Marcia C. Inhorn

Inhorn’s most recent book is America’s Arab Refugees: Vulnerability and Health on the Margins (Stanford University Press, 2018), based on a five-year ethnographic study carried out in “Arab Detroit,” Michigan, the so-called “capital” of Arab America. Set against the backdrop of America’s stratified healthcare system and Detroit’s status as the poorest big city in America, America’s Arab Refugees provides the first in-depth analysis of the post-war health problems and struggles of infertile Arab refugees as they attempt to make new lives and new families in America. Forwarding the concept of “reproductive exile,” Inhorn examines the ways in which Arab refugees, particularly from the country of Iraq, have been made infertile by the toxic legacies of American military intervention. Yet, after being forced to flee, they are exiled from America’s costly healthcare system by poverty and reproductive racism. The book also interrogates the widespread anti-Arab/anti-Muslim sentiment that has been felt in the United States since 9/11, but that has been significantly exacerbated by the contemporary political climate and imposition of the “Muslim ban.” To examine these new forms of racism, America’s Arab Refugees draws inspiration from intersectionality theory as developed by US Black feminist scholars. One chapter of the book compares the interlocking and multiplicative forms of discrimination faced by both Arab and Black populations living side by side on the margins of Detroit. America’s Arab Refugees thus represents the first attempt to apply intersectionality theory to the study of Arab lives in the US, showing that this theoretical approach has great utility in interrogating axes of oppression among marginalized immigrant and refugee communities. Ultimately, Inhorn’s book interrogates the health costs of war, the health inequities and structural vulnerabilities faced by Muslim refugees in this country, and the US government’s moral duty to assist those whose lives it has destroyed through its ongoing wars in the Middle East.

Middle East’s most “global city” and a new medical tourism hub. Her book Cosmopolitan Conceptions: IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai (Duke University Press, 2015), explores the stories of infertile couples from fifty countries and five continents, all of whom have attempted to seek assisted conception in Dubai’s emergent IVF sector. The increasing global magnitude of travel to new cosmopolitan “reprohubs” such as Dubai is a reflection of the fact that IVF services are either absent, inaccessible, illegal, expensive, or harmful in many of the world’s nations, particularly in the global South. As the first ethnographic study of so-called “reproductive tourism,” Cosmopolitan Conceptions challenges this term as an inappropriate descriptor for couples’ painful and tortuous IVF journeys across international borders. Instead, Cosmopolitan Conceptions adopts the term “reprotravel” to represent these journeys—part of a new conceptual “reprolexicon” introduced in the book and inspired by recent developments in globalization theory. Cosmopolitan Conceptions ends with an activist agenda, arguing for alternative pathways to parenthood; support for the infertile, especially infertile women; and provision of safe, low-cost IVF services, particularly in the global South.

Inhorn’s current scholarly project is based solely in the US, although she is collaborating with an anthropology colleague at the University of Haifa in Israel. This National Science Foundation-funded project, carried out from 2014 to 2016, focuses on oocyte cryopreservation (egg freezing), which is increasingly being used by women around the world to preserve their fertility. Experimentally developed for women facing medical conditions such as cancer, the technology has moved into IVF clinics since 2012, where it is being used by otherwise healthy women. Although most of the feminist and media commentary about egg freezing focuses on women’s career ambitions, in-depth interviews show a quite different story about women’s motivations and experiences. Inhorn’s ethnographic research with more than 150 women shows that egg freezing is largely about partnership problems, leaving highly educated women with fewer relationship options than men. These partnership problems reflect growing but little-discussed gender imbalances in higher education—not only in America, but in more than 75 other countries around the world, leading to an emerging “global turn” to egg freezing. Inhorn’s study has been featured in multiple outlets, including NPR, CNN, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Jezebel, and the Huffington Post. As of 2020, Inhorn appears in Netflix’s newly released “Explained” feature on “Fertility.”

Before joining the Yale faculty in 2008, Inhorn was a professor of medical anthropology at the University of Michigan and director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies. Inhorn served as president of the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.

Since 2003, Inhorn has undertaken three Middle Eastern research projects outside of Egypt. All have been funded by the National Science Foundation’s Cultural Anthropology and Science, Technology, and Society programs, as well as the U.S. Department of Education's Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad program. Her book, The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2012), is the culmination of one of these projects, based in Lebanon, and strongly reflects her intellectual engagements in Middle East gender studies. Indeed, The New Arab Man is the first anthropological ethnography devoted to the exploration of Arab masculinity in the 21st century. It is also the only book focusing on male infertility and men’s uses of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), a variant of IVF designed to overcome this “hidden” male reproductive health problem. In The New Arab Man, Inhorn interrogates Raewyn Connell’s theory of “hegemonic masculinity,” suggesting that this concept, when applied to the Middle East, only serves to reinforce static dualisms and neo-Orientalist stereotypes. Inspired by the work of Raymond Williams, she offers a new concept of “emergent masculinities” as a way to encapsulate change over the male life course, between generations, and throughout social history, as men enact transformative events such as the 2011 Arab uprisings. As Inhorn argues in this book, many Middle Eastern men today are engaged in a self-conscious critique of local gender norms, attempting to unseat forms of patriarchy in the process. These men, who perhaps represent the “silent majority,” share their hopes, dreams, and desires in the book, which is filled with ethnographic stories of men’s lives, often in conflict-ridden settings. The New Arab Man is, above all else, a humanizing account, based on in-depth research conducted with more than 300 Arab men, including Sunni and Shia Muslims, Christians, and Druze, from nearly a dozen Middle Eastern countries. The New Arab Man received the 2014 JMEWS Book Award from the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies. In 2015, it received the 2015 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology, an award given annually by the American Anthropological Association.

Inhorn’s scholarship is firmly situated at the intersection of feminist science and technology studies (STS), Middle East gender studies (including masculinity studies), and the anthropology of reproduction. She was the first anthropologist to study infertility and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) outside of the West, following the globalization of IVF to Egypt. Working in Egypt during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, she was able to document the significant social, religious, kinship, and gender ramifications of infertility and its treatment, as well as the impact that IVF had on both the medical system and gender relations in the country. In the decade between 1993-2003, she published an “Egyptian trilogy”—three books called Quest for Conception (1994), Infertility and Patriarchy (1996), and Local Babies, Global Science (2003). These books could be described, respectively, as a classic medical anthropological ethnography, a gender studies ethnography, and an STS ethnography of the globalization of IVF into the Muslim Middle East. Throughout these volumes, Inhorn charts Egyptian social and cultural understandings of infertility as a problem of personhood, marriage, kinship, and community life, while explaining how treatment options such as IVF are fundamentally shaped by local religious moralities. In the final book, based on research in Cairo’s IVF clinics, she argues that numerous “arenas of constraint”—social, structural, ideological, and practical—limit and sometimes curtail access to IVF, even among elite Egyptian couples who engage in transnational quests to create a “baby of the tubes.” These books have won several medical anthropology and feminist awards, including the American Anthropological Association’s Diana Forsythe Prize for outstanding feminist anthropological research on work, science, technology, and biomedicine, and the Society for Medical Anthropology’s Eileen Basker Memorial Prize for the most significant contribution to anthropological scholarship on gender and health.