Transgressive Markets in Assisted Reproduction: Queering family construction in the 21st century

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

The mobilisation of assisted reproduction as a set of diverse practices is quintessentially trans in both construct and operation. The vital resources that constitute the raw materials of this economy are now able to traverse time and space with relative ease by virtue of the emergence of new technologies such as sperm and egg freezing and uterine transplantation; whilst donors and recipients together remake historical conceptions of familial relations by queering both their composition and social organisation. The resulting assemblages are inherently transgressive in nature finding expression in new forms of distributed kinship that have their roots in a variety of localities and cultural contexts and which are bought into being through regulatory protocols that reach across existing borders and legal jurisdictions. Contributors to this panel investigate through original conceptual and empirical research how advanced markets in assisted reproduction disrupt or unsettle existing conceptions of how families should or could be constituted and explore how these new family forms are realised through amalgamations of technologies; bodily and affective labour, corporate strategizing and political expediency. Taking transnational surrogacy, uterine transplantation and social egg freezing as points of departure we together unpack the key controversies that attend the fundamental revisions of the concept and practice of family life that these new technologies both create and demand.

Sub Unit

• Closed Panels

Individual Presentations

• Reversing infertility: The political economy of family building through uterine transplantation - Sayani Mitra, Institute of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine

• Frozen eggs, Frozen dreams: How oocyte cryopreservation in urban India alter women’s approach to family formation - Priya Satalkar, Institute for Biomedical Ethics, University of Basel, Switzerland

• The invisible surrogate: Regulatory mechanisms and the erasure of the (re)productive presence of commercial surrogates - Rakhi Ghoshal, Unitedworld School of Law; Bronwyn Parry, King's College London

• Transnational surrogacy in the post-Soviet sphere: Geographic and geo-political stratifications amongst migrant and commuting surrogacy workers in Russia - Christina Weis, Centre for Reproduction Research; De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

Session Organizer

• Bronwyn Parry, King's College London