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This chapter draws on biographical interviews to analyze identity-based interpretations of inequalities by disabled people in France, as these understandings are formed and transformed over the course of their lives. We combined the material from two different studies to create a corpus of 65 life stories from working-age people with contrasting impairments in terms of type, degree, and onset, as well as various profiles in terms of gender, race, and class. When talking about the inequalities they face, respondents commonly made use of identity labels (gender, class, race, disability), among those available in their micro and macro environments. They usually presented these categories as separate and cumulative, and only a few upper-class disabled women developed reflections in line with an intersectional model. This fragmentation of identity categories translated into the framing of each inequality encountered through a single lens. Respondents mentioned race, class, or gender mainly when evoking topics and contexts that the public debate highlights as problematic, while their references to disability covered a variety of disadvantages. Although the interview situation might have fueled this framing, we also showed that certain earlier socialization processes led people to believe that their disability was the source of the inequalities they encountered. Lastly, we identified three turning points that encourage shifts in the interpretation of inequalities; these are the availability of a new label to qualify one's experience, a competing identity-based interpretation for a mechanism, and access to a different, intersectional model of inequality.

This chapter investigates knowledge and practices relating to the ‘right timing’ in reproductive biomedicine in Switzerland. More precisely, it focuses on the effects of an anticipatory regime (Adams, Murphy, & Clarke, 2009) on women's experiences of age-related infertility. As assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) promise to intervene in the fixed ‘biological facts’ of fertility decline to render reproduction and the timing of motherhood more flexible, manageable and controllable, this chapter explores the effects of anticipation on women's experiences and negotiations of age-related infertility and ARTs. It sheds light on an anticipatory regime which can be called ‘motherhood as right timing’. It shows how, in this regime, the temporality of the lifecourse is brought back to a biological temporality and how expectations and injunctions towards managing and controlling time contain the possibility of their failure, as they are associated with a multiplication of uncertain, complex and resisting biologies. At the core of the practices and politics of anticipating fertility decline, there is a tension between acting upon and being acted upon time, which are embedded in a moral economy of responsibility and volition in which women are blamed, or blame themselves, for not anticipating what is by definition beyond individual control and anticipation.

This edited collection proposes an interdisciplinary and integrated approach to the study of reproductive technologies (RTs), which reflects the fact that many people use different technologies throughout their lifecourse and resists the disciplinary siloing of research on these technologies. The ever-expanding availability of RTs, the continued roll-out of ‘family planning’ and maternity services across low- and middle-income settings and the rapid development of the fertility industry mean that it is more likely than ever that individuals, especially women and trans* people, will engage with more than one RT at some point in their life. These multiple engagements with RTs will affect users' expectations and uptake, as well as the technologies' availability, commercial success, ethical status and social meanings. We offer this book as part of a wider movement in the study of reproduction and RTs, which takes inspiration from the reproductive justice framework to address forms of exclusion, discrimination and stratification that are perpetuated in the development and application of RTs and the ways in which they are studied and theorised. Here, we introduce the project and outline the structure of the book.

Here we provide a short reflection on the persistent theme of knowledge in reproductive studies which allows us to draw out further insights from each of the chapters.

This chapter describes how ambitious, educated, professional women engage with a range of reproductive technologies across their lifetime in an attempt to achieve the much-lauded post-feminist ideal of the perfect ‘work-life balance’ and ‘having it all’. Drawing on interviews, this chapter shares women's experiences of using several reproductive technologies over a 15-year period and how their configurations of bodies, technologies and responsibilities change. In our initial conversations, bodies were seen as a source of disruption to well-laid plans; bodies bled, throbbed, conceived, aborted and were often incompatible with the many social expectations and demands on young women's lives to balance their professional and private lives. At this time, women were attempting to control and direct their malleable bodies using different technologies, a tool, that were accompanied with new gendered responsibilities to make the right choices about if and when to menstruate, to get pregnant, to become a mother and to be intimate. Over time these technologies proved to be imperfect and often failed to deliver the promised future and a counter-narrative emerges in which bodies are not so malleable and technologies are less of tool and more of an additional burden. By looking at interactions of several reproductive technologies over time, experiences of bodies, of technologies and of responsibilities change; they are not static but more cumulative.