Reconceiving personhood: The localization of assisted reproductive technologies in Mexico City

As assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) circulate around the globe, it has become clear that they assume culturally specific forms in diverse contexts. Yet, the mechanism by which they are localized remains an ethnographic question. Proposing answers, some anthropologists have emphasized either the political and social systems, the religious and moral values, or the gender and kinship logics that localize ARTs. Extending their work, I contend that personhood is a key, hitherto under-examined mechanism for the localization of ARTs. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico City, I argue that ARTs are localized there through their recruitment into the (always local) project of re/constructing personhood, after it has been destabilized by infertility in this culturally pro-natal context.Typically, the use of ARTs is motivated by infertility, which can manifest in some sites as a sociomoral crisis in that it impedes one from being the kind of person one wishes to be and is socially expected to be. Specifically, in Mexico, it can impede one from being seen as a "complete" man or woman, becoming a mother or father, having a family, and feeling oneself to be a worthy recipient of God's will. Given this cultural model of personhood in which the reproductive aspects of gender, kinship, and the socio-religious order are privileged, I examine how individuals appear to adapt ARTs such that they may inhabit that model by achieving or emulating gender and kin ideals with the help of ARTs, and by sustaining a religious position with reference to the role of God in ARTs. It is by localizing ARTs-- i.e., by normalizing, naturalizing, and practicing them in particular ways-- that they explicitly hope to have a child, which implicitly can enable them to become socially valued as persons: as women/men, mothers/fathers, wives/husbands and "good" Catholics in this context.Further, by showing how these global biotechnologies acquire vernacular meanings, forms, and uses in terms of a local model of personhood, I do more than present a story about biotechnological localization: I also offer a novel approach to the "person." Rather than assume the person to be only a public, static, juridical category, I conceptualize it in subjective, processual, embodied, and situated terms. This conceptualization emerges through my ethnographic inquiry of ARTs, which are fundamentally person-making technologies: they not only help to make babies, they can also make specific adult persons. To the extent that persons are uniquely configured in particular cultural and historical contexts, a person-making technique and its effects are bound to differ as well. In this case, ARTs, in their vernacular form, illuminate and facilitate what it means to be a person in Mexico today.Ultimately, this dissertation draws upon and extends the scholarship within cultural, medical, and psychological anthropology science studies and Mexican studies. In doing so, it further elucidates the broader theoretical and cultural implications of the growing entanglement of persons and technologies.