Sammendrag
In the science fiction TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation the friendly, humanoid android Data represents advanced technology programmed to understand and, if possible, copy human behaviour. The episode ?The Offspring? raises the issue of how reproduction is interrelated to Michel Foucault?s notion of biopower or biopolitics: the ways in which ?biological existence [is] reflected in political existence? ((Foucault 1990)1978:142). In recent media debates in Norway, the issue of reproduction has surfaced as entanglements of reproductive ability (biology), reproductive rights (politics) and assisted reproductive technologies (ART). In the Norwegian media debate, Norwegian philosopher Nina Karin Monsen has argued in favour of a differentiation of what she calls ?natural? versus ?constructed? children, where the latter are children conceived by ART (Monsen 2009). I am interested in the co-construction of ?natural? rights and political rights, and how ART has become an intersection where discourses of the ?natural? human and its limits are brought to the fore. The purpose for this paper is to critically explore how a strategic naturalisation, to use Charis Thompson?s words, of specific bodies results in an ontological differentiation between the ?natural? and the ?constructed?. Situating my analysis in the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics, I use Star Trek as a critical angle for addressing how the boundaries between biology, technology and politics regulate what counts as ?natural? or ?proper? reproduction.
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