Nodes of Desire

This article presents qualitative research conducted in an Israeli ova `extraction' clinic in Romania. Following on from a piece written by Jyotsna Gupta and published in this journal in February 2006, this article asks what kinds of feminist alliances can or should be made in the arena of reproductive technologies. In conversation with Gupta, the author asks whether `an ethic of universal human dignity' is possible or desirable. This article looks to the voices of Romanian egg sellers themselves as a source of theoretical and political direction for transnational feminists who try to think about responses to reproductive technologies

Global fertility chains: An integrative political economy approach to understanding the reproductive bioeconomy

Over the last two decades, social scientists across disciplines have been researching how value is extracted and governed in the reproductive bioeconomy, which broadly refers to the various ways reproductive tissues, bodies, services, customers, workers, and data are inserted into capitalist modes of accumulation. While many of these studies are empirically grounded in single country–based analyses, this paper proposes an integrative political economy framework, structured around the concept of “global fertility chains.” The latter articulates the reproductive bioeconomy as a nexus of intraconnected practices, operations, and transactions between enterprises, states, and households across the globe, through which reproductive services and commodities are produced, distributed, and consumed. Employing a diffractive reading of the literature on commodity chains and care chains, this unified approach scrutinizes the coproduction of value, biology, and technoscience and their governance mechanisms in the accumulation of capital by taking into account (1) the unevenly developed geographies of global fertility chains, (2) their reliance on women’s waged and unwaged reproductive labor, and (3) the networked role of multiple actors at multiple scales without losing sight of the (4) constitutive role of (supra)national states in creating demand, organizing supply, and accommodating the distribution of surplus value. We empirically ground this integrative political economy approach of the reproductive bioeconomy through collaborative, multisited fieldwork on transnational reproduction networks in Israel/Palestine, Romania, Georgia, and Spain

Introduction: Global fertility chains and the colonial present of assisted reproductive technologies

The introduction to the Special Section “Global Fertility Chains and the Colonial Present of Assisted Reproductive Technologies”(re)situates assisted reproductive technologies, infrastructures,and markets within older, yet ongoing, histories of colonialism, racial capitalism,and slavery. Engaging with the “colonial present” of a broad array of reproductive technologies,including surrogacy, adoption, seed saving, “slave breeding,”and in vitro fertilization in different (post)colonial sites of inquiry, including India, Korea, Australia, the United States, and the borderlands between Mexico and Guatemala, the papers in this collection draw on the foundational work of materialist, STS, Black, Indigenous,and decolonial feminists to foreground three main “relational”themes: (1) between past and present colonial materializations and imaginaries of ARTs;(2) between colonialism’s myriad, intraconnectedreproductive grammars of slavery, genocide, conservation, exploitation,and extraction;(3) between ART’s life and death functions and their mutually constitutive biopolitical and necropolitical logics

Reproductive tourism, through the anthropological “reproscope”

This review analyses the emerging literature on ‘reproductive tourism’ through a metaphorical ‘reproscope’ focusing largely on cross-border egg donation and surrogacy as the prime areas of contemporary anthropological investigation. Whilst acknowledging that ‘reproductive travel’ is not new, the paper recognises that there is an increased volume of such travel. It provides an overview of the major areas of anthropological investigation into these transnational phenomena, globalisation, stratification, exploitation, race, nationalism, religion, biopower and bioethics. Whilst so doing, it suggests these areas of investigation may tell us about the preoccupations of anthropology today. Namely, what kind of discipline it imagines itself to be

Redefining bioavailability through the 'lens' of migrant egg donors in Spain

This paper utilizes feminist technoscience studies understandings of bodily ‘materialisation’ and ‘ontological choreographies’, offering a cyborg feminist account of ‘bioavailability’ as embodied becomings, rather than a fixed ontological state of being. Drawn from two years’ ethnographic study in IVF clinics in Spain with migrant women who provided eggs to the cross-border IVF industry, this work explores how global understandings of race and inequalities, clinical practices and women’s own emotional and physical labours collectively produce bioavailability. Through examples from observations and interviews in IVF clinics, we examined women’s embodied stories to understand the ways in which bioavailability becomes. The paper demonstrates a novel way in which to think about ‘bioavailability’, a concept which has already been of enormous use to the social sciences since its introduction by Lawrence Cohen. We examine recent configurations of bodily extraction in the reproduction-migration nexus that help us rethink the concept of bioavailability

Introduction: Global Fertility Chains and the Colonial Present of Assisted Reproductive Technologies

The introduction to the Special Section “Global Fertility Chains and the Colonial Present of Assisted Reproductive Technologies” (re)situates assisted reproductive technologies, infrastructures, and markets within older, yet ongoing, histories of colonialism, racial capitalism, and slavery. Engaging with the “colonial present” of a broad array of reproductive technologies, including surrogacy, adoption, seed saving, “slave breeding,” and in vitro fertilization in different (post)colonial sites of inquiry, including India, Korea, Australia, the United States, and the borderlands between Mexico and Guatemala, the papers in this collection draw on the foundational work of materialist, STS, Black, Indigenous, and decolonial feminists to foreground three main “relational” themes: (1) between past and present colonial materializations and imaginaries of ARTs; (2) between colonialism’s myriad, intraconnected reproductive grammars of slavery, genocide, conservation, exploitation, and extraction; (3) between ART’s life and death functions and their mutually constitutive biopolitical and necropolitical logics

Reverse traffic: intersecting inequalities in human egg donation

The paper examines a case of cross-border reproductive care that happens in reverse by looking at Israeli–Romanian transnational ova traffic. The state of Israel claims to have the most IVF clinics per capita in the world, some of the highest success rates in the use of assisted reproductive technology, very liberal regulation of these technologies and the most heavily subsidized IVF in the world. This support and the government’s demographic policies are designed to encourage the growth of the Jewish population in its demographic race against Palestinians. Yet transnational egg donation is very costly and reimbursement to patients a slow and involved process. Hence, while transnational ova donation is increasing in Israel, only a few can afford to participate in this border crossing. Further, new laws are meant to forbid cross-religious donation in Israel, hardening the borders of the Jewish State. Romanian ova donors are part of the global majority, exploited by markets’ incursions into new niches in bodies. The history of Romanian oppression of women’s reproduction makes today’s women willing to undergo invasive treatment for very little compensation, even when there is the possibility of injury. This paper documents reverse traffic reproduction, which maintains, rather than addresses, inequalities

Correction: Receiving, or ‘Adopting’, Donated Embryos to Have Children: Parents Narrate and Draw Kinship Boundaries

The authors wish to make the following corrections to this paper published in Genealogy (Tasker et al., 2018), reflecting regrettable misrepresentation of one research participant’s experience [...