How Do You Want Your Eggs? Kin-making in the Clinic and the Medical Management of Social Reproduction in Kolkata and the Bay Area

• In Event: 4163 - Social Dimensions of Reproductive Technologies

Abstract

Assisted reproductive technologies, especially using donor gametes, have amplified our reimagination of parentage and ‘legitimate’ families. This is particularly salient for heterosexual intended parents in India and the United States, the fastest growing egg-donation industries worldwide. Here, intended parents and clinics work together to contend with what traits are genetically imbued in the egg, versus socially learned and do not factor into the egg’s composition. Drawing on participant observations and in-depth interviews at fertility clinics in Kolkata and the Bay Area of California, the paper analyzes the biosocial negotiations in egg donor selection to question the conflation and confusion of biological essentialism and social constructionism in technologized kin-making. In doing so, it poses a theory of aspirational biologism: the medical management of donors’ biological and social traits reinforces donor selection that mirrors intended parents while selectively prioritizing only desirable aspects in their aesthetic and social make-up. Ultimately, the paper argues that the micro-politics of donor-patient matching replicate macro-politics of social desirability in both the Bay Area and Kolkata. Asserting that privilege can be biologically inherited, egg donor selection normalizes pervasive racialized inequalities and socioeconomic hierarchies as genetically prescribed.

Author

• Meghna Mukherjee, University of California Berkeley