Medical researchers have been making headlines with a surprising series of findings about men and reproduction. It turns out that the health status of men’s bodies prior to conception can directly affect the health of their children. As a result, many of the warnings that women receive about pregnancy - regarding their age and watching what they eat, drink, and smoke - also apply to men during the three months that sperm develops inside their bodies. The average American man does not know any of this because basic medical knowledge about the effects of men’s bodily health on reproductive outcomes has only recently begun to be produced. This lack of knowledge is only made more glaring when one thinks of the enormous efforts to understand and treat women’s reproductive bodies over the past 150 years. This begs the question: Why did it take so long for researchers to begin asking basic questions about how men matter for reproduction?

Rene Almeling is Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Health at Yale University with her area of interests in gender and medicine. Using a range of historical, qualitative, and quantitative methods, Rene examines questions about how biological bodies and cultural norms interact to influence scientific knowledge, medical markets, and individual experiences. Her first book, Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm (University of California Press, 2011), received awards from the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association. In 2013, she received the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Research at Yale.

This talk is presented by IRWG's Feminist Science Studies Program.