Spectacular reproduction: Ron's Angels and mechanical reproduction in the age of ART (assisted reproductive technology).
Ron Harris captured the popular imagination in October 1999 with a website where he auctioned off the ova of fashion models to the highest bidder. This article treats the controversy surrounding Harris' site within a dual frame of critical theory's approach to reproduction and a folkloristic approach to discourse. The website fuses traditional narrative motifs and structures with the logic of advertising, seventies television, family-values rhetoric, and the fertility industry. I argue that the great attraction of ronsangels.com is that it put into relief the intervention of mechanical reproduction in human fertility together with the state of genetics at the turn of the 21st century. The result is not only a disconcerting aestheticization and commodification of biological reproduction, but also the biological reproduction of a particular aesthetic and moral code--a generation of reality by model.
Hafstein
Valdimar Tr
VT
Department of Anthropology and Folklore, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Iceland, IS-101 Reykjavik, Iceland. vth@hi.is
D000329:Advertising; D032821:Commodification; D004954:Esthetics / Q000523:psychology; D005053:Eugenics; D005495:Folklore; D006801:Humans; D007246:Infertility / Q000523:psychology*; D020407:Internet; D009014:Morals; D010063:Ovum; D012098:Reproduction; D027724:Reproductive Techniques, Assisted / Q000191:economics / Q000941:ethics / Q000523:psychology*