On Having an Own Child
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€47.99
A01=Karin Lesnik-Oberstein
Author_Karin Lesnik-Oberstein
Category=JMC
Child and Adolescent Studies
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eq_isMigrated=1
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Product details
- ISBN 9781855755451
- Dimensions: 147 x 230mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jan 2008
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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How are ideas of genetics, 'blood', the family, and relatedness created and consumed?This is the first book ever to consider in depth why people want children, and specifically why people want children produced by reproductive technologies (such as IVF, ICSI etc). As the book demonstrates, even books ostensibly devoted to the topic of why people want children and the reasons for using reproductive technologies tend to start with the assumption that this is either simply a biological drive to reproduce, or a socially instilled desire. This book uses psychoanalysis not to provide an answer in its own right, but as an analytic tool to probe more deeply the problems of these assumptions. The idea that reproductive technologies simply supply an 'own' child is questioned in this volume in terms of asking how and why reproductive technologies are seen to create this 'ownness'.Given that it is the idea of an 'own' child that underpins and justifies the whole use of reproductive technologies, this book is a crucial and wholly original intervention in this complex and highly topical area.
All of Karin Lesnik-Oberstein's academic research based on inter- and multi- disciplinary research has been on childhood as a cultural and historical construction. Her first monograph (published by the Clarendon Press of OUP in 1994) addressed this issue through the lens of children's literature studies. Subsequent work analyses childhood as an identity in fields ranging from psychology, anthropology, sociology, and history, to law and medicine. Her work on childhood is primarily based on approaches drawn from Freudian psychoanalytic thinking, through the particular use made of psychoanalysis in turn by thinkers such as Professor Jacqueline Rose and Erica Burman in literature and psychology respectively. Her edited volumes have drawn together fields in innovative ways and demonstrated how this kind of analysis of identity can illuminate thinking across a range of disciplines. That her approach is not limited to childhood as such, but extends to any thinking about identity and meaning is demonstrated also by her latest edited book on productions of gender and sexuality, 'The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair' (Manchester University Press, 2007).
