It also makes explicit the meanings and relations of power underpinning the heteronormative family and the imagined homogenous and heterosexual nation. Assisted fertilization and immigration threaten to disrupt imagined 'ties of blood' at the level of the family and the nation respectively and to reveal their constructedness. Preoccupations with the proper composition of the nation reflect anxieties about its increasing heterogeneity. Fears of disharmony and identity crises in families where children may not be genetically related to both parents echo cultural fundamentalist and new racist discourses that explain xenophobia as a "natural" response to difference.

Download

Share

COinS