Marcia C. Inhorn Explained

Marcia C. Inhorn
Nationality:American
Birth Date:1957
Education:PhD, MPH
Alma Mater:UC Berkeley
William K. Lanman Jr. professor
Employer:Yale University
University of Michigan
Boards:Elected Fellow, Society for Applied Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, 2007. Chair, Council on Middle East Studies, Yale University, 2008 - 2011. 2019- present. Founding Editor, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies
Spouse:Kirk Hooks
Children:Carl & Justine
Awards:Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Middle East Anthropology, 2015. JMEWS Book Award for The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East, Association of Middle East Women’s Studies, Middle East Studies Association, 2014 Diana Forsythe Prize for Outstanding Feminist Anthropological Research on Work, Science, and Technology, 2007. Eileen Basker Prize award for Book: Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions.

Marcia Claire Inhorn is a medical anthropologist and William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Yale University where she is Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies.[1] A specialist on Middle Eastern gender and health issues, Inhorn conducts research on the social impact of infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and Arab America. She has also completed a major study of egg freezing in the United States, described in her book Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs. Inhorn has published 21 books and more than 200 articles and book chapters.

Before joining the Yale faculty in 2008, Inhorn was a professor of medical anthropology at the University of Michigan and director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies. Inhorn was president of the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.

Research

Egypt

Inhorn’s works within feminist science and technology studies (STS), Middle East gender studies (including masculinity studies), and the anthropology of reproduction. She was the first anthropologist to study infertility and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) outside of the West, following the globalization of IVF to Egypt. Working in Egypt during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, she was able to document the significant social, religious, kinship, and gender ramifications of infertility and its treatment, as well as the impact that IVF had on both the medical system and gender relations in the country. In the decade between 1993-2003, she published three books called Quest for Conception (1994), Infertility and Patriarchy (1996), and Local Babies, Global Science (2003). These books could be described, respectively, as a classic medical anthropological ethnography, a gender studies ethnography, and an STS ethnography of the globalization of IVF into the Muslim Middle East.

Throughout these volumes, Inhorn charts Egyptian social and cultural understandings of infertility as a problem of personhood, marriage, kinship, and community life, while explaining how treatment options such as IVF are fundamentally shaped by local religious moralities. In the final book, based on research in Cairo’s IVF clinics, she argues that numerous “arenas of constraint” — social, structural, ideological, and practical — limit and sometimes curtail access to IVF, even among elite Egyptian couples who engage in transnational quests to create a “baby of the tubes.” These books have won several medical anthropology and feminist awards, including the American Anthropological Association’s Diana Forsythe Prize for outstanding feminist anthropological research on work, science, technology, and biomedicine, and the Society for Medical Anthropology’s Eileen Basker Memorial Prize for the most significant contribution to anthropological scholarship on gender and health.

Lebanon

Since 2003, Inhorn has undertaken three Middle Eastern research projects outside of Egypt. All have been funded by the National Science Foundation’s Cultural Anthropology and Science, Technology, and Society programs, as well as the U.S. Department of Education's Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad program. Her book, The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2012), is the culmination of one of these projects, based in Lebanon, and reflects her intellectual engagements in Middle East gender studies. Indeed, The New Arab Man is the first anthropological ethnography devoted to the exploration of Arab masculinity in the 21st century. It is also the only book focusing on male infertility and men’s uses of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), a variant of IVF designed to overcome this “hidden” male reproductive health problem. In The New Arab Man, Inhorn interrogates Raewyn Connell’s theory of “hegemonic masculinity,” suggesting that this concept, when applied to the Middle East, only serves to reinforce static dualisms and neo-Orientalist stereotypes. Inspired by the work of Raymond Williams, she offers a new concept of “emergent masculinities” as a way to encapsulate change over the male life course, between generations, and throughout social history, as men enact transformative events such as the 2011 Arab uprisings. As Inhorn argues in this book, many Middle Eastern men today are engaged in a self-conscious critique of local gender norms, attempting to unseat forms of patriarchy in the process. These men, who perhaps represent the “silent majority,” share their hopes, dreams, and desires in the book, which is filled with ethnographic stories of men’s lives, often in conflict-ridden settings. The New Arab Man based on research conducted with more than 300 Arab men, including Sunni and Shia Muslims, Christians, and Druze, from nearly a dozen Middle Eastern countries. The New Arab Man received the 2014 JMEWS Book Award from the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies. In 2015, it received the 2015 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology, an award given annually by the American Anthropological Association.

United Arab Emirates

Middle East’s most “global city” and a new medical tourism hub. Her book Cosmopolitan Conceptions: IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai (Duke University Press, 2015), explores the stories of infertile couples from fifty countries and five continents, all of whom have attempted to seek assisted conception in Dubai’s emergent IVF sector. The increasing global magnitude of travel to new cosmopolitan “reprohubs” such as Dubai is a reflection of the fact that IVF services are either absent, inaccessible, illegal, expensive, or harmful in many of the world’s nations, particularly in the global South. As the first ethnographic study of so-called “reproductive tourism,” Cosmopolitan Conceptions challenges this term as an inappropriate descriptor for couples’ painful and tortuous IVF journeys across international borders. Instead, Cosmopolitan Conceptions adopts the term “reprotravel” to represent these journeys—part of a new conceptual “reprolexicon” introduced in the book and inspired by recent developments in globalization theory. Cosmopolitan Conceptions ends with an activist agenda, arguing for alternative pathways to parenthood; support for the infertile, especially infertile women; and provision of safe, low-cost IVF services, particularly in the global South.

Arab America

Inhorn's most recent book is America’s Arab Refugees: Vulnerability and Health on the Margins (Stanford University Press, 2018), based on a five-year ethnographic study carried out in “Arab Detroit,” Michigan, the so-called “capital” of Arab America. Set against the backdrop of America’s stratified healthcare system and Detroit’s status as the poorest big city in America, America’s Arab Refugees provides the first in-depth analysis of the post-war health problems and struggles of infertile Arab refugees as they attempt to make new lives and new families in America. Forwarding the concept of “reproductive exile,” Inhorn examines the ways in which Arab refugees, particularly from the country of Iraq, have been made infertile by the toxic legacies of American military intervention. Yet, after being forced to flee, they are exiled from America’s costly healthcare system by poverty and reproductive racism. The book also interrogates the widespread anti-Arab/anti-Muslim sentiment that has been felt in the United States since 9/11, but that has been significantly exacerbated by the contemporary political climate and imposition of the “Muslim ban.” To examine these new forms of racism, America’s Arab Refugees draws inspiration from intersectionality theory as developed by US Black feminist scholars. One chapter of the book compares the interlocking and multiplicative forms of discrimination faced by both Arab and Black populations living side by side on the margins of Detroit. America’s Arab Refugees thus represents the first attempt to apply intersectionality theory to the study of Arab lives in the US, showing that this theoretical approach has great utility in interrogating axes of oppression among marginalized immigrant and refugee communities. Ultimately, Inhorn’s book interrogates the health costs of war, the health inequities and structural vulnerabilities faced by Muslim refugees in this country, and the US government’s moral duty to assist those whose lives it has destroyed through its ongoing wars in the Middle East.

United States

Inhorn’s most recent scholarly project is based solely in the US and supported by the US National Science Foundation. It focuses on oocyte cryopreservation (egg freezing), which is increasingly being used by women around the world to preserve and extend their fertility. Experimentally developed for women facing medical conditions such as cancer, the technology has moved into IVF clinics since 2012, where it is being used by otherwise healthy women. Although most of the feminist and media commentary about egg freezing focuses on women’s career ambitions, in-depth interviews show a quite different story about women’s motivations and experiences. Inhorn’s ethnographic research with 150 women who froze their eggs shows that egg freezing is largely about partnership problems among highly educated professional women who are hoping for the “three P’s” of partnership, pregnancy, and parenthood. However, these women lack the “three E’s”—namely, men who are eligible, educated, and equal. This “mating gap” reflects growing but little-discussed gender imbalances in higher education, not only in America, but in more than 60 percent of the world’s nations. Educated women’s inability to form stable reproductive relationships is leading to the global egg freezing turn. Inhorn’s study has been featured in multiple media outlets, including NPR, CNN, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and Jezebel. Inhorn has also appeared in multiple podcasts, radio talk shows, and documentary films, such as Netflix’s “Explained” feature on “Fertility.”

Editorships

Inhorn is the founding editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS).[2] She is also Co-Editor in Chief of Reproductive BioMedicine and Society, Associate editor for population and health of the journal Global Public Health,[3] and Co-editor of the "Fertility, Reproduction, and Sexuality" series at Berghahn Books.[4] She is also editor or co-editor of fourteen volumes on medical anthropology, gender, reproduction, and the Middle East.

Publications

Books

Edited volumes

Selected book chapters

Selected journal articles

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Welcome - Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. www.yale.edu.
  2. Web site: Middle East Women's Studies (AMEWS). amews.org. 2017-04-22. https://web.archive.org/web/20110903225533/http://www.amews.org/site/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52&Itemid=55. 2011-09-03. dead.
  3. Web site: Global Public Health. tandf.co.uk.
  4. Web site: series - Berghahn Books. www.berghahnbooks.com.