Seizing the means of contraception: the politics and practices of experimentation

This research seeks to explore the constitution of women's contemporary contraceptive knowledges and their practices of contraceptive experimentation. It will review and interrogate the procedures and practices through which the contraceptive knowledges of young women in England are constituted. The increasing visibility of contraceptive technologies and the ways they are understood to constitute empowerment and embodiment have been well documented and critiqued. Existing research on sexual knowledge in the UK in the twentieth century has examined the effects of contraceptive knowledge on sexual attitudes, sexual relationships and sex practices including the practice of safer sex (Cook 2004, Porter and Hall 1995, Vitellone 2008). Information about contraceptive technologies has been described, on the one hand, as ambiguous, simultaneously individualising and universalising women's responsibility for contraception in ways that expand and limit choices (Oudshhoorn 1996), and, on the other, as entangled with a feminist protocol in which women are engaged in the collective coproduction of feminist methods of experimentation (Murphy 2012). What is less understood is the impact of scientific, popular media and lay contraceptive knowledge on women's contraceptive practices. This original empirical project will address this gap