Janelle Lamoreaux, 2023, Infertile Environments: Epigenetic Toxicology and the Reproductive Health of Chinese Men, Durham: Duke University Press, 160 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4780-1933-6

Abstract

This ethnography’s investigation of the ways in which male reproductive health in contemporary China is problematised could be seen as an exemplary response to the call by Marcia C. Inhorn for more "masculine quests" (2020, 4), where further inquiry is desirable into the global decline of male fertility, counterintuitively at some distance from women, who remain the most biomedically problematised centre for monitoring and treatment. From Chapters One to Five, all titled after "the xxx environment", Janelle Lamoreaux weaves her fieldwork into a multiplicity of environments that are partially connected through the epigenetic toxicology conducted by Chinese scientists in Nanjing. This suggests one of the most prominent features of the book: the author moves against the oft-voiced critique by social scientists that laboratory science is "reductive" and "oversimplifying". Instead, Lamoreaux demonstrates how contexts and environments proliferate and come into being, from the laboratory in Nanjing to China more broadly and beyond.