Gender Studies Programme
Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China
Professor Ayo Wahlberg
University of Copenhagen
DATE: Friday, 30 November 2018
TIME: 2:30-4:00 pm
VENUE: Room 10.66, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower
Description:
Author Ayo Wahlberg will discuss the difficult birth and routinization of assisted reproductive technologies in China. Wahlberg’s new book (Good Quality, University of California Press 2018) situates the development of sperm banking in the political history of China’s restrictive reproductive policies. Based on seven years of fieldwork at the world’s largest fertility clinic in Changsha, Wahlberg documents how sperm banking practices are caught up in the intense pressures to produce high quality children, a purported national “sperm crisis” in the context of worsening environmental pollution, and debates
over the vitality of men, their sperm cells, and the nation itself.
About the Speaker:
Ayo Wahlberg is Professor MSO in the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China, co-editor of Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making, and Associate Editor at the interdisciplinary journal BioSocieties.
This book talk is co-hosted by the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine and the Gender Studies Programme in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong.
All welcome.