This year’s Hancock Lecture will be delivered by Dr Jaya Keaney.

Remaking reproduction: gender, artifice and population futures

While in vitro fertilisation, or IVF, has been commonplace since the 1980s, new technologies such as uterus transplants, artificial wombs, and lab-grown sperm and eggs take reproduction beyond the limits of what we think the body can do. These technologies promise to solve the population “crisis” of falling birth rates facing many parts of Asia and the global North by intervening into fertility on a cellular scale. Such technologies make reproduction increasingly artificial, reorganising the relations between gender, biology, and generation. And yet, today gender is also forcefully defined as natural in a populist “gender critical” discourse, which takes issue with gender both as an analytic category and a field of Humanities inquiry. In this populist discourse, there are males and females, with distinct reproductive anatomy: gender is biological sex, nothing more. How should we understand these two, divergent narratives? In this talk, I explore reproduction as a site of contest across multiple scales, from the cellular to the populational, that is bound to what I term artifice as much as to nature.

Contact the host of 2026 Hancock Lecture - Dr Jaya Keaney