Purchasing Race: Assisted Reproduction in Asian America

Daisy Deomampo, guest lecturer for the Social Theory spring seminar, will be discussing her research on assisted reproductive technologies, highlighting questions regarding race and value in the context of transnational surrogacy in India and egg donation in the United States.Deomampois a cultural and medical anthropologist whose research interests encompass science and technology studies, critical race studies, reproductive health and politics, and bioethics and social justice. Her book, Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India (NYU Press, 2016), is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in India with Indian surrogate mothers, Western intended parents, and egg donors from around the world, as well as doctors and other actors. In the book, she argues that ideologies of race lie at the heart of transnational family-making, illuminating the intersections of race, power, kinship, and inequality in the context of transnational gestational surrogacy. Her current research project explores assisted reproduction as a mode of racial capitalism, focusing on the social meanings of race, identity, and value in the context of egg donation among Asian Americans in the United States