Men breeding men

Political and social debates and events, cultural and religious classifications and medical research and the mapping of the genome have today diversified and complexified the racial and racist discourse even further (Burdet 2007). The cultural

or social turn in race theories following the atrocities of the Second World War, when eugenics and racial thinking was pushed to its limit, has had an impact on the way scientists think of racial categories today. Notably, eugenics is not the same as the contemporary genetic discourse. Nevertheless, the idea of genetic hereditary qualities (the second strand) is clearly expressed in the answer to The New York Times by the managing director of Cryos International, Ole Schou: ‘It’s not that people want superchildren… It’s that they want someone like them, someone they can relate to’

(Alvarez 2004). The article thus allows for the concept of relation to be equalled to sameness or common ancestry, which is thought to give a common frame of reference outside time and space.

The denial of the desire of at least some future parents’ for a ‘superchild’ is strongly negated in the donors’ many academic and physical talents listed in the article and on the website which also state the donors’ height, weight, eye colour and ethnic origin.

Though it would be a mistake to assume that all prospective parents browsing Cryos International’s website wish to reproduce a certain genetic compound, it is likewise difficult to believe that none entertain the thought. The message on the website is certainly one of the option of choosing the gene pool. What is at stake here is the social genetic imaginary (Franklin 2000), or in Anthias and Yuval-Davis’ terms, a social ‘ontology of collectivity or belongingness… postulated through common origin or destiny’ (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1996: 2). Issues of relations, relatedness, in terms of reproduced sameness are socially imagined as part of a genetic connectedness, which determines qualities of personality, frame of mind and so on. It also determines a familiarity among people who are perceived to share genetic features and cultural heritage.

In the light of this emphasised – though not absolute – cultural importance of origin, some theorists focus on a perceived stability of the genome and genetic heritage.

Additionally, these theorists warn of the risk that the ability to choose a future child’s ancestry and the idea of a perfect life embedded in the genes will have social consequences and lead to discrimination ‘against difference at the point of origin of life’ (Le Breton 2004: 8). The argument states that due to the social, historical and political structures of most western societies today, ‘white’ children may be seen as

having a better opportunity at a more perfect life than non-white children. This was the reason behind the decision by an Italian woman of African descent to give birth to a ‘white’ child by artificial insemination. ‘[S]he believed that a white child had a better future than one of mixed race’¹²⁴ (William and Hawkes in The Times of London 1993, quoted in Berkowitz and Snyder 1998). Reiterating this event, Berkowitz and Snyder are not saying that the world would be ‘white’ if we could all choose to have

‘white’ babies – ambiguity is still highly present on these issues. However, with colonial categorisation fresh in mind, it is not an unfamiliar thought in the history of sperm banks and other controlled reproduction to have perceived ‘social reasons’ for choosing artificial insemination and population control. Minority groups have been forcefully sterilised for what was seen as the common good of the nation in Scandinavia for centuries (Sweden being the last country to abandon the practice in the 1970s) and Roma women are sterilised in Slovakia today (Burdet 2007).

Consider also the American millionaire Robert Graham, who created a sperm bank for intelligent people in the early 1980s, urging Nobel Prize winners to make deposits (Plotz 2005). Graham’s idea was that the ‘white’ American race was intellectually deteriorating and needed a boost of ‘intelligent genes’. Furthermore, the philosophy was to provide the users with a choice of a better life for their child. With Graham’s

‘Repository of Germinal Choice’ it was no longer merely a question of bringing a child into the world, but an issue of bringing a healthy, intelligent, ‘white’, heterosexual and able-bodied child into the world. The sperm bank created over 200 lives before Graham’s death and the closure of the bank in 1999. The idea of the sperm bank as we know it today, in which a choice of visible, physical and disease-free qualities are given, was born with Graham and, though it has undoubtedly developed since and though there are other ways of accomplishing genetically-assisted pregnancies, its origin is thus not entirely innocent but rather connected to the eugenics of the colonial era, the Nordic eugenics and the Nazi’s positive¹²⁵

‘Lebensborn’ project (Plotz 2005).

124 Her partner was ‘white’ and a child produced by the two of them would have been of ‘mixed race’

(William and Hawkes in The Times of London 1993, quoted in Berkowitz and Snyder 1998).

125 The meaning of positive and negative eugenics is not about the value of the science: positive eugenics urges people with desired qualities to procreate, whereas negative eugenics denies procreation to those with undesirable qualities.

Through the social genetic imaginary of the Viking portrayed on the Cryos International website and in Alvarez’ article, the common past of the Nordic people is constructed as a pure and desirable identity worth reproducing. It is ur-Scandinavian, and it is masculine. Again, the perception put forth seems to circumscribe female participation in the tracing of ancestry as well as prescribing a heterosexual norm.

Women’s bodies are either not part of the equation or they are mere wombs or containers that help the uncontaminated, male reproduction. Alvarez’ article is about college boys, sperm and Vikings. Because of the strong connotations between the Viking imaginary and masculinity, the narrative slips into a tale of the male birth ritual (McClintock 1995) in which the female body is absent or by-passed. The fascination is with cloning of the same, Le Breton (2004) asserts. These journalistic representations latch onto the social genetic imaginary, which in turn calls upon reflections of early genetic research such as eugenics and racial, mental and able-bodied population control. It is a naturalisation of genetic destiny.