Rebecca Close

It was wonderful to contribute this week to this celebration of filmmaker @pratibha.bsky.social work at the ICA London.

A new book of essays by myself, Lola Olufemi, @alexispauline.bsky.social
& more is available; “a gift for any artist”researcher and activist

www.smingsming.com/products/our...

Here in Wales for a @bspsuk.bsky.social panel called “Public concern about low fertility: the 1920s and 2020s”. Packed hall and brilliant discussion!

Allele frequency selection and no age-related increase in human oocyte mitochondrial mutations Human oocyte mtDNA mutations do not increase with age and are selected against changes to minimize functional consequences.

Pretty fascinating study comparing mtDNA mutations in human blood, saliva and oocyte cells, showing how oocyte cells are the only ones that do not show an increase in mutations with age 👁 👁

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

It’s been just over a year of animation workshops, lab ethnographies and critical artistic research on the topic of reproductive crisis.

Pleased to share a sneak research update via the DOROTHY fellowship blog.
dorothy.ie/2025/06/10/d...
@researchireland.ie @uccresearch.bsky.social

Great #repromob roundtable!

Clinicians experience alongside critiques of the ownership structures of global clinic chains.

Loved sharing my paper too on software fixes for fertility crisis.

More reproductive mobilities presentations today 🌱

"Them, All" is a really special thing – check out the whole thing and some shrubby poems from me, too.

⚠️Issue # 5 now posted! ⚠️
Iona, Sam, QiP and noï share vital writing on erasure.

Them, All is a podcast and online magazine for poetry and critical writing on reproduction, hosted by Systerserver.

Read or listen here:

them-all-magazine.com/projects.html

them-all-magazine.com/podcast.html

Calling reproduction people in and beyond London! Get your tickets to #ReproSalon next Friday 30th 🌅

a shining annual event to discuss and think through in community all things repro, organised by @lucyvandewiel.bsky.social

“Not Too Different”: Doing Resemblance, Enacting Boundaries in Sperm Donor Matching For/By Dutch Intended Parents Scholars writing about selecting gamete donors have emphasized the importance of resemblance when choosing a donor. However, while they have thoroughly researched the question of why prospective pa...

Nice to see this mention of my work on facial matching algorithms for donor selection. Recommended new ethnographic scholarship on “enacting resemblance” in assisted reproduction in the Dutch context.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Really enjoyed this paper, especially the use of a scifi narrative at the end.

Looking forward to our panel today at the @sociologyireland.bsky.social . Thanks to colleagues for organising.

I’ll be talking about the limited “biological mode” of hypothetical thinking and switch on/off policy solutions for dealing with declining fertility rates in Europe.

fellow DOROTHY MSCA colleague @fearoncassidy.bsky.social sums up this recent article on the soft eugenics of maga’s health market expansion, from her metabolic health research perspective.

The UK’s Anti-Trans Ruling Is a Defeat for All Women Even the self-described feminists celebrating the Supreme Court’s attempt to banish trans people from womanhood will pay a heavy price.

“They do not know us, and can never name us”
🙏🏼

www.thenation.com/article/soci...

The “Correlation” Between Statistics and Eugenics | Los Angeles Review of Books In the second essay of the Legacies of Eugenics series, Aubrey Clayton excavates the troubling correlation between the birth of statistical methods and the history of eugenics.

A little reminder that Francis Galton coined the term “co-relation” 😱

lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

Beautiful workshop! We talked about animation and the politics of the body + life and made some brilliant and funny films that give voice to the elements.

Thanks to Hamaca in Barcelona for co-coordinating, loved sharing ongoing postdoc work.
@researchireland.bsky.social
@uccresearch.bsky.social

Current right-wing + far right backlash against choice and sex/gender equality is worryingly reflected in key public health policy statement at this year’s 69th Commission on the Status of Women at the UN, which omits sexual and reproductive health commitments for the first time since 1995.

Networks of queer reproduction in Sappho magazine (1972–1981) In 1978 the London Evening News ran a series of ‘exposés’ on the UK lesbian organization and magazine Sappho and their Artificial Insemination by Donor (A.I.D) network. This article situates the Sa...

Excited to announce that ‘Networks of queer reproduction in Sappho magazine (1972-81)’ by Rebecca Close is out now 🌐✨

This piece is part of our special issue on Feminist
Media in Transition for the Journal of Gender Studies

Read it here!
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Networks of queer reproduction in Sappho magazine (1972–1981) In 1978 the London Evening News ran a series of ‘exposés’ on the UK lesbian organization and magazine Sappho and their Artificial Insemination by Donor (A.I.D) network. This article situates the Sa...

🌟 New article on UK magazine Sappho and their 1970s proto-fertility clinic🌟

An infrastructural reading of breaking apart reproduction 🛠 looking back from Them, All magazine, hooked to Systerserver.

Reflections on networks, imagination and scale.

👀 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

You might live to be 100. Are you ready? A demographic change is unfolding, and many of us can expect a long life. It’s time to provide the support needed

The under-reported side of the fertility crisis: elderly life and care.

“Family building” programs, however progressive, could also shift focus and attend to a necessary radical transformation of elderly life, including better wages for care workers.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This quote from The Uses of the Erotic (1978).

Audre Lorde may have read the current media / techbro gathering around the fascist salute as a continuation of the “Euroamerican tradition where needs are fulfilled by certain proscribed erotic comings-together, whether religion…or mob violence…”

Spam for president! @grantamag.bsky.social

I got to share a Ludd Gang issue with this legend.

poetshardshipfunduk.com/about/

The Fertility Fix: the Boom in Facial-matching Algorithms for Donor Selection in Assisted Reproduction in Spain This article reads the uptake of facial-matching algorithms by fertility clinics in Spain through the lens of ‘the fertility fix’: a software fix to the social reconfiguration of kinship and a fixe...

It was so fruitful to share this work on algorithms as fertility world fixed capital at the @histmat.bsky.social london and barcelona conferences and @uccresearch.bsky.social last year.

The full article is now online open access here 🍑 🍒

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I thought I’d start putting together a list for people working within queer and trans Marxism.

Please let me know if that’s you, so I can add you!

go.bsky.app/6sdaeHP

Birth rates in rich countries halve to hit record low Steep decline in fertility will ‘change face of societies’ and affect growth prospects, says OECD

Fertility crisis headlines continue to cite Total Fertility Rates (TFRs) + the second demographic transition. These are highly contested hypothesis and measures of decline that sneak in modern-colonial imaginations of nation state, immigration, gender and reproduction.

www.ft.com/content/f0d2...

How does social and biological reproduction become the material of public governance and policy?

Great that such questions are being anthologised anew for today’s repro-techno-world.
New book affirming the value of comparative studies of policy.
@hannahzagel.bsky.social
@ralmeling.bsky.social

The classical theorizations of bourgeois political economy neglect spatio-temporality for the simple reason that their a-spatial theories of supply and demand equilibrium collapse when spatial differentiations and the qualities of place and location are introduced.

Algorithms rely on as much Artificial Ignorance as they do Intelligence… This is especially true when it comes to state’s broad embracing of AI as a solution in health care settings while ignoring the specific ecological and future health impacts of AI fixes.

The movement against sexuality, sex-gender and reproductive rights and equality initiatives is increasingly international.

Looking forward to reading @nuriaalabao.bsky.social @ctxt.es on the global churches, banks, NGOs and politicians at the center of new networked forms of reproductive control.

“The medicine developed in the enclosed spaces of slavery was not just the darkside of Enlightenment but its epistemic & material condition of possibility”

Huge congrats to 🌟 Dr. 🌟 Anyely Marín at iHC, Barcelona.

Vital work in antiracist, postcolonial & decolonial history of science and medicine

Imaging/imagining Reproductive Crisis | University College Cork Learn, Study and Research in UCC, Ireland's first 5 star university. Our tradition of independent thinking will prepare you for the world and the workplace in a vibrant, modern, green campus.

As ‘the fertility crisis’ is picked up by Elon Musk and rightwing demography, it’s vital to address the many ways reproduction has been (re)imagined across lab and society.

🙏🏼 to @uccresearch.bsky.social @pregnancylossie.bsky.social colleagues who attended our workshop🔬🏡
www.ucc.ie/en/iss21/new...