ONTOLOGICAL CHOREOGRAPHY - AGENCY THROUGH OBJECTIFICATION IN INFERTILITY CLINICS

This paper is about the interaction between patients and medical techn ology, and uses ethnographic data drawn from fieldwork in infertility clinics to question the humanist argument that selves need to be prote cted from technological objectification to ensure agency and authentic ity. It argues that objectification is only antithetical to personhood in specific circumstances. Non-reductive manifestations of objectific ation make possible a notion of agency not opposed by, but pursued in objectification. The dependence of science and technology on social, i ndividual and political factors has been quite extensively worked out in the science and technology studies literature. The dependence of se lves on technology has received less attention. In other literatures t hat take the construction of the person seriously, the role of technol ogy in that process is typically underemphasized. This paper attempts to link the initiatives of these literatures by adding an ontological connection between technology and selves. A notion of 'ontological cho reography' is developed to describe the processes of forging functiona l trails of compatibility that create and maintain the referentiality between things of different kinds -- like persons and reproductive tec hnologies.