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Laskawska, Patrycja (2022) Muslim women of South-Asian origin’s constructions of assisted reproductive technologies in the UK: a Foucauldian discourse analysis. Doctoral thesis, London Metropolitan University.
This study employed Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) to explore South-Asian-Muslim women’s talk about Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) in the context of their socio-cultural environment.
A critical review of the literature demonstrated the problematization of ARTs and women in the context of their socio-cultural and bio-medical environments, in the United Kingdom and worldwide.
Six South-Asian-Muslim women who underwent NHS ARTs in the UK were interviewed. Collected data were analysed using FDA and with a social constructionist positioning. After available discursive constructions of ARTs were mapped out, their impact on subjectivity, technologies of self and practice were addressed, along with the role of National Health Service fertility clinics and social environment on these constructions.
The analysis identified that participants construct their understanding of ARTs in relation to:
(1) biomedical and sociocultural hegemony;
(2) being a woman’s problem and
(3) being a liberating event. They all presented dualities and contradictions resulting from the subject positions made available.
For all three sites, participants alternated between the subject positions of ‘eligible patient’, ‘respectable woman’ and ‘responsible woman’, with a pattern of being silenced.
This study has demonstrated that the way South-Asian-Muslim women talk about ART is complex, problematising and marginalising through dominant biomedical and sociocultural discourses. Participants in this research used silencing as well as their talk to resist dominant discourses.
This research recommends that the humanistic approach of CoP could potentially encourage awareness about issues regarding ART and how it is perceived/framed within the South-Asian-Muslim minority and later, via pluralism and interculturalism, support the formation of new, perhaps more positive discourses.
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