Conference Contesting Fertilities, Families, and Sexualities Social and Historical Perspectives on Assisted Reproductive Technologies

Since the beginning of the 1990s many insightful studies on the social and cultural conditions and effects of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) have been published. Pioneering anthropological research has been done by Marilyn Strathern, Jeanette Edwards, Sarah Franklin and Monika Konrad in the UK, next to important work about the US by Gay Becker and Charis Thompson. Further pioneering work has been conducted by Marcia Inhorn on Egypt, Susan Kahn on Israel, Anne Cadoret on France and Brigitte Hauser-Schäublin on Germany. After more than twenty years of the proliferation of social research on ARTs, it is time to reconsider concepts such as fertility, human reproduction, family and gender in the light of the development of gender and queer studies, recent kinship studies, religious studies, medical anthropology, bioethics, history of medicine and science and technology studies.