Marcia C. Inhorn

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Marcia C. Inhorn
MarciaInhorn.jpg
Inhorn at Yale.
Born1957
NationalityAmerican
EducationPhD, MPH
Alma mater UC Berkeley
Employer(s) Yale University
University of Michigan
TitleWilliam K. Lanman Jr. professor
Board member ofElected Fellow, Society for Applied Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, 2007. Chair, Council on Middle East Studies, Yale University, 2008 - 2011. 2019- present. Founding Editor, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies
SpouseKirk Hooks
ChildrenCarl & Justine
AwardsRobert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Middle East Anthropology, 2015. JMEWS Book Award for The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East, Association of Middle East Women’s Studies, Middle East Studies Association, 2014 Diana Forsythe Prize for Outstanding Feminist Anthropological Research on Work, Science, and Technology, 2007. Eileen Basker Prize award for Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions.
Website marciainhorn.com

Marcia Claire Inhorn is a medical anthropologist and William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Yale University where she is Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies. [1] A specialist on Middle Eastern gender and health issues, Inhorn conducts research on the social impact of infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and Arab America. She has also completed a major study of egg freezing in the United States, described in her book Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs. Inhorn has published 21 books and more than 200 articles and book chapters.

Contents

Before joining the Yale faculty in 2008, Inhorn was a professor of medical anthropology at the University of Michigan and director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies. Inhorn was president of the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.

Research

Egypt

Inhorn’s works within feminist science and technology studies (STS), Middle East gender studies (including masculinity studies), and the anthropology of reproduction. She was the first anthropologist to study infertility and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) outside of the West, following the globalization of IVF to Egypt. Working in Egypt during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, she was able to document the significant social, religious, kinship, and gender ramifications of infertility and its treatment, as well as the impact that IVF had on both the medical system and gender relations in the country. In the decade between 1993-2003, she published three books called Quest for Conception (1994), Infertility and Patriarchy (1996), and Local Babies, Global Science (2003). These books could be described, respectively, as a classic medical anthropological ethnography, a gender studies ethnography, and an STS ethnography of the globalization of IVF into the Muslim Middle East.

Throughout these volumes, Inhorn charts Egyptian social and cultural understandings of infertility as a problem of personhood, marriage, kinship, and community life, while explaining how treatment options such as IVF are fundamentally shaped by local religious moralities. In the final book, based on research in Cairo’s IVF clinics, she argues that numerous “arenas of constraint” — social, structural, ideological, and practical — limit and sometimes curtail access to IVF, even among elite Egyptian couples who engage in transnational quests to create a “baby of the tubes.” These books have won several medical anthropology and feminist awards, including the American Anthropological Association’s Diana Forsythe Prize for outstanding feminist anthropological research on work, science, technology, and biomedicine, and the Society for Medical Anthropology’s Eileen Basker Memorial Prize for the most significant contribution to anthropological scholarship on gender and health.

Lebanon

Since 2003, Inhorn has undertaken three Middle Eastern research projects outside of Egypt. All have been funded by the National Science Foundation’s Cultural Anthropology and Science, Technology, and Society programs, as well as the U.S. Department of Education's Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad program. Her book, The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2012), is the culmination of one of these projects, based in Lebanon, and reflects her intellectual engagements in Middle East gender studies. Indeed, The New Arab Man is the first anthropological ethnography devoted to the exploration of Arab masculinity in the 21st century. It is also the only book focusing on male infertility and men’s uses of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), a variant of IVF designed to overcome this “hidden” male reproductive health problem. In The New Arab Man, Inhorn interrogates Raewyn Connell’s theory of “hegemonic masculinity,” suggesting that this concept, when applied to the Middle East, only serves to reinforce static dualisms and neo-Orientalist stereotypes. Inspired by the work of Raymond Williams, she offers a new concept of “emergent masculinities” as a way to encapsulate change over the male life course, between generations, and throughout social history, as men enact transformative events such as the 2011 Arab uprisings. As Inhorn argues in this book, many Middle Eastern men today are engaged in a self-conscious critique of local gender norms, attempting to unseat forms of patriarchy in the process. These men, who perhaps represent the “silent majority,” share their hopes, dreams, and desires in the book, which is filled with ethnographic stories of men’s lives, often in conflict-ridden settings. The New Arab Man based on research conducted with more than 300 Arab men, including Sunni and Shia Muslims, Christians, and Druze, from nearly a dozen Middle Eastern countries. The New Arab Man received the 2014 JMEWS Book Award from the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies. In 2015, it received the 2015 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology, an award given annually by the American Anthropological Association.

United Arab Emirates

Middle East’s most “global city” and a new medical tourism hub. Her book Cosmopolitan Conceptions: IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai (Duke University Press, 2015), explores the stories of infertile couples from fifty countries and five continents, all of whom have attempted to seek assisted conception in Dubai’s emergent IVF sector. The increasing global magnitude of travel to new cosmopolitan “reprohubs” such as Dubai is a reflection of the fact that IVF services are either absent, inaccessible, illegal, expensive, or harmful in many of the world’s nations, particularly in the global South. As the first ethnographic study of so-called “reproductive tourism,” Cosmopolitan Conceptions challenges this term as an inappropriate descriptor for couples’ painful and tortuous IVF journeys across international borders. Instead, Cosmopolitan Conceptions adopts the term “reprotravel” to represent these journeys—part of a new conceptual “reprolexicon” introduced in the book and inspired by recent developments in globalization theory. Cosmopolitan Conceptions ends with an activist agenda, arguing for alternative pathways to parenthood; support for the infertile, especially infertile women; and provision of safe, low-cost IVF services, particularly in the global South.

Arab America

Inhorn's most recent book is America’s Arab Refugees: Vulnerability and Health on the Margins (Stanford University Press, 2018), based on a five-year ethnographic study carried out in “Arab Detroit,” Michigan, the so-called “capital” of Arab America. Set against the backdrop of America’s stratified healthcare system and Detroit’s status as the poorest big city in America, America’s Arab Refugees provides the first in-depth analysis of the post-war health problems and struggles of infertile Arab refugees as they attempt to make new lives and new families in America. Forwarding the concept of “reproductive exile,” Inhorn examines the ways in which Arab refugees, particularly from the country of Iraq, have been made infertile by the toxic legacies of American military intervention. Yet, after being forced to flee, they are exiled from America’s costly healthcare system by poverty and reproductive racism. The book also interrogates the widespread anti-Arab/anti-Muslim sentiment that has been felt in the United States since 9/11, but that has been significantly exacerbated by the contemporary political climate and imposition of the “Muslim ban.” To examine these new forms of racism, America’s Arab Refugees draws inspiration from intersectionality theory as developed by US Black feminist scholars. One chapter of the book compares the interlocking and multiplicative forms of discrimination faced by both Arab and Black populations living side by side on the margins of Detroit. America’s Arab Refugees thus represents the first attempt to apply intersectionality theory to the study of Arab lives in the US, showing that this theoretical approach has great utility in interrogating axes of oppression among marginalized immigrant and refugee communities. Ultimately, Inhorn’s book interrogates the health costs of war, the health inequities and structural vulnerabilities faced by Muslim refugees in this country, and the US government’s moral duty to assist those whose lives it has destroyed through its ongoing wars in the Middle East.

United States

Inhorn’s most recent scholarly project is based solely in the US and supported by the US National Science Foundation. It focuses on oocyte cryopreservation (egg freezing), which is increasingly being used by women around the world to preserve and extend their fertility. Experimentally developed for women facing medical conditions such as cancer, the technology has moved into IVF clinics since 2012, where it is being used by otherwise healthy women. Although most of the feminist and media commentary about egg freezing focuses on women’s career ambitions, in-depth interviews show a quite different story about women’s motivations and experiences. Inhorn’s ethnographic research with 150 women who froze their eggs shows that egg freezing is largely about partnership problems among highly educated professional women who are hoping for the “three P’s” of partnership, pregnancy, and parenthood. However, these women lack the “three E’s”—namely, men who are eligible, educated, and equal. This “mating gap” reflects growing but little-discussed gender imbalances in higher education, not only in America, but in more than 60 percent of the world’s nations. Educated women’s inability to form stable reproductive relationships is leading to the global egg freezing turn. Inhorn’s study has been featured in multiple media outlets, including NPR, CNN, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and Jezebel. Inhorn has also appeared in multiple podcasts, radio talk shows, and documentary films, such as Netflix’s “Explained” feature on “Fertility.”

Editorships

Inhorn is the founding editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS). [2] She is also Co-Editor in Chief of Reproductive BioMedicine and Society, Associate editor for population and health of the journal Global Public Health, [3] and Co-editor of the "Fertility, Reproduction, and Sexuality" series at Berghahn Books. [4] She is also editor or co-editor of fourteen volumes on medical anthropology, gender, reproduction, and the Middle East.

Publications

Books

Edited volumes

Selected book chapters

Selected journal articles

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">In vitro fertilisation</span> Assisted reproductive technology procedure

In vitro fertilisation (IVF) is a process of fertilisation where an egg is combined with sperm in vitro. The process involves monitoring and stimulating a patient's ovulatory process, removing an ovum or ova from their ovaries and letting sperm fertilise them in a culture medium in a laboratory. After the fertilised egg (zygote) undergoes embryo culture for 2–6 days, it is transferred by catheter into the uterus, with the intention of establishing a successful pregnancy.

Reproductive technology encompasses all current and anticipated uses of technology in human and animal reproduction, including assisted reproductive technology (ART), contraception and others. It is also termed Assisted Reproductive Technology, where it entails an array of appliances and procedures that enable the realization of safe, improved and healthier reproduction. While this is not true of all people, for an array of married couples, the ability to have children is vital. But through the technology, infertile couples have been provided with options that would allow them to conceive children.

Infertility is the inability of an animal or plant to reproduce by natural means. It is usually not the natural state of a healthy adult, except notably among certain eusocial species. It is the normal state of a human child or other young offspring, because they have not undergone puberty, which is the body's start of reproductive capacity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Assisted reproductive technology</span> Methods to achieve pregnancy by artificial or partially artificial means

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) includes medical procedures used primarily to address infertility. This subject involves procedures such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), cryopreservation of gametes or embryos, and/or the use of fertility medication. When used to address infertility, ART may also be referred to as fertility treatment. ART mainly belongs to the field of reproductive endocrinology and infertility. Some forms of ART may be used with regard to fertile couples for genetic purpose. ART may also be used in surrogacy arrangements, although not all surrogacy arrangements involve ART. The existence of sterility will not always require ART to be the first option to consider, as there are occasions when its cause is a mild disorder that can be solved with more conventional treatments or with behaviors based on promoting health and reproductive habits.

Male infertility refers to a sexually mature male's inability to impregnate a fertile female. In humans, it accounts for 40–50% of infertility. It affects approximately 7% of all men. Male infertility is commonly due to deficiencies in the semen, and semen quality is used as a surrogate measure of male fecundity. More recently, advance sperm analyses that examine intracellular sperm components are being developed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Female infertility</span> Diminished or absent ability of a female to achieve conception

Female infertility refers to infertility in women. It affects an estimated 48 million women, with the highest prevalence of infertility affecting women in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa/Middle East, and Central/Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Infertility is caused by many sources, including nutrition, diseases, and other malformations of the uterus. Infertility affects women from around the world, and the cultural and social stigma surrounding it varies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reproductive medicine</span> Branch of medicine

Reproductive medicine is a branch of medicine concerning the male and female reproductive systems. It encompasses a variety of reproductive conditions, their prevention and assessment, as well as their subsequent treatment and prognosis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fertility clinic</span>

Fertility clinics are medical clinics that assist couples, and sometimes individuals, who want to become parents but for medical reasons have been unable to achieve this goal via the natural course. Clinics apply a number of diagnosis tests and sometimes very advanced medical treatments to achieve conceptions and pregnancies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Brinsden</span>

Peter Robert Brinsden MBBS, MRCS, LRCP, FRCOG is known for the treatment of infertility in couples. From 1989 to 2006 he was the medical director of Bourn Hall Clinic in the UK, a leading centre for the treatment of fertility problems, and where about 6,000 babies have been conceived using IVF and other assisted conception treatments.

Reproductive endocrinology and infertility (REI) is a surgical subspecialty of obstetrics and gynecology that trains physicians in reproductive medicine addressing hormonal functioning as it pertains to reproduction as well as the issue of infertility. While most REI specialists primarily focus on the treatment of infertility, reproductive endocrinologists are trained to also test and treat hormonal dysfunctions in females and males outside infertility. Reproductive endocrinologists have specialty training (residency) in obstetrics and gynecology (ob-gyn) before they undergo sub-specialty training (fellowship) in REI.

Fertility tourism is the practice of traveling to another country or jurisdiction for fertility treatment, and may be regarded as a form of medical tourism. A person who can become pregnant is considered to have fertility issues if they are unable to have a clinical pregnancy after 12 months of unprotected intercourse. Infertility, or the inability to get pregnant, affects about 8-12% of couples looking to conceive or 186 million people globally. In some places, rates of infertility surpass the global average and can go up to 30% depending on the country. Areas with lack of resources, such as assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), tend to correlate with the highest rates of infertility.

Religious response to assisted reproductive technology deals with the new challenges for traditional social and religious communities raised by modern assisted reproductive technology. Because many religious communities have strong opinions and religious legislation regarding marriage, sex and reproduction, modern fertility technology has forced religions to respond.

Reproductive surgery is surgery in the field of reproductive medicine. It can be used for contraception, e.g. in vasectomy, wherein the vasa deferentia of a male are severed, but is also used plentifully in assisted reproductive technology. Reproductive surgery is generally divided into three categories: surgery for infertility, in vitro fertilization, and fertility preservation.

Sarah Franklin is an American anthropologist who has substantially contributed to the fields of feminism, gender studies, cultural studies and the social study of reproductive and genetic technology. She has conducted fieldwork on IVF, cloning, embryology and stem cell research. Her work combines both ethnographic methods and kinship theory, with more recent approaches from science studies, gender studies and cultural studies. In 2001 she was appointed to a Personal Chair in the Anthropology of Science, the first of its kind in the UK, and a field she has helped to create. She became Professor of Social Studies of Biomedicine in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics in 2004. In 2011 she was elected to the Professorship of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.

Geeta Nargund is a professor and medical doctor in the field of natural and mild IVF and Advanced Technology in Reproductive Medicine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ashok Agarwal</span> Medical Scientist

Ashok Agarwal is the Director of the Andrology Center, and also the Director of Research at the American Center for Reproductive Medicine at Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, USA. He is Professor at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University, USA. Ashok is a Senior Staff in the Cleveland Clinic's Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute. He has published extensive translational research in human infertility and assisted reproduction.

Female fertility is affected by age and is a major fertility factor for women. A woman's fertility is in generally good quality from the late teens to early thirties, although it declines gradually over time. Around 35, fertility is noted to decline at a more rapid rate. At age 45, a woman starting to try to conceive will have no live birth in 50–80 percent of cases. Menopause, or the cessation of menstrual periods, generally occurs in the 40s and 50s and marks the cessation of fertility, although age-related infertility can occur before then. The relationship between age and female fertility is sometimes referred to as a woman's "biological clock."

Carolyn Sargent is a medical anthropologist.

Tiruchirappalli Chelvaraj Anand Kumar (1936–2010) was an Indian biologist and reproductive biologist and the creator of the second scientifically documented test tube baby in India. He was the founder of Hope Infertility Clinic, Bangalore and the director of the National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health. He was an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medical Sciences and a recipient of the Sanjay Gandhi National Award. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 1977, for his contributions to biological sciences.

Stratified reproduction is a widely used social scientific concept, created by Shellee Colen, that describes imbalances in the ability of people of different races, ethnicities, nationalities, classes, and genders to reproduce and nurture their children. Researchers use the concept to describe the "power relations by which some categories of people are empowered to nurture and reproduce, while others are disempowered," as Rayna Rapp and Faye D. Ginsburg defined the term in 1995.

References

  1. "Welcome - Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies". www.yale.edu.
  2. "Middle East Women's Studies (AMEWS)". amews.org. Archived from the original on 2011-09-03. Retrieved 2017-04-22.
  3. "Global Public Health". tandf.co.uk.
  4. "series - Berghahn Books". www.berghahnbooks.com.