Reproductive Cryopower

A follicle is a small cavity, sac, or gland out of which growth occurs. Hairs grow out of follicles, as do humans. The follicle, like the womb, is a speculative container of potential life. A menstruating woman loses numerous follicles with each cycle-only one will release an egg, and rarely is that egg fertilized. Medicine, technology, and big pharma have distorted this unlikely probability into a dominant narrative of, and social obsession with, reproductive futurity. With hormone stimulation, a standard part of the oocyte cryopreservation (egg freezing) process, one might produce numerous mature follicles and thus numerous eggs. Freezing then becomes a way both to preserve and heighten the fantasy of potentiality, thus circumventing Sabina Spielrein's notion that, in the reproductive instinct, there is also always already an instinct toward death ("Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being," 1912). Theorizing the follicle as both a space of speculation and of death, "reproductive cryopower" then refers to the biopolitics of cryogenic reproduction. This essay looks at cryonics in literature and film alongside the historical overlap of cryonics with the eugenics movement, freezing's increased popularity since the 1960s, corporate investment in human oocyte cryopreservation to retain and profit off of "prime" female labor by postponing reproduction, and recent legislative decisions, all of which increasingly relocate reproductive agency from the individual to the state.