Please join us for a special double seminar featuring two visiting researchers at the Morgan Centre for Research Into Everyday lives. Light refreshments will be available from 3pm.
- The ageing of family change - Torbjörn Bildtgård
What happens when family change grows old? This presentation brings together Swedish research on family relationships in later life against the background of half a century of family change. Current cohorts of older Swedes have lived their adult lives during and after a period of profound institutional, legal and cultural changes surrounding family life, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. These transformations have shaped both their family histories and their present relationships.
The presentation illustrates these developments through research projects by myself, conducted together with Peter Öberg, covering divorce and repartnering in later life, ageing stepfamilies and kinless ageing. The central argument is that family relationships in later life reflect both accumulated experiences across the life course and the particular conditions of ageing, including greater freedom in the third age, combined with a growing awareness of limited remaining life time.
The presentation asks how family change reshapes the experience of ageing, including opportunities for intimacy and autonomy, relationships across generations, and access to support and care. It considers later life as both an outcome and a site of family change.
- A new gift for the barren ones: Examining the introduction of egg donation in Norway – Ingvill Stuvøy
In the Spring of 2020, the Norwegian Parliament voted in favour of legalizing egg donation. More specifically, the resolution said to remove the article in the Norwegian Biotechnology act prohibiting the insertion of an egg from one woman into the uterus of another. Thus, the human egg was mobilized, after decades of being ‘immobilized’ and sought kept in place. In this paper I examine the mobilization of the egg in this new legal situation in Norway, drawing on documents and interview material. Analysing the politicians’ enactment, the bureaucratic operationalization of the law into concrete guidelines, as well as the fertility clinics’ introduction of egg donation as part of their services, I ask: What characterizes the extraction of eggs from one woman and transfer to another, and how is the egg transformed as it moves from one woman to another via the clinic and is aligned with legal provisions and guidelines? The analysis suggests that the mobilization of the egg requires the transformation of one woman’s reproductive capacity into a cell that may be gifted to someone else without creating bonds that disturb the normative ideal of family. The problem of the gift – always retaining something of the donor in it – is handled through the requirement of unknown donation, where donor and recipient shall not know each other, neither before nor after the donation. The donor code is instrumental in that regard, ensuring that the donor is traceable while not present in the lives of those in the receiving end. These findings shed light on both the biopolitics of the state and the marketization of reproduction, both oriented towards the (assumed) desires of exclusive parenthood and a bonded family among involuntarily childless couples.
Speaker bios:
Torbjörn Bildtgård is an associate professor in sociology at the Department of Social Work at Stockholm University in Sweden. Together with Professor Peter Öberg at the University of Gävle, he has been studying family relationships in later life for the past 20 years, exploring topics such as divorce and repartnering in later life, ageing stepfamilies and ageing without a family. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Ageing and Later Life.
Ingvill Stuvøy is an associate professor in sociology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and holds a PhD in sociology on transnational surrogacy (2018). Her primary research agendas concern assisted and third-party reproduction and alternative family-making, as well as reproductive politics and markets. Stuvøy’s work is published in e.g. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society; Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online; Anthropology & Medicine, and Critical Social Policy.
