“[...] An IUD Is Only An IUD when it's in the womb”: the intra-action of the discursive and the non-discursive as re-membering

Abstract

As part of the current doctoral research that considers the polyvalent functioning of the microprosthetic device (Silva, 2021) and intra-active IUD, this text proposes to make a careful defense of a neomaterialist analysis of discourses (Butturi Junior; Camozzato, 2023), in the Foucauldian stitching of concepts dear to neomaterialist, posthuman and composite studies, especially with Tsing, Barad, Bennet and Haraway. The purpose of this text is to stitch together two clippings: one which is the discursive irruption of the IUD, which was the 1960s, the tests with IUD formats and, still, the Dalkon Shield IUD; and the other which is an excerpt from the fabricated story of Mirabel, one of the interviewees who narrated having felt the IUD “[...] piercing from the inside out”. In this filigree of effects, mixtures, assemblages and, multi-species ethnography, for now, some possible points of analysis are: human agencies and more-than-human and non-human things, such as fluids, cells, endometrium, pain, blood, IUD, plastic, copper, synthetic hormone levonorgestrel, in short, are active in the functioning of the microprotetic and intra-active IUD device, both as obstacles to any techno-medical-scientific categorization and as a zone that lacks functional organization for becoming-with to result in contraception; and the polyvalence of these intra-actions, in the play of piercing what is inside and what is outside, are material-discursive re-memberings.