Research on cross-border reproductive care has shown how the geographical, historical, economic and political contexts in which egg donation takes place shape this transnational practice. As many ...women offer their oocytes due to their precarious conditions, they become seen as ‘bioavailable bodies’. The presence of these bioavailable bodies is key to the emergence of global egg donation hotspots. We argue that feminist research needs to go beyond the conceptualization of egg donors as bioavailable bodies. We suggest the analysis of ‘reproductive biographies’ as an innovative way to understand the entanglements of the global bioeconomy with intimate experiences of reproduction. We suggest advancing current feminist discussions around clinical labour by (1) studying the entanglements between the global bioeconomy, a neoliberalized healthcare system, systematic feminicide and women’s reproductive biographies, and by (2) revealing how women’s decision to donate results from gendered dependencies, obligations of care and coercive moments in egg donors’ reproductive biographies.
Technologies are at the heart of geographic analysis. More-than-human geographies, actor-network theory, and new materialism have all called for attending to technological infrastructures and ...artefacts. This attention is directed mainly towards large-scale technologies. What often escapes geographies of technoscience are small, mundane, and unspectacular technologies. Bringing into conversation work from feminist technoscience and feminist geographies, we broaden the understanding of technology in geographies of technoscience by developing the concept of intimate technologies. By exploring three sites that lie at the centre of feminist technoscience – the home, the laboratory, and the clinic – we carve out the spatial politics of intimate technologies.
Reproduction has been the privileged site of post-colonial eugenic politics through which the future national body is regulated in racial terms. Nikolas Rose argues that new forms of liberal eugenics ...have replaced traditional state biopolitics. In the current bioeconomy, it is no longer the state but active consumers that make (racialized) reproductive choices. The market of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in Mexico serves as an empirical case to argue that the liberal eugenics practiced in this market recasts rather than replaces traditional state biopolitics. This becomes evident in (1) the racialized access to surrogacy programs in Mexico and (2) in giving higher value to white sex cells, while (3) devaluing the genetic traits of non-white women through the selection and classification processes of reproductive laborers. Analyzing the transnational geographies of surrogacy markets in Mexico, the article investigates how future bodies are whitened through biomedical practices and consumer choices that are shaped by and simultaneously reinforce (post-)colonial imaginaries of white desirability.
This paper explores how reproductive life has changed through the development, transnational spread, and commercialization of assisted reproductive technologies (in vitro fertilization, gamete ...donation, and surrogacy). (Economic) geography has been slow to take up the vibrant debates in anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and other neighboring disciplines on assisted reproductive technologies and their effects on society, kinship, and reproduction. In this paper, I argue that an analysis of the fast‐growing transnational market of assisted reproduction has much to gain from economic geographies with their interest in the making of markets across borders and feminist economic geographers' engagement with how new forms of gendered and racialized divisions of labor intersect with particular economic, cultural, political, and social contexts. I discuss literature on assisted reproductive technologies and their transnational economies against the background of these two issues—the transnational making of fertility markets and the global division of reproductive labor along axes of gender, race, class, and nationality. The conclusion points out the need for articulating geographies of assisted reproduction that integrate a geographic perspective into the study of assisted reproductive technologies and reproductive economic geographies that push the boundaries of economic geography towards the economies of (assisted) reproduction.
While Michael Billig’s ‘banal nationalism’ points to the significance of the trivial reproduction of national representations in everyday routines, feminist political geographers have highlighted how ...the nation is brought into being through embodied and emotional practices. Building upon and extending these notions of the nation as represented and embodied, the paper argues that the nation also takes shape through bodily encounters and joyful as well as painful affections. In what we call ‘affective nationalism’, the nation emerges in moments of encounter between different bodies and objects through embodying, sharing, enjoying or disliking what feels national. We combine a Deleuzian reading of affect that discloses the mechanisms of material becomings with feminist scholarship sensitive to how bodies affect and are affected differently by materially produced nationalisms. Based on ethnographic field research in Azerbaijan, which we present in three vignettes, we untangle the affective becoming of national bodies, objects and places during a publicly staged ceremony of the collective remembrance of martyr and the celebration of a national holiday within the realm of a family. The paper makes two contributions to researching affective nationalism. First, it enquires into how people identify with Azerbaijan through their capacities to affect and to be affected by what feels national and, second, it explores how affective nationalism can be captured through vignettes of affective writing.
How can we conceptualize travel in search of fertility treatment? While current research on transnational reproduction mostly conceptualizes mobility as horizontal movement from A to B, this article ...shows how horizontal mobilities converge, contradict, and are interdependent with other forms of mobility; namely vertical mobilities in terms of social upward and downward mobility, representational mobilities in form of imaginative geographies, and the actual embodied experiences of mobility. Based on ethnographic research on the reproductive tourism industry in Mexico, the article explores the multiplicity of mobilities that constitute transnational reproduction. The article evaluates how the concept of multiple mobilities contributes to the study of medical tourism from a critical mobilities' perspective.
The booming business of global surrogacy has come to a halt: one surrogacy hub after the other has started to regulate the incremental flow of intended parents to the Global South hoping to fulfill ...their desire for a baby with the help of a foreign surrogate laborer. Thailand and Nepal have banned surrogacy altogether; India and Mexico insist on the altruistic nature of their surrogacy arrangements. As the drive for altruistic surrogacy suggests, the baby holds an exceptional position in many societies: ideas about the ‘unique’ maternal bond create public unease about the commercialization of babies in surrogacy markets. Drawing on economic sociology and theories of affect, this paper argues that multiple processes of affective attachment, detachment and reattachment shape transnational surrogacy journeys. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico’s surrogacy industry, the paper studies processes of commodification and decommodification in three instances of market-making: (1) the assignment of value and a price to reproductive laborers’ bodies on the basis of affective postcolonial geographies of beauty; (2) the affective/effective organization of the market encounter through contracts and communication rules and (3) the detachment of the final ‘good’ of the baby from the surrogate laborer. Transnational surrogacy arrangements, the paper concludes, are always forms of partial commodification – no matter whether they are framed as altruistic or commercial – because processes of affective/effective attachment and detachment are fundamental for delineating the intimate boundaries of families that come into life with the assistance of the globally operating surrogacy industry.
This paper shows that assemblage thinking and actor-network theory (ANT) have much more to gain from each other than debate has so far conceded. Exploring the conjunctions and disjunctions between ...the two approaches, it proposes three cross-fertilisations that have implications for understanding three key processes in our sociomaterial world: stabilisation, change and affect. First, the conceptual vocabulary of ANT can enrich assemblage thinking with an explicitly spatial account of the ways in which assemblages are drawn together, reach across space and are stabilised. Second, each approach is better attuned to conceptualising a particular kind of change in sociomaterial relations: ANT describes change without rupture, or fluidity, whereas assemblage thinking describes change with rupture, or events. Third and last, assemblage thinking could fashion ANT with a greater sensitivity for the productive role of affect in bringing socio-material relations into being through the production of desire/wish (désir). We demonstrate the implications of these cross-fertilisations for empirical work through a case study of the global market for assisted reproduction.
Abstract
Spain's berry industry relies on the agricultural labour of both local and seasonal migrant workers. A significant part of this migrant workforce comprises Moroccan mothers who leave their ...children with relatives in order to perform this wage labour. The bilateral recruitment regime favours the employment of Moroccan women with children for this labour to ensure that workers return home at the end of the harvesting season. Drawing on multi‐site ethnographic research in Spain and Morocco, this study revealed the effects of this bilateral labour regime on the intimate lives of migrant workers. We argue that the geopolitical prescriptions of this labour migration regime, along with the working and living conditions of migrant workers in Huelva, result in experiences of intimate liminality. We examined these experiences by exploring: (1) how the role of female workers as mothers becomes liminal as transnational labour agreements marginalise and outsource care obligations, (2) how governmental neglect of migrant workers' occupational health exposes them to reproductive health risks and (3) how this neglect places them in a liminal space in terms of access to healthcare, and (4) how, despite their liminality, migrant workers contest precarious conditions through everyday solidarity practices. We advance a feminist approach to liminality, emphasising the importance of an embodied, intersectional, and multiscalar perspective.
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