Reproductive Migrations

Weis, Christina

doi:10.1108/978-1-83982-896-620211012

Cited by 5 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…10. The 'romance of the egg and sperm' referred to by Emily Martin (1991) is where the idea of culturally mediated scripts around reproductive narratives was first introduced into feminist accounts of reproduction; it has subsequently been developed by other authors who extend its meaning towards gamete donation and surrogacy (Pande, 2010;Teman, 2010;Tober, 2018;Weis, 2021b). We employ it here to pay homage to that history of writing about reproduction and also to explore another aspect that is about relationships between donor and recipient.…”

Section: Orcid Idmentioning

confidence: 99%

Redefining Bioavailability through Migrant Egg Donors in Spain

Nahman

Weis

2023

Body & Society

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This article utilises feminist technoscience studies’ notions 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 2 years’ ethnographic study in in vitro fertilisation clinics in Spain with migrant women who provided eggs to the cross-border in vitro fertilisation 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 in vitro fertilisation clinics, we examined women’s embodied stories to understand the ways in which bioavailability becomes. The article 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.

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Section: Orcid Idmentioning

confidence: 99%

Redefining Bioavailability through Migrant Egg Donors in Spain

Nahman

Weis

2023

Body & Society

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“…Deomampo, 2016; Majumdar, 2017; Pande, 2014; Rudrappa, 2015; Saravanan, 2018; Vora, 2013). Increasingly, scholars have studied other transnational surrogacy markets such as Mexico (Hovav, 2019; Schurr and Militz, 2018), Thailand (Whittaker, 2014), Ukraine (Siegl, 2018), and Russia (Weis, 2017). Scholarship on these newer surrogacy markets continues to highlight the exploitative potential of surrogacy while simultaneously challenging the notion of surrogates as predestined victims.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The abovementioned scholarship on surrogacy in newer reproductive markets describes what surrogacy looks like in the absence of regulatory protection, illuminating its potential harms. Much of the focus is on transnational practices and inequalities and the commodification and marketization of bodies and reproductive potentials (e.g., Hovav, 2019; Schurr, 2018; Weis, 2017). However, the national context these studies reveal is one of profound socioeconomic inequality; surrogacy is the best-paid option of “work” for the women who do it and who are often in financial straits.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, the national context these studies reveal is one of profound socioeconomic inequality; surrogacy is the best-paid option of “work” for the women who do it and who are often in financial straits. As concerns about exploitation are raised (e.g., Pande, 2014; Rudrappa, 2015; Weis, 2017), critiques of lack of regulation are often linked to calls for recognizing the “obscured labor” of surrogacy that Jacobson (2016) considers akin to employment.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Individual responsibility or trust in the state: A comparison of surrogates’ legal consciousness

Teman

Berend

2022

International Journal of Comparative Sociology

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Drawing on ethnographic research in the United States and Israel, two countries that have long-term experience with surrogacy, we compare surrogates’ understanding of, approaches to, and expectations about regulation. Women who become surrogates in these two countries hold opposite views about regulation. US surrogates formulate their rejection of standardized regulation—including standardized screening and contracts—by emphasizing their own responsibility for the legal, relational, and medical aspects of surrogate pregnancy. They want more oversight of fertility clinics and surrogacy agencies but ultimately argue for individual accountability. Israeli surrogates, conversely, support centralized government regulation of the practice and even defend Israel’s centralized regulation of surrogacy; many advocate for the extension of the law and the state to assume more responsibility for these arrangements. We discuss these differing formations of legal consciousness in terms of Engel’s conceptualization of “individualism emphasizing personal responsibility” versus “rights-oriented individualism.”

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“…Dasgupta and Dasgupta, 2014; Deomampo, 2016; Majumdar, 2017; Pande, 2014; Rudrappa, 2015; Whittaker, 2019). To date, major anthropological ethnographies and sociological studies have contributed to a nuanced view of the local specificities, cultural differences, and complexities of surrogacy in a number of different national settings including in Israel (Teman, 2010), India (Deomampo, 2016; Majumdar, 2017; Pande, 2014; Rozée et al, 2019; Rudrappa, 2015; Stockey-Bridge, 2017), Russia (Weis, 2017, 2019), Ghana (Gerrits, 2016), Mexico (Hovav, 2019; Olavarría, 2018; Schurr, 2017), Thailand (Whittaker, 2019), Canada (Lavoie and Côté, 2018), and the United States (Berend, 2016; Jacobson, 2016; Markens, 2007; Ragoné, 1994). These studies pay attention to surrogates and intended parents’ experiences and subjectivities and consider surrogacies and other types of third-party-assisted reproduction as forms of interactive encounters at the bodily, local, and national levels, shaped by processes of globalization.…”

Section: Research On Surrogaciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shifting surrogacies: Comparative ethnographies

König

Whittaker

Gerrits

et al. 2022

International Journal of Comparative Sociology

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Gestational surrogacy is a reproductive arrangement where a woman gestates a child for others—the “intended parents”—in order to be handed over to them after birth. Since the turn of the millennium, demands for surrogacy have continuously increased due to social and demographic changes, rising rates of infertility, and the normalization of new, non-heteronormative, family forms. Many countries prohibit surrogacy, and others that previously permitted this reproductive arrangement closed down as a result of political decisions or surrogacy scandals. Moreover, surrogacy is offered at greatly varying costs, ranging from approximately US$50,000 in countries like the Republic of Georgia to US$200,000 in fertility clinics in California. Accordingly, many of these arrangements are transnational, with intended parents who cannot access surrogacy or afford surrogacy in their home country commissioning it in countries such as the United States, until recently Ukraine, and today increasingly in the Republic of Georgia. Existing research has focused on surrogacy from different angles, such as practices of kinning and de-kinning, inequality and stratification, the political economy of the fertility industry, and its gender dimensions. We engage in, but further these debates by drawing attention to settings, accounts, experiences, and new theoretical notions that diverge from “mainstream” presentations of surrogacy. Moreover, in this Special Issue, we experimented with writing joint papers with a deliberative aim to provide comparative analyses and emphasize the links between and diversity of different cases of surrogacy. Therefore, all papers have an explicit comparative character and are all based on empirical studies from more than one field site. They provide nuanced understandings of surrogacy arrangements, grounded in empirical data rather than ideological, political, or moral assessments.

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Reproductive Migrations

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Redefining Bioavailability through Migrant Egg Donors in Spain

Redefining Bioavailability through Migrant Egg Donors in Spain

Individual responsibility or trust in the state: A comparison of surrogates’ legal consciousness

Shifting surrogacies: Comparative ethnographies

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