Performing in Glass: Reproduction, Technology, Performance and the Bio-Spectacular

  • Anna Furse
Part of the Performance Interventions book series (PIPI)

Abstract

The human egg is a human future. More precisely, the human egg is a potential human future. A baby girl carries all the eggs she will ever need in a lifetime inside her ovaries.2 And inside each of these eggs is the genetic material which, if fertilized, could make another baby girl, who contains the potential future of another baby (girl) inside her ad infinitum. A woman’s future in her own lifetime always contains the issue of whether or not she will use her eggs to become a mother. What this might mean is the matter of human drama, both on stage and off. In this chapter I will try and locate some of these dramas as they have been written for the stage, from a contemporary (feminist) perspective and with specific reference to the spectacular in In Vitro Fertilization (IVF)3 and Assisted Reproduction Technology (ART).

Keywords

Assist Reproduction Technology Childless Woman Baby Girl Lesbian Couple Human Drama 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Notes

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    Jacqueline Brown, Thinking Egg, quoted in Deborah Law and Sandra Peaty, Angels and Mechanics, Catologue (London Arts Board/ Arts Council, 1996), p.47.Google Scholar
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    ‘At twenty week’s gestation, the peak of the female’s oogonial load, the fetus holds 6–7 million eggs. In the next twenty weeks of wombing, 4 million of those eggs will die, and by puberty all but 400,000 will have taken to the wing, without a squabble, without a peep’ (Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography (London: Virago Press, 1999), p.2).Google Scholar
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    See Lee M. Silver, Remaking Eden: Cloning, Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humankind? (New York: Avon Books, 1997).Google Scholar
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Copyright information

© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2006

Authors and Affiliations

  • Anna Furse

There are no affiliations available

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