Men’s Infertility in Qatar: Nation Building, Family and Patriarchy

Studies on infertility often focus on women, and most of them are medical research or investigate the topic at the individual level. The involvement of the state, medical and religious institutions in this matter is often neglected. The core question I focus on in this thesis is: How and why the state of Qatar, through its institutions, has been involved and invested in the topic of men's infertility? I use a Foucauldian approach to discourse and biopolitics to investigate how the state and its institutions frame men's infertility in Qatar. I also rely on interviews I carried out with academic and religious scholars and official documents from the Qatari state and its medical and religious institutions. My findings indicate that men's infertility is broached in the medical field and presented as an illness to be overcome. The limited and closely monitored introduction of artificial reproductive technologies in Qatar is an integral part of the state's demographic project. Indeed, it ensures the maintenance of the model of family as a unit that preserves economic, social, tribal, and political power. It also reinforces the biological narrative of the family, rigidifying its normative understanding. Thus, the artificial reproductive technologies used in Qatar are a way to control the bodies of the individual citizens through their medicalisation, and to ensure the control of the social body by strengthening the social institution of the family and the status of the fertile patriarch.