지원사업
학술연구/단체지원/교육 등 연구자 활동을 지속하도록 DBpia가 지원하고 있어요.
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연구자들이 자신의 연구와 전문성을 널리 알리고, 새로운 협력의 기회를 만들 수 있는 네트워킹 공간이에요.
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This paper examines the concepts of nature and culture in a clinical setting, focusing specifically on the tactical rhetoric of nature. Pregnancy has been regarded as a normal event in women`s lives and an event beyond the human intervention. However, the appearance of assisted reproductive technology has changed the meaning of nature in the context of pregnancy, while enabling people to consider different methods to become pregnant. For this study, I conducted participant observation in a fertility clinic in South Korea for four months in 2010. During my research, I interviewed the staff members formally and informally, while observing the medical practices and the interactions between staffs and patients. As it is observed in the case study of the fertility clinic in South Korea, the category of natural pregnancy is altered when the new type of treatment is introduced. Nature is neither fixed nor exists in essence; the term is rather manipulated tactically by the medical professionals. In different steps, the meaning of natural pregnancy is sharply changed. If technological intervention fails at certain steps, doctors are requested to explain what the problem is. In this context, they tend to conceptualize the failing technological step as natural pregnancy, while problematizing the patient body as the cause. As a result, biomedicine and medical technology can avoid the charge of the failure, since the failure has nothing to do with human or technological intervention, but it is due to the mysterious design of nature. In short, biomedicine justifies its own explanatory power and authority by constituting different conceptual boundaries between nature and culture, and by shifting the responsibility on the failure of treatment. Finally, despite nature is regarded as inferior to culture in the clinical discourse, all people in the clinic still prefer to natural pregnancy. Moreover, IVF does not enable all patients to have babies although it is believed to conquer the fertilization problem. Someone can become pregnant, but others cannot. The medical professionals say that those who are supposed to succeed will succeed. At this point, the faith that biomedicine has overcome the inferiority of nature waives, and the fatalism of infertility, which seemed to be abandoned by biomedicine, reappears in the 21 century`s fertility clinics.
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