Fertility Narratives: An Experimental Project of Applied Anthropology within a Fertility Clinic of Southern California

The article presents an experimental project of applied anthropology realized within WeHo Fertility Center (WHFC), a fertility institute of Southern California (2017-2020). Since infertility was almost never described as a disease by doctors and patients, I proposed the concept of fertility narratives, a notion mainly inspired by illness narratives of Kleinman, to refer to a set of narratives relating to the temporal, emotional and biopolitical stratification of reproductive paths. In this article, I will focus only on the reproduction temporal stratification, showing three different scopes which emerged during the lab: body temporality, staff temporality and patients’ temporality.