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11 Colum. J. Gender & L. 127 (2002)
Breeder at Law

handle is hein.journals/coljgl11 and id is 133 raw text is: BREEDER AT LAW
KARLA MOMBERGER
I. INTRODUCTION
You have to stop being what you were when you start paying
attention to the work it takes to maintain your clear distinctions.
-Xerox Palo Alto Research Center computer scientist
and philosopher Brian Smith, discussing maintaining
the identity of a microprocessor, quoted by Donna
Haraway in
Modest Witness()Second Millenium.FemaleMan8
Meets OncoMouseJ 1997.
I realized soon into this project that the most difficult part might be
identifying what, exactly, this paper is about. It's not that easy to do,
especially when everything seems so connected. But you should be aware
that I am writing from an extremely confident perspective; today I got a
fortune in a cookie that says: Everyone agrees you are the best. Well, if
everyone agrees, it must be true-isn't my existence a series of reflections
off other people?
This paper is about an embodied law school experience, and what
that experience indicates about corporeality in the legal system in general.
It's about paying for school with my body. What price is exacted is
uncertain. It's about existing in a body that is out of bounds, and about
becoming the multiple reflections of how others perceive my embodiedness.
It's about the bizarre realm of biotechnology, infertility, and reproduction.
It's about the ways that gender, race, class, and sexuality interplay in this
arena. It's about learning to negotiate your value in the very specific terms
of the dollar amount your genetic inheritance is worth. It's about how the
dollar value changes based on who you are, and who you are perceived to
be.
This paper is also about fighting with your Mom. It's about
knowing you have a steep hill to climb in order to gain legitimacy in
traditional ways, and what it means to try to go around that hill. This story
is about learning to police yourself, about living in a modem,
technologically-dependent society. It's about what it means to be a polluter
in such a society, and how pollution rituals weave the fabric of society. It's
about why the law echoes, creates, and recreates that fabric of pollution and
purity.

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