Afterword: freezing technologies and melting distinctions

Frozen – it is rare to find an introduction to an academic collection that shares a title with a popular Disney movie. For this particular volume, it is strangely fitting. It is a special issue edited by Ori Katz, Yael Hashiloni-Dolev, Charlotte Kroløkke and Aviad Raz, and explores how intense emotional dramas interact with international capital in the making of new markets for reproductive cryo-technologies. Disney certainly knows how to combine international capital with the sense of drama. With its remake of the fairy tale by HC Andersen, it also used the metaphorical language of temperature to speak about emotions and control. Through coldness, Princess Elsa can exert control of her surroundings, but she experiences difficulties staying in command of these powers. She harms her loved ones. Temperature as a tool of control can turn out to be a mixed blessing even for those possessing the magic. It is not until she allows her emotions – the love for her sister Anna – to unfold that she stops feeling at a loss. Similarly, ambivalent relations between control and desire characterize the medical cryotechnologies explored in this issue of New Genetics and Society. Running through the papers are ambivalent questions of power, high emotional stakes, and uncanny experiences of dissolving distinctions between foes and allies as freezing technology comes to mediate intimate choices and relationships. The cryotechnologies in question deal with reproductive innovation. The technologies “potentiate” body parts, as Kroløkke and Bach (this issue) term it, and in intriguing ways, each paper describes the dramas that evolve as people reach out for technologies to deal with hardship or fulfill desires; while sometimes substituting their dreams rather than fulfilling them.