Celia Roberts

Existing sociological studies of miscarriage, typically undertaken in Euro‐American contexts, describe its ambiguous and uncertain character, arguing that pregnancy loss puts both pregnant people and foetuses into a liminal position. Based on 28 interviews and 24 participant drawings, this paper contributes to and challenges this literature by focusing on pregnancy loss in Taiwan. Our analysis reveals three reproductive apparatuses addressing miscarriage: biomedicine, Taiwanese Chinese medicine (TCM) and folk healthcare. We show that although biomedicine is the dominant apparatus, many Taiwanese who have experienced miscarriage also visit TCM clinics and engage in folk healthcare practices, even when they do not necessarily ‘believe’ in these. We argue that both TCM and folk healthcare blame women for miscarriage, whereas biomedicine fails to acknowledge the emotional significance of this experience. Viewed together, the three reproductive apparatuses reflect both the ambiguity and uncertainty surrounding miscarriage and women's complex labour in negotiating multiple understandings of pregnancy loss. Such specificities notwithstanding, our argument highlights the importance of attending to the practices, thoughts and feelings—both within and outside biomedicine—of those experiencing pregnancy loss in trying to sociologically understand this common, often devastating, experience.

For many people in the Global North, climate crisis renders reproduction a fraught issue, prompting questions about whether it is right to bring more people into a rapidly deteriorating world. Feminist theorists have written variously about this issue, with many arguing for multiplying forms of kinship that are not based on biogenetic connection. Adoption is often offered as an example of such alternative kinning practices. This article reports on interviews with Australians who are not parents, aged 24–35, about the connections between climate crisis and reproduction, and their thoughts and feelings about having children in the future. Many participants mentioned the idea that instead of conceiving and birthing children, they might adopt or foster and/or argued that others should do so rather than have ‘their own’ children. The article critically explores the figures of adoption as an ethical solution to the problem of overpopulation in our participants’ accounts of reproduction and in feminist academic literature. We argue that both propagate unrealistic and potentially harmful tropes in the wish for solutions to serious personal and political dilemmas.

In 2008, Timmermans and Haas called for a ‘sociology of disease’ to develop and challenge the sociology of health and illness. A sociology of disease, they argued, would take seriously the biological and physiological processes of disease in theorising health and illness. Building on two decades of Science and Technology Studies and feminist work on biological actors such as hormones and genes, we propose a ‘cortisol sociology’ to push further at this argument. As a ‘messenger of stress’, cortisol is key to understanding human and non‐human health as a biosocial phenomenon. We argue that sociologists should engage with cortisol through critical yet open‐minded reading of the relevant science and critical triangulation studies, and by tracking cortisol’s movements from science into public worlds of biosensing and self‐monitoring.

Although reproduction involves (at least) two sexed bodies, men are often missing from in/fertility research. Surveys such as the widely-used Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) engage in often unintentional yet highly consequential practices of gendering. Here we identify two processes through which surveys have the potential to render male infertility invisible: defining the population at risk of infertility in an exclusionary way; and designing survey instruments to select out some groups/issues. Compiling information about survey samples and inclusion criteria in the DHS, and combining this with a qualitative examination of instrument design, we identify areas of men’s invisibility across time and place. While inclusion of men in DHS samples has increased over time, some men (e.g. single and divorced, transgender) remain missing in many survey settings. This is problematic from a reproductive justice perspective. Survey results, which both reflect and contribute to men’s invisibility, are widely used as an evidence-base for family and population policies. Moreover, reproductive health services are only made available to those whose reproductive health needs are recognized; men’s exclusion from the reproductive discourse contributes to the stratification of reproduction. Men’s underrepresentation in in/fertility data also reinforces the notion that reproduction is a woman’s domain, and so contributes to a system that places responsibility for reproduction on women. It is vital to explore how gender is enacted or ‘done’ in such research.

What happens when neuroscientific knowledges move from laboratories and clinics into therapeutic settings concerned with the care of children? ‘Brain-based parenting’ is a set of discourses and practices emerging at the confluence of attachment theory, neuroscience, psychotherapy and social work. The neuroscientific knowledges involved understand affective states such as fear, anger and intimacy as dynamic patterns of coordination between brain localities, as well as flows of biochemical signals via hormones such as cortisol. Drawing on our own attempts to adopt brain-based parenting, and engaging with various strands and critiques of new materialism and affect theory, we explore the ways in which the social sciences and humanities might fruitfully engage with neuroscientific concepts and affects. How does science-affected indeterminacy, with all its promises of ontological and experiential agency, help us to observe, wait, bind or hold together volatile mixtures of habit, speech and action?

(2017). Gut feminism. New Genetics and Society. Ahead of Print.