The Voice Inside

This in utero tale deconstructs the consumption and marketing of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). It aims to highlight the deep ambivalence and phantasmagoria that accompany such transbiological procedures which, though undertheorised by marketing scholars, especially through an introspective lens, are reshaping markets and fundamental understanding of life, death, health, kin, progress, hope, sex, capital and cure. The story also advances extant marketing research on autobiography and consumer introspection theory (CIT) by introducing ‘autobiological writing’, a genre of self-reflexive, creative life writing which foregrounds lived, biological and medicalised experiences, therefore exposing the emotional ‘truths’, ‘authentic voices’, volatile bodies and experiential insights that often prove difficult to access and capture for consumer researchers. As liberatory narratives for the writers themselves and the researchers who extrapolate meaning from them, autobiological accounts offer unique critical cultural perspectives, in this case, on complex reprogenetic consumption.