With the expansion of reproductive technologies, the making of a baby has become an enterprise with a market for any, and all, related services. In the past decade, these technologies have taken a striking transnational turn, with clients crossing multiple borders to get a genetically related baby or a baby customized to their preferences. A research fellowship and residency at STIAS will allow me to finish writing my manuscript, “Desire-Design-Debility: The Global fertility industry and the Future of Humanity” (MIT Press), based on a decade-long multi-sited ethnography of the global fertility industry. It will also give me the time to define a related creative output in the form of a lecture-performance. In the book I argue that as reproductive technologies become a means for families to “invest” in a child, and people cross borders to maximise this investment, parental desires about their future offspring cannot be discussed merely as intimate, private, and innocuous choices but have profound implications for race, racialization, reproductive and disability justice. I follow the making of a baby in three segments and to multiple sites – the journeys of white (Afrikaner) egg donors from South Africa to various countries in Asia; the egg retrieval and making of an embryo in a clinic in India; and, finally, the transfer of embryo into the womb of a surrogate in Cambodia and Kenya. This project is an invitation to journey with me, across borders and continents, as I navigate the shifting cartography of this industry by placing it firmly within Southern theories of Blackness studies, critical whiteness studies from the south, Dalit feminist studies, and postcolonial science and technology studies.
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