This book explores the relationship between new reproductive technologies and new ethnographic writing technologies, setting off from the example of surrogate motherhood. It is a project that interrogates fictional multimodality in ethnography and illuminates the generative possibilities of digital textuality in the field of anthropology. It is the first book to bring together digital anthropology, fiction writing and the ethnography of surrogate motherhood and it does so in order to discuss the anthropological potential entailed in bridging the epistemological gaps between seemingly irrelevant spheres of interest (assisted reproduction and academic writing tropes) towards the creation of transdisciplinary digital narrations about the human condition.This book makes a case for the tailor-made character of ethnographic writing in the digital era, wherein research topics and representational modalities can be paired accordingly in order to develop a unique narrative form for each individual topic, depending on its particular traits and analytical angles. It attempts to combine the genealogy of feminist critique on the orthodox, phallocentric, and heteronormative structure of narrative in academic discourse with the input of digital anthropology regarding the closed form of scholarly writing. In addition, it focuses on informants’ and ethnographers’ situated knowledge as a stance for revisiting the century-long discussion about the relation between an object of study and its possibilities of representation. More specifically, the book argues that assisted reproduction technologies and technologically supported digital writing constitute a fruitful territory of inquiry into the limits of the anthropological potential in relation to the imaginary, the fictional and the ‘real’ in research and writing.weiterlesen