Beyond the Egg and the Sperm?: How Science Has Revised a Romance through Reproductomics

Abstract

Social scientists have shown that scientific characterizations of the egg and the sperm are shaped by gender stereotypes and cultural values. How have such characterizations been transformed by a recent embrace of -omics, when studies of reproduction increasingly go beyond genomics to incorporate proteomics, transcriptomics, exposomics, and other -omics perspectives? Scientists studying reproduction and analyzing eggs, sperm, and embryos are in some ways reimagining the roles, identities, and functions of gametes as fundamentally shaped by other molecular entities and environments. Such relational understandings of substances and processes, however, continue to operate through a teleology that often conscripts more nuanced -omics reflection into familiar genomic visions of sex and reproduction. While ideas of the gene as an alienable object may be unraveling, -omics efforts to go beyond the egg and the sperm are frequently constricted by an understanding of reproduction that remains tied to individualized bodies and by a genomically infused interpretation of the gamete as life itself.

Biocircularities: New Formations of Embodied Time

“…Understanding why, how, and in what forms linear frameworks endure is vital, because the hegemony of linear narrative forms and developmental temporalities can inhibit the emergence of other analyses that might be more expansive, more fruitful or more politically promising. For example, Janelle Lamoreaux, revisiting Emily Martin's classic text 'The Egg and the Sperm', suggests that the emergence of a 'more relational, contextual, and processual biology [is] limited by broader narratives of reproduction that have largely stayed the same' (Lamoreaux, 2022(Lamoreaux, : 1183. In Lappé and Jeffries Hein's paper, the authors complexify this coexistence argument by demonstrating that discursive constructions of the placenta draw both on linear notions of time and reproduction while also reflecting recursive embodiment: the ongoing transformations that take place in the laboratory as the material of the placenta is continually materially re-made and reinvested with meaning.…”

“…Rather than seeing lifetimes as cultural objects – narratives grafted onto implacable and ‘objective’ biological time – contributors to this special section draw upon ethnographic research in laboratories, clinics, cities and homes to explore the deeply co-constructed nature of social and biological time. In this introduction to the special section we contextualise the new concept of biocircularity within the interdisciplinary study of the lifetime in technoscience (Adams et al, 2009; Blackman, 2016; Gibbons and Mathers, 2021; Greco and Graber, 2022; Lamoreaux, 2022; Lappé and Landecker, 2015; Lock, 2013; Mansfield, 2017; Murphy, 2017; Warin et al, 2016). We argue that biocircularities offer a new possibility of understanding, systematising and comparing the multiple and uneven temporalities the body enfolds.…”

What Biological Stories are Americans Telling About the Egg and the Sperm? A Study Inspired by Emily Martin 30 Years Later

“…During this same period, scientists began moving away from simplistic depictions of agentic sperm and awaiting eggs (Lamoreaux 2022); now one encounters descriptions of sperm moving aimlessly in circles, the musculature of the female reproductive tract directing them toward the fallopian tubes, and eggs issuing chemical signals to draw in sperm (see Eisenbach 2007 for a review). There has also been more scientific attention to and public awareness of genetics (e.g., Nelkin and Lindee 2004), which can be associated with thinking about eggs and sperm as contributing "equally" to conception (Almeling and Waggoner 2013).…”