Precarious labour: on egg donation as work
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the relationship between social reproduction and reproductive technologies in Canada to interrogate the value in reconceiving egg donation as a form of labour, rather than as a matter of health.
Abstract: This article examines the relationship between social reproduction and reproductive technologies in Canada to interrogate the value in reconceiving egg donation as a form of labour, rather than as a matter of health. It argues that understanding egg donation as labour both highlights the potential for egg donors to be autonomous, agentic subjects within exploitative circumstances, and offers new possibilities for the governance of what has been, to date, a failed policy field.
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TL;DR: Margaret Atwood's novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a tour de force based on speculative dystopian fiction, and Handmaids are recruited to repopulate the sterility struck society.
Abstract: Point Illustration Explanation Mini-conclusion Introduction Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a tour de force based on speculative dystopian fiction. In the novel, Atwood creates a society run by a theocratic government, and Handmaids are recruited to repopulate the sterility struck society. It was written in 1985 and is written in a first person limited narrative stance. The protagonist of the novel is a Handmaid named Offred.
303 citations
TL;DR: A broader view on gender inequalities and the production of wellbeing, with the capability approach serving as the theoretical connection between the chapters, is presented in this paper. But the description of the theory remains lacking amidst numerous references that point the reader towards clarification elsewhere.
Abstract: Gender inequality remains both a pressing social issue and a fruitful area of social science research. This edited volume seeks to examine gender inequality and the production of well-being in Europe from an interdisciplinary perspective that is perhaps more feminist economics than sociology. The chapters draw on historical and contemporary European examples and offer a somewhat different take (both theoretically and methodologically) on what is usually found in American sociology journals. This book takes a broader view on gender inequalities and the production of wellbeing, with the ‘‘capability approach’’ serving as the theoretical connection between the chapters. The chapters reemphasize that social reproduction is more complex than the production of goods. The various authors also call for and (in the empirical chapters) take into account the socio-political and economic context. An entire chapter is dedicated to the introduction of the capability approach (Chapter Two). But the description of the theory remains lacking amidst numerous references that point the reader towards clarification elsewhere. The authors posit that well-being is an important outcome, and that the production of well-being itself needs to be included in the study of gender inequality (Chapter One), while also demanding that women are not just another vulnerable group (Chapter Four). Chapter Three further challenges conventional notions about the evolution of the ‘‘modern family’’ in the wake of the industrialization process, and argues that the fragility of families is not a novel concept. These theoretical chapters call for a more multidimensional assessment of gender inequality, and remind readers of the importance of the concept and production of well-being. The topics covered in the two empirical parts of the book are very diverse in terms of subject, methodology, and historical time period. The first empirical section ‘‘Gender Care and Work’’ is held together by the challenge to the idea of women as passive victims and in need of assistance. Chapter Five demonstrates widows’ relative economic independence in urban Sweden and Finland from 1890 to 1910, and Chapter Six shows the centrality of female relatives in caring for extended family members in times of crisis. Chapter Seven reaffirms the idea that intergenerational support is not one-sided, and those often thought of as needing care due to older age are also givers of care and other forms of support. The findings from the chapters emphasize the importance of non-monetary transfers outside the market system. The theme of caregiving is readdressed in later chapters which illustrate how home caregiving in Belgium is situated between the public/market divide (Chapter Nine) and the problems of combining market work with caregiving, especially for those in the ‘‘sandwich generation’’ (Chapter Ten). In a seeming departure from studies in the capability approach tradition, Chapter Eight is a more typical time-use study that examines the gender asymmetry in unpaid labor in Italy. The results are not novel as women are found to do more unpaid work, especially in couples with children. The second empirical part of the book focuses on the intra-household allocation of resources. Three of the five chapters in this section center primarily on the nineteenth century, examining consumption patterns in Spain (Chapter 11), gender differences in children’s schooling in Switzerland (Chapter 12), and the differences in the treatment of and opportunities for celibate men and women in the Pyrenees (Chapter 13). These chapters illustrate gender differences, but not in
229 citations
TL;DR: In Sex Cells, Rene Almeling describes in detail the market in what are euphemistically called donated eggs and sperm, and found gender differences not only in pay, but in the framing of the donation as a ‘‘gift’’ or a‘job’, in the market for gametes.
Abstract: In Sex Cells, Rene Almeling describes in detail the market in what are euphemistically called donated eggs and sperm. She found gender differences not only in pay, but in the framing of the donation as a ‘‘gift’’ or a ‘‘job.’’ In the market for gametes, eggs are more highly valued than sperm; egg donation is considered a gift of life, while sperm donors are construed as doing a job for which they are paid. To Almeling, the frame is a gendered stereotype of women as ‘‘selfless, caring, and focused on relationships and family’’ (p. 131); they cannot be seen as selling babies, so their eggs are a ‘‘gift.’’ For sperm donors, the masculine oxymoron was in the juxtaposition of a pleasurable experience (masturbation) with a sometimes alienating job. Yet while sperm donors call themselves fathers and connect to the children born of their sperm, negating the female gestator and social parents, egg donors ‘‘are adamant that they are not mothers’’—the recipients are the mothers (p. 20). Almeling’s extensive, in-depth ethnographic research covers the economic, cultural, and structural organization of six donor programs through interviews with 45 staff members, observations of daily practices, and analysis of more than a thousand records. She also conducted 60to 90-minute interviews with 19 egg donors and 20 sperm donors ranging in age from 19 to 46. Sperm donation went from a medical service for infertile heterosexual married couples in the 1950s using fresh sperm, to a commercial enterprise where frozen sperm is sold increasingly to single women and lesbians. The AIDs epidemic in the 1980s increased the market for sperm that could be frozen and the donors tested for several months before it was used. With new in vitro fertilization (IVF) techniques for male infertility, there are fewer heterosexual married couples seeking sperm donation, so the target buyers increasingly are single women and lesbians. The large commercial sperm banks sell donors with profiles and ID releases to meet these clients’ demands. The egg donation programs that began in IVF clinics in the 1980s originally were a search for altruistic ‘‘earth mothers.’’ Psychological evaluations were used on the premise that altruism predicted honesty about medical information and compliance with the regimen of hormonal injections. Anonymity was discouraged; some recipients even recruited their own donors. The proliferation of IVF clinics and new techniques has increased the demand for donated eggs for women whose uteruses are intact but whose eggs are defective. There are many applications to be egg donors, but there is a high attrition rate. The ideal egg donor, according to agency staffs, is either a physically attractive college graduate or a caring mother. The ideal sperm donor is a tall college student with consistently high sperm counts. Agencies also look for ethnic, racial, and religious diversity, and may pay these donors more. The extensive testing that potential egg donors go through and the attrition rate reduce actual donors to 20 percent of the original pool. Sperm banks reject more than 90 percent of applicants, most on the basis of their sperm count. In the course of profiling, the actual sex cells (sperm, eggs) that are being sold turn into gendered people, even though few of the donors’ personality characteristics are inheritable. Egg donation involves self-administered injections of fertility drugs to stimulate egg production and surgical egg retrieval. In addition, the donors are monitored with blood tests and ultrasounds. They may have to travel to the recipient’s city, but sometimes that is a bonus vacation. Side effects can be severe or at the least, discomforting—hyperstimulation, infection, bleeding, anesthetic complications, and pain—but donors prepare themselves with discussions with medical professionals and online or library research. The majority (80 percent) were willing to undergo at least one more cycle; many planned to donate several more times. The donors get paid thousands of dollars no matter how many eggs they produce, but they usually Reviews 379
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110 citations
TL;DR: The Professional Guinea Pig as mentioned in this paper investigates the motivations, reflections, and practices of professionalized clinical trial participation, and argues that the drug industry deliberately uses the consent form to obfuscate the commodified relationship with research subjects.
Abstract: The Professional Guinea Pig belongs to a social science growth area investigating the pharmaceutical industry in contemporary health care. This literature is united by a prevailing consensus that views the drug industry as the villain du jour in health policy. After focusing on unbridled professional power and the for-profit insurance industry, the critical social gaze is turned to Big Pharma. Consequently, most social scientists see it as their job to expose the scientific manipulation, the chase of profit margins, the dehumanization, the ethical transgressions, and the inequities that flow from drug industry involvement. In engaging prose, Roberto Abadie delivers the expected social science message. Abadie conducted an eighteen-month ethnography of a group of healthy people who made a living as research subjects in Phase One clinical trials in Philadelphia. Most trial participants are African-American and Latino, but Abadie spent time with a group of young, non-Hispanic white anarchists who enrolled in clinical trials. He compares these trial participants with people enrolling in HIV trials. The book examines the motivations, reflections, and practices of professionalized clinical trial participation. What does Abadie make from this data? He highlights the ‘‘commodification’’ (p. 15) of the trial subjects’ bodies in a ‘‘slow torture economy’’ (p. 46). He pays attention to the ‘‘revolt’’ (p. 54) of the professional research subjects when they felt underpaid and threatened to walk out. Instead they received an $800 bonus. He notes the ‘‘resistance of the weak’’ (p. 60), when ‘‘guinea pigs’’ (p. 21) smuggle in forbidden foods or engage in other acts of ‘‘sabotage’’ (p. 61). Abadie also examines the risk-management strategies of the trial subjects: they weigh money against potential long-term effects but tend to believe that drugs wash out of their bodies in a couple of days. He then compares the professional trial participants to those involved in HIV trials and argues that the latter are motivated by deeper existential concerns but, of course, they also have a disease and participate in different kinds of trials. In a final empirical chapter, Abadie examines the professional trial subject’s limited understanding of informed consent procedures, and argues that the drug industry deliberately uses the consent form to obfuscate the commodified relationship with research subjects. Abadie’s book has two glaring weaknesses. First, he brings much rhetorical bluster to his study but the interview quotes and observations do not bear out the core themes of ‘‘alienation’’ (p. 6) and ‘‘exploitation’’ (p. 154). The fascinating empirical puzzle of his study is that anarchists are willing to swallow their principles and vegan diet to take money from this most controversial industry. In the conclusion, Abadie pays attention to the paradox between anarchist politics and pragmatics, but throughout most of the book he tries to rationalize the anarchists’ justifications for the blood money that sustains their lifestyle of leisure. Some of his friends even minimize the trial risk because they assume that strong government oversight protects them from harm! Abadie writes: ‘‘[these] views of governmental regulation are not totally at odds with their radical [anarchist] beliefs’’ (p. 143). Really? Rather than reconcile the dissonance between what anarchists do and belief in theoretical constructs of exploitation, the explanation seems more mundane. People end up in trial after trial by choice or circumstances because it is easy money. Compared to flipping burgers, cleaning toilets, or being homeless, testing pills is extremely attractive. The job stinks, but the money is good. Abadie also wrote the wrong book. While he lived in the anarchist community, he never participated along with his research subjects in the trials. Abadie’s information comes largely from casual conversations
93 citations
References
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01 Jan 1975
TL;DR: Rubin this paper used geology as an analogy to situate the essays as "artifacts of very particular circumstances" or "different matrices" which "manifest a consistent lineage of theoretically interconnected interests".
Abstract: Gayle S. Rubin, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Women’s Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, made her first impact on feminist and gender theory in 1975 with the publication of her groundbreaking essay ‘The traffic in women: Notes on the “political economy” of sex’, in which she introduced the term ‘sex/gender system’ as a corrective to what she saw as the conceptual limitations of the word ‘patriarchy’ for theorising gender and sexuality. When ‘Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality’ (a ‘protoqueer’ text that became foundational to queer studies) was published in 1984, she had already established her reputation as a fearless and often controversial pioneering theorist of the politics of sexuality and an activist on behalf of sexual minorities, which brought her into open conflict with some sister feminists – notably those spearheading the anti-pornography lobby. As the title of this timely reader of Rubin’s work suggests, her essays are deviations from norm and doctrine in their sustained and reasoned refusal of convention, including those givens of feminism, and in their centring of the idea and practice of sexual deviance as intellectual concerns that are always, inextricably, both personal and political. (Rubin’s explicit appropriation of the terminology of 19th-century sexology is significant and the lineage of the term ‘deviant’ is comprehensively engaged in her essay ‘Studying sexual subcultures’). Her stated objective in ‘Thinking sex’ to ‘contribute to the pressing task of creating an accurate, humane, and genuinely liberatory body of thought about sexuality’ (p. 145) underpins the trajectory of the career mapped in her key essays and subsequent reflections on them in afterwords, postscripts and an interview conducted by Judith Butler included in this reader, which, in its entirety, stands as a necessary reminder of the role feminism should play ‘as a progressive, visionary force in the domain of sexuality’ (p. 275), especially when confronted by the cooption of its discourse by right-wing agendas. Reflecting on the retrospective imperatives of writing the introduction to Deviations, Rubin uses geology – a ‘recreational obsession’ of hers (p. 2) – as an analogy to situate the essays as ‘artifacts of very particular circumstances’ or ‘different matrices’ which ‘manifest a consistent lineage of theoretically interconnected interests’. The aptness of the analogy is increasingly evident as one reads through the sequence of essays – each ‘something like a piece of amber that preserves’ a particular cultural moment and place, to use Rubin’s description of ‘The traffic in women’ (p. 12) – and her later reviews of them in which additional contextualisation deepens one’s understanding of their significance, both then and now. She returns to this analogy in her final essay in the collection,
2,131 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1972
TL;DR: In The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Shulamith Firestone cuts into the prejudice against women (and children) - amplified through the modern media-that pervades our society as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: "In The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Shulamith Firestone cuts into the prejudice against women (and children) - amplified through the modern media-that pervades our society." -- p. [2] of cover.
1,213 citations
01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: This document reviews the scientific background, current technology, clinical results and potential future applications of two methods for preserving female fertility—ovarian tissue cryopreservation and oocyte cryopReservation.
1,016 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1991
TL;DR: In this article, the author attempts to integrate previous work on Foucault with feminist theory, and expands discussion of feminism and sexual liberation, charts the impact of Foucaults on humanistic studies, and picks up an aspect of the mothering theme, the question of new reproductive technologies.
Abstract: In this book, the author attempts to integrate previous work on Foucault with feminist theory. She expands discussion of feminism and sexual liberation, charts the impact of Foucault on humanistic studies, and picks up an aspect of the mothering theme, the question of new reproductive technologies.
807 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss four fundamental and interpenetrating domains of feminist theory: representation, the body, identity, and activism, and suggest some critical inquiries that considering disability can generate within these theoretical arenas.
Abstract: of the body, multiculturalism, and the social formations that interpret bodily differences. The essay asserts that integrating disability as a cat- egory of analysis and a system of representation deepens, expands, and challenges feminist theory. To elaborate on these premises, the essay discusses four fundamental and interpenetrating domains of feminist theory: representation, the body, identity, and activism, suggesting some critical inquiries that considering disability can generate within these theoretical arenas. Over the last several years, disability studies has moved out of the applied fields of medicine, social work, and rehabilitation to become a vibrant new field of inquiry within the critical genre of identity studies. Charged with the residual fervor of the Civil Rights Movement, Women's Studies and race studies established a model in the academy for identity-based critical enterprises that followed, such as gender studies, queer studies, disability studies, and a proliferation of ethnic studies, all of which have enriched and complicated our understandings of social justice, subject formation, subjugated knowledges, and collective action. Even though disability studies is now flourishing in disciplines such as history, literature, religion, theater, and philosophy in precisely the same way feminist studies did twenty-five years ago, many of its practitioners do not recognize that disability studies is part of this larger undertaking that can be called identity studies. Indeed, I must wearily conclude that much of current disability studies does a great deal of wheel reinventing. This is largely because many disability studies scholars simply do not know either feminist theory or the institutional history of Women's Stud- ies. All too often, the pronouncements in disability studies of what we need to start addressing are precisely issues that feminist theory has been grappling with for years. This is not to say that feminist theory can be
734 citations