Negotiating “normality” when IVF fails

This article argues that the dominant social and cultural representations of IVF as successful, and of reproduction as the natural and inevitable life course, particularly for women, offer those for whom treatment fails a limited set of discursive resources through which to make sense of that experience. The article explores the ways in which those resources are both deployed and resisted by those who have experienced treatment failure, and who have since stopped treatment, in order to establish themselves as “normal”. It is argued that through the construction of themselves as meeting rather than transgressing the normative social and cultural reproductive standards, the participants can be seen to discretely subvert and redefine the dominant discourses of both technology and reproduction, even while appearing to shore them up.