The fate of fatherhood: The impact of Assisted Reproductive Technologies on male parenthood and power

Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) are qualitatively changing the means through which children are created, and the growing distance between heterosexual intercourse and human procreation has vast implications for ideologies of motherhood and fatherhood, which also implies monumental changes to power relations between the sexes. The overwhelming majority of scholarship on the subject involves feminist assessments of the effects of ARTs on women and mothers. Surprisingly little attention has been given to the impact of reproductive technologies on the male institution of fatherhood, but this dissertation argues that fatherhood will be even more radically affected than motherhood by advances in the field of ART.;This theory is developed by locating ARTs within the capitalist system of profit-driven commercial development and technological advancement. Employing Marxist methods of analysis enables an assessment of the ability of reproductive technologies to continue expanding with consumer demand and therefore manipulate, rather than be limited by, existing ideologies of family and parenthood. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that ARTs widen and multiply the definitively mothering roles a female can experience to the extent that motherhood eclipses and subsumes the category of father, thereby threatening the discrete, gender-specific institution of male fatherhood.;An historical analysis of the previously perceived crises in modern American fatherhood reveals that contemporary capitalist advancement presents an unprecedented threat to the institution by invalidating the two foundational characteristics that have previously upheld its gender specificity: breadwinning and paternity. Because the more familiar concern of the feminization of parenthood is now compounded by the feminization of reproduction through ARTs, contemporary fatherhood is facing an unparalleled crisis in the degendering of the institution.;This dissertation also engages works of literary and visual art that instantiate and play out the current trajectory of ART development and are therefore able to identify potentially unanticipated social consequences. Science fiction novels by Marge Piercy, Theodore Sturgeon, and Katherine Burdekin and the visual art of Matthew Barney are shown to flesh out prospective technological advancements in ways that not only suggest the likely detrimental consequences of ARTs for fathers but also draw out the broader social and gendered implications of such change.