Marcia Inhorn
Encyclopedia
Marcia C. Inhorn is the William K. Lanman Jr. professor
of anthropology
and international affairs
in the Department of Anthropology and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University
. She also serves as Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies.
Before coming to Yale
in 2008, Inhorn was a professor of medical anthropology
at the University of Michigan
and director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies there. As a medical anthropologist, Inhorn served as president of the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association
and program chair of the Yale SMA conference on "Medical Anthropology at the Intersections: Celebrating 50 Years of Interdisiciplinarity." Currently, she serves on the Middle East Studies Association Board of Directors.
A specialist on Middle Eastern gender and health issues, Inhorn has conducted research on the social impact of infertility
and assisted reproductive technologies in Egypt
, Lebanon
, the United Arab Emirates
, and Arab America over the past 20 years.
(ARTS) in Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and Arab America over the past 20 years. She is the first anthropologist to study infertility in the non-Western world, beginning with research in the late 1980s among the urban Egyptian poor. There, she discovered the complex “quest for conception”—involving both traditional and Western biomedicine—undertaken by many infertile women in an attempt to overcome their stigmatizing childlessness. She also theorized infertility as a form of “lived patriarchy” for poor women, even though many poor husbands in Egypt were supportive and loving toward their infertile wives. Returning to Egypt in the mid-1990s, Inhorn examined the introduction of both in vitro fertilization
(IVF) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection
(ICSI) (a variant of IVF to overcome male infertility) in that country. She discovered the numerous “arenas of constraint,” or structural, ideological, and practical obstacles and apprehensions faced by urban Egyptian elites in their struggles to overcome infertility through the use of ARTs. These two research projects resulted in the publication of Inhorn’s “Egyptian trilogy”—three award-winning books on the impact of infertility, childlessness, reproductive medicine, and the globalization of ARTs to Egypt at the turn of the century.
is highly prevalent in the Middle East and is probably genetically related to consanguineous (cousin) marriage. Increasingly, Middle Eastern men are viewing male infertility as a medical condition to be overcome through ICSI, and are demonstrating their “emergent masculinities” through their engagements with emerging ARTs. These ARTs include new forms of gamete
donation, as well as surrogacy
, which have been allowed by some Shia Islamic religious authorities in Iran
and Lebanon. Inhorn’s newest book, The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities and Islam in the Middle East, is being published by Princeton University Press (2011).
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...
of anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
and international affairs
International affairs
International affairs may refer to:* Diplomacy* International relations* International Affairs Association* International Affairs , a peer-reviewed academic journal first published in 1924...
in the Department of Anthropology and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
. She also serves as Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies.
Before coming to Yale
YALE
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in 2008, Inhorn was a professor of medical anthropology
Medical anthropology
Medical anthropology is an interdisciplinary field which studies "human health and disease, health care systems, and biocultural adaptation". It views humans from multidimensional and ecological perspectives...
at the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
and director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies there. As a medical anthropologist, Inhorn served as president of the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association
American Anthropological Association
The American Anthropological Association is a professional organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 11,000 members, the Arlington, Virginia based association includes archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, biological anthropologists, linguistic...
and program chair of the Yale SMA conference on "Medical Anthropology at the Intersections: Celebrating 50 Years of Interdisiciplinarity." Currently, she serves on the Middle East Studies Association Board of Directors.
A specialist on Middle Eastern gender and health issues, Inhorn has conducted research on the social impact of infertility
Infertility
Infertility primarily refers to the biological inability of a person to contribute to conception. Infertility may also refer to the state of a woman who is unable to carry a pregnancy to full term...
and assisted reproductive technologies in Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
, Lebanon
Lebanon
Lebanon , officially the Republic of LebanonRepublic of Lebanon is the most common term used by Lebanese government agencies. The term Lebanese Republic, a literal translation of the official Arabic and French names that is not used in today's world. Arabic is the most common language spoken among...
, the United Arab Emirates
United Arab Emirates
The United Arab Emirates, abbreviated as the UAE, or shortened to "the Emirates", is a state situated in the southeast of the Arabian Peninsula in Western Asia on the Persian Gulf, bordering Oman, and Saudi Arabia, and sharing sea borders with Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Iran.The UAE is a...
, and Arab America over the past 20 years.
Editing
Inhorn is the current and founding editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. She is also associate editor for population and health of the journal Global Public Health, and co-editor of the "Fertility, Reproduction, and Sexuality" series at Berghahn Books.. She is also editor or co-editor of eight volumes on medical anthropology, gender, reproduction, and the Middle East.Egypt
A specialist on Middle Eastern gender and health issues, Inhorn has conducted research on the social impact of infertility and assisted reproductive technologiesAssisted reproductive technology
Assisted reproductive technology is a general term referring to methods used to achieve pregnancy by artificial or partially artificial means. It is reproductive technology used primarily in infertility treatments. Some forms of ART are also used in fertile couples for genetic reasons...
(ARTS) in Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and Arab America over the past 20 years. She is the first anthropologist to study infertility in the non-Western world, beginning with research in the late 1980s among the urban Egyptian poor. There, she discovered the complex “quest for conception”—involving both traditional and Western biomedicine—undertaken by many infertile women in an attempt to overcome their stigmatizing childlessness. She also theorized infertility as a form of “lived patriarchy” for poor women, even though many poor husbands in Egypt were supportive and loving toward their infertile wives. Returning to Egypt in the mid-1990s, Inhorn examined the introduction of both in vitro fertilization
In vitro fertilisation
In vitro fertilisation is a process by which egg cells are fertilised by sperm outside the body: in vitro. IVF is a major treatment in infertility when other methods of assisted reproductive technology have failed...
(IVF) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection
Intracytoplasmic sperm injection
Intracytoplasmic sperm injection is an in vitro fertilization procedure in which a single sperm is injected directly into an egg.-Indications:...
(ICSI) (a variant of IVF to overcome male infertility) in that country. She discovered the numerous “arenas of constraint,” or structural, ideological, and practical obstacles and apprehensions faced by urban Egyptian elites in their struggles to overcome infertility through the use of ARTs. These two research projects resulted in the publication of Inhorn’s “Egyptian trilogy”—three award-winning books on the impact of infertility, childlessness, reproductive medicine, and the globalization of ARTs to Egypt at the turn of the century.
Lebanon
Since 2000, Inhorn has undertaken three more major research projects on Middle Eastern infertility and assisted reproduction, with support of the U.S. Department of Education. Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Program and the Cultural Anthropology Program of the National Science Foundation. As a Visiting Research Professor at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon in 2003, Inhorn examined the impact of male infertility in the era of ICSI. Inhorn discovered that male infertilityMale infertility
Male infertility refers to the inability of a male to achieve a pregnancy in a fertile female. In humans it accounts for 40-50% of infertility. Male infertility is commonly due to deficiencies in the semen, and semen quality is used as a surrogate measure of male fecundity.-Pre-testicular...
is highly prevalent in the Middle East and is probably genetically related to consanguineous (cousin) marriage. Increasingly, Middle Eastern men are viewing male infertility as a medical condition to be overcome through ICSI, and are demonstrating their “emergent masculinities” through their engagements with emerging ARTs. These ARTs include new forms of gamete
Gamete
A gamete is a cell that fuses with another cell during fertilization in organisms that reproduce sexually...
donation, as well as surrogacy
Surrogacy
Surrogacy is an arrangement in which a woman carries and delivers a child for another couple or person. This woman may be the child's genetic mother , or she may carry the pregnancy to delivery after having an embryo, to which she has no genetic relationship whatsoever, transferred to her uterus...
, which have been allowed by some Shia Islamic religious authorities in Iran
Iran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
and Lebanon. Inhorn’s newest book, The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities and Islam in the Middle East, is being published by Princeton University Press (2011).
Books: Authored
. Winner of the Diana Forsythe Prize for Outstanding Feminist Anthropological Research on Work, Science, and Technology, including Biomedicine; Society for the Anthropology of Work and The Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC), American Anthropological Association, 2007Books: Edited volumes
(Winner of Council on Anthropology and Reproduction, Society for Medical Anthropology, Book Prize for “Most Notable Recent Edited Collection").Selected book chapters
- Inhorn, Marcia C. (2010) “’Assisted’ Reproduction in Global Dubai: Reproductive Tourists and Their Helpers.” In Globalized Motherhood, eds. Wendy Chavkin and JaneMaree Maher, pp. 180-202. New York: Routledge Press.
- Inhorn, Marcia C., and Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli (2010) “Male Infertility, Chronicity, and the Plight of Palestinian Men in Israel and Lebanon,” in Chronic Conditions, Fluid States: Globalization and the Anthropology of Illness, eds. Lenore Manderson and Carolyn Smith-Morris, pp. 77–95. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
- Birenbaum-Carmeli, Daphna, and Marcia C. Inhorn (2009) “Introduction: Assisting Reproduction, Testing Genes: Global Encounters with New Biotechnologies.” In Assisting Reproduction, Testing Genes: Global Encounters with New Biotechnologies, eds. Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli and Marcia C. Inhorn, pp. 1–26. New York: Berghahn Books.
- Inhorn, Marcia C. (2009) “Middle Eastern Masculinities in the Age of Assisted Reproductive Technologies.” In Assisting Reproduction, Testing Genes: Global Encounters with New Biotechnologies, eds. Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli and Marcia C. Inhorn, pp. 86–110. New York: Berghahn Books.
- Inhorn, Marcia C., Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, Tine, Goldberg, Helene, and Maruska La Cour Mosegaard (2009)“Introduction—The Second Sex in Reproduction? Men, Sexuality, and Masculinity.” In Reconceiving the Second Sex: Men, Masculinity, and Reproduction, eds. Marcia C. Inhorn, Tine Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, Helene Goldberg, and Maruska La Cour Mosegaard, pp. 1–17. New York: Berghahn Books.
- Inhorn, Marcia C., Rosario Ceballo, and Robert Nachtigall (2009) “Marginalized, Invisible, and Unwanted: American Minority Struggles with Infertility and Assisted Conception.” In Ethnicity, Infertility and Reproductive Technologies, eds. Lorraine Culley, Nicky Hudson, and Floor B. van Rooij, pp. 181–197. London: Earthscan Books.
- Hahn, Robert A., and Marcia C. Inhorn (2009) “Introduction: Anthropology and Public Health.” In Anthropology and Public Health: Bridging Differences in Culture and Society, eds. Robert A. Hahn and Marcia C. Inhorn, pp. 1–31. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Inhorn, Marcia C. (2007) “Loving Your Infertile Muslim Spouse: Notes on the Globalization of IVF and Its Romantic Commitments in Sunni Egypt and Shi’ite Lebanon.” In Love and Globalization: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World, eds. Mark B. Padilla, Jennifer S. Hirsch, Miguel Munoz-Laboy, Robert Sember, and Richard G. Parker, pp. 139–160. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
- Inhorn, Marcia C., and Aditya Bharadwaj. (2007) “Reproductively Disabled Lives: Infertility, Stigma, and Suffering in Egypt and India.” Disability in Local and Global Worlds, eds. Benedicte Ingstad and Susan Reynolds Whyte, pp. 78–106. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Inhorn, Marcia C. (2003) “The Risks of Test-tube Baby Making in Egypt.” Risk, Culture, and Health Inequality: Shifting Perceptions of Danger and Blame, eds. Barbara Herr Harthorn and Laury Oaks, pp. 57–78. Westport, CT: Praeger.
- Van Balen, Frank, and Marcia C. Inhorn (2002) “Introduction—Interpreting Infertility: A View from the Social Sciences.” In Infertility Around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies, eds. Marcia C. Inhorn and Frank van Balen, pp. 3–23. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Inhorn, Marcia C. (2002) “The ‘Local’ Confronts the ‘Global’: Infertile Bodies and New Reproductive Technologies in Egypt.” In Infertility Around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies, eds. Marcia C. Inhorn and Frank van Balen, pp. 263–282. Berkeley: University of California Press.