Dr Rebecca Barr

My interests lie at the intersection of narrative fiction, medicine, reproduction and infertility and/or childlessness. I’m interested in the ways in which cultural norms of reproduction coerce, exclude and stigmatize LGBTQ+ individuals, and can often replicate racialized and classed inequalities. In 2019 I was awarded an Irish Research Foundation Creative Connections Award for a project on ‘Fertility, Feminism and Reproduction: Towards a Progressive Politics’, (details here: https://ffrirc.wordpress.com/) which brought together activists, poets and writers, historians, legal experts and doctors involved in reproductive medicine. At a day-long event in Galway we analysed the politics and culture of fertility and reproduction in Ireland and Europe, in the hope bringing together different disciplines and creative communities in order to better understand the fraught politics of reproduction and to work toward a progressive politics of reproduction. In Ireland, the heterosexual reproductive family is encoded in the constitution itself. By aiming to bring together interdisciplinary understandings of fertility, this project aimed to inform the debate on the new terrain of Irish family life and fertility in the wake of the Marriage Equality Act, the Repeal of the Eighth Amendment, and the proposed excision of Article 4.2 against the backdrop of a global decline in fertility rates. I am an Associate Editor at the BMJ’s Medical Humanities and welcome new research on reproduction.