Though commonplace today as a technological quick fix for infertility, assisted reproduction is a complex phenomenon, located at the intersection of patriarchy, medicalization and commerce. These technologies create both challenges and opportunities, and response to them have sought to balance questions of ethics, rights and politics. The essays in this volume map the journey of ARTs in different countries, examining the global industry and the challenges it poses in the context of markets and look at regulatory frameworks in diverse settings. Together they bring a feminist lens to the examination of the now-established ART industry. Sama’s longstanding work provides a special focus on India: the spread and features of the industry, the gendered nature of the burden and treatment of infertility, the destabilization of the family as we know it, and feminist debates around surrogacy that re-assess ideas of agency and commodification. Published by Zubaan.
The essays in Relative Values draw on new work in anthropology, science studies, gender theory, critical race studies, and postmodernism to offer a radical revisioning of kinship and kinship theory. Through a combination of vivid case studies and trenchant theoretical essays, the contributors—a group of internationally recognized scholars—examine both the history of kinship theory and its future, at once raising questions that have long occupied a central place within the discipline of anthropology and moving beyond them. Ideas about kinship are vital not only to understanding but also to forming many of the practices and innovations of contemporary society. How do the cultural logics of contemporary biopolitics, commodification, and globalization intersect with kinship practices and theories? In what ways do kinship analogies inform scientific and clinical practices; and what happens to kinship when it is created in such unfamiliar sites as biogenetic labs, new reproductive technology clinics, and the computers of artificial life scientists? How does kinship constitute—and get constituted by—the relations of power that draw lines of hierarchy and equality, exclusion and inclusion, ambivalence and violence? The contributors assess the implications for kinship of such phenomena as blood transfusions, adoption across national borders, genetic support groups, photography, and the new reproductive technologies while ranging from rural China to mid-century Africa to contemporary Norway and the United States. Addressing these and other timely issues, Relative Values injects new life into one of anthropology's most important disciplinary traditions. Posing these and other timely questions, Relative Values injects an important interdisciplinary curiosity into one of anthropology’s most important disciplinary traditions. Contributors. Mary Bouquet, Janet Carsten, Charis Thompson Cussins, Carol Delaney, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Sarah Franklin, Deborah Heath, Stefan Helmreich, Signe Howell, Jonathan Marks, Susan McKinnon, Michael G. Peletz, Rayna Rapp, Martine Segalen, Pauline Turner Strong, Melbourne Tapper, Karen-Sue Taussig, Kath Weston, Yunxiang Yan
How do rapid social and technological changes shape reproductive realms today? This book considers the complex choices, anxieties and challenges that come alongside postmodern reproduction for women and men in the West. Topics include surrogacy, fatherhood, sperm banking, egg donation, contraception, breastfeeding, and postpartum body image.
This paper suggests the concept of care extractivism as a space- and time-diagnostic tool to international political economics in post-fordist societies. Analogous to resource extractivism, care extractivism depicts the intensified commodification of social reproduction and care work along social hierarchies of gender, class, race and North-South as a strategy to cope with a crisis of social reproduction. Extractivist policies result in the creation of a cheap reproductive labour force. The paper analyses the current national and transnational reconfiguration of social and biological reproduction in Germany / Western Europe interacting with Eastern Europe and Asia. Currently, the most striking features of care extractivism are a) professionalisation for efficiency increase, b) transnationalisation based on import of care workers, and c) transnationalisation of biological reproduction based on reproductive technologies. The contradiction between the rationale of care and the neoliberal capitalist market logic results in frequent care struggles such as the protests of hospital nurses against the depletion of care resources. The politisation of care by the protesting care workers asks for giving preference to the care economy as a common good over care as a commodity.
Starting in 1978, when the first babies conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) were born in the UK and India, assisted reproduction has become a global industry. Contributors to this edited collection reflect on the global dimensions of IVF and assisted reproductive technologies, examining how people have used these technologies to create diverse family forms, including gay, lesbian, and transgender parenthood, as well as complex configurations of genetic, gestational, and social parenthood. The authors examine how IVF and other reproductive technologies have and have not circulated around the globe; how reproductive technologies can be situated historically, nationally, locally, and culturally; and the ways in which culture, practices, regulations, norms, families, and kinship ties may be reinforced or challenged through the use of assisted reproduction.
"A fascinating and exhaustive explanation as to why emotions are a political issue." –Brit Dawson, AnOther Magazine The work of love is a feminist problem, and it demands feminist solutions Comforting a family member or friend, soothing children, providing company for the elderly, ensuring that people feel well enough to work; this is all essential labour. Without it, capitalism would cease to function. They Call It Love investigates the work that makes a haven in a heartless world, examining who performs this labor, how it is organised, and how it might change. In this groundbreaking book, Alva Gotby calls this work “emotional reproduction,” unveiling its inherently political nature. It not only ensures people’s well-being but creates sentimental attachments to social hierarchy and the status quo. Drawing on the thought of the feminist movement Wages for Housework, Gotby demonstrates that emotion is a key element of capitalist reproduction. To improve the way we relate to one another will require a radical restructuring of society.
This book envisages a different form of our economies where care work and care-full relationships are central to social and cultural life. It sets out a feminist vision of a caring economy and asks what needs to change economically and ecologically in our conceptual approaches and our daily lives as we learn to care for each other and non-human others. Bringing together authors from 11 countries (also representing institutions from 8 countries), this edited collection sets out the challenges for gender aware economies based on an ethics of care for people and the environment in an original and engaging way. The book aims to break down the assumed inseparability of economic growth and social prosperity, and natural resource exploitation, while not romanticising social-material relations to nature. The authors explore diverse understandings of care through a range of analytical approaches, contexts and case studies and pays particular attention to the complicated nexus between re/productivity, nature, womanhood and care. It includes strong contributions on community economies, everyday practices of care, the politics of place and care of non-human others, as well as an engagement on concepts such as wealth, sustainability, food sovereignty, body politics, naturecultures and technoscience. Feminist Political Ecology and the Economics of Care is aimed at all those interested in what feminist theory and practice brings to today’s major political economic and environmental debates around sustainability, alternatives to economic development and gender power relations.
Transnational surrogacy – the creation of babies across borders – has become big business. Globalization, reproductive technologies, new family formations and rising infertility are combining to produce a 'quiet revolution' in social and medical ethics and the nature of parenthood. Whereas much of the current scholarship has focused on the US and India, this groundbreaking anthology offers a far wider perspective. Featuring contributions from over thirty activists and scholars from a range of countries and disciplines, this collection offers the first genuinely international study of transnational surrogacy. Its innovative bottom-up approach, rooted in feminist perspectives, gives due prominence to the voices of those most affected by the global surrogacy chain, namely the surrogate mothers, donors, prospective parents and the children themselves. Through case studies ranging from Israel to Mexico, the book outlines the forces that are driving the growth of transnational surrogacy, as well as its implications for feminism, human rights, motherhood and masculinity.
Written by leading authorities from Europe, the Americas and Asia, this path-breaking work develops an innovative and original theorization of global political economy. Whilst most approaches theorize global political economy from the perspectives of power and production or states and markets, this work argues that what feminists call social reproduction is a more basic framework, upon which most forms of power and production, and states and markets, must necessarily rest. By combining Feminist and Radical Political Economy with Critical International Studies, the volume explores how global transformations of states, growth in the power of capital, and extension of market values and market forces in everyday life, all affect the security of the majority of the population, and the reproduction of communities and societies. The book shows how public and private forms of power regulate three main aspects of social reproduction: biological reproduction; reproduction of labour power; and social practices connected to caring and provisioning of human needs.
Assisted reproduction challenges and reinforces traditional understandings of family, kinship and identity. Sperm, egg and embryo donation and surrogacy raise questions about relatedness for parents, children and others involved in creating and raising a child. How socially, morally or psychologically significant is a genetic link between a donor-conceived child and their donor? What should children born through assisted reproduction be told about their origins? Does it matter if a parent is genetically unrelated to their child? How do experiences differ for men and women using collaborative reproduction in heterosexual or same-sex couples, single parent families or co-parenting arrangements? What impact does the wider cultural, socio-legal and regulatory context have? In this multidisciplinary book, an international team of academics and clinicians bring together new empirical research and social science, legal and bioethical perspectives to explore the key issue of relatedness in assisted reproduction.
