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Nameless Relations: Anonymity, Melanesia and Reproductive Gift Exchange between British Ova Donors and Recipients
304
by Monica Konrad
Monica Konrad
Nameless Relations: Anonymity, Melanesia and Reproductive Gift Exchange between British Ova Donors and Recipients
304
by Monica Konrad
Monica Konrad
Paperback
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Overview
"Konrad has produced an exceptionally interesting and totally original book . . . a major contribution to social theory." - Marilyn Strathern, Cambridge University Based on the author's fieldwork at assisted conception clinics in England in the mid-1990s, this is the first ethnographic study of the new procreative practices of anonymous ova and embryo donation. Giving voice to both groups of women participating in the demanding donation experience - the donors on the one side and the ever-hopeful IVF recipients on the other - Konrad shows how one dimension of the new reproductive technologies involves an unfamiliar relatedness between nameless and untraceable procreative strangers. Offsetting informants' local narratives against traditional Western folk models of the 'sexed' reproductive body, the book challenges some of the basic assumptions underlying conventional biomedical discourse of altruistic donation that clinicians and others promote as "gifts of life." It brings together a wide variety of literatures from social anthropology, social theory, cultural studies of science and technology, and feminist bioethics to discuss the relationship between recent developments in biotechnology and changing conceptions of personal origins, genealogy, kinship, biological ownership and notions of bodily integrity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781845450403 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Berghahn Books |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2005 |
| Series: | Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives , #7 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Monica Konrad is a Bye-Fellow of Girton College and Director of the PLACEB-O Research Orbital at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
Table of Contents
List of Figures PrefacePART I: THE SECRETS IN THE GIFT
Chapter 1. What is Concealed Inside an Anonymously Donated Gamete?
- Incoexistence
- Inside Out
- ART, Exteriorisation and Forms of Facelessness
- Future Feminisms
- ‘Cosmic Egg’ Revisited
- Ova Donors and Recipients
- Finding Method in the Oblique
- Implicit Links and Multiple Audiences
Chapter 2. Anonymity and the Way of Juxtaposition
- Anonymity/taboo
- Anonymity/openness
- Anonymity/reciprocity
- Anonymity/partibility
- Anonymity/transilience
PART II: IN THE NAME OF THE UN-NAMED
Chapter 3. Donors I
- Come Superovulate!
- Free Gift Emerging
- ‘Not a Hardship at All’
- Testimonies of Assistance
- Intimately Impersonal
- And Free Gift Receding
- Becoming Special
- Prestige and ‘Fame’
- ‘It’s Something I Must Do!’
- Summary Link
Chapter 4. Donors II
- Categories of De-identification and Degrees of Anonymisation
- Strong, Indeterminate and Weak Anonymity
- Knowledge Outcomes and the Form of the Return Gift
- Neither Inalienable nor Forgettable
- Remote Parenting?
- Negotiated Maternity and the Ambiguous Progenetrix
Chapter 5. Donors III
- Donating Agency, Extension and Intersubjective Spacetime
- Reproducibility and Relations of Non-relations
- Odelle: Genes by Proxy
- Policy Link - Penny: Relations as Ripple Effects
- Policy Link - Rita: Donating Adoption
- Policy Link - Meena: Receiving Pardon
- Summary Link
- Dispossession, Effraction and Nontraceability
- What Goes Round Comes round
- What Goes around Comes around (Again)
Chapter 6. Recipients I
- Gift Elasticity and the Infertility Industry
- Egg-sharing, Egg-giving and Egg Donation
- Anonymity, Kinship Distance and ‘Poison’ in the Gift
- ‘Like with Like’ and the Equivalence of Matching
- Degrees of Information and Informational Gaps
- The Idea of ‘Donor-release’
- Mismatching
- ‘You See What You Want to See’
- Blood Food Lines
- Summary Link
Chapter 7. Recipients II
- Accountability and Blood Manipulations
- Revealing-while-keeping the Secret (Ella’s Effacement)
- Whatever Happened to You?
- Money Manipulations and Ova Pathways
- Taming Contingency (I): Ova Pathways and Directing Flow
- Taming Contingency (II): Ranking between Recipients
- How Ova and Embryo Pathways Make Half-siblings
- Policy Link
- Summary Link
Chapter 8. Recipients III
- Hyper-kinship within a Remaindered World
- Eliciting Hyperembryo
- Re-donation, Refusal and ‘Disowning Decisions’
- Sacrificial Keeping-while-giving and Donation to Research
- Obviating a Compounded Life
- Liquidating the Third Party
- Re-donation as Continuous Gifting
- Summary Link
PART III: APPLICATIONS
Chapter 9. Unconcealing Extensional Transilience
- Hyper-embryo into Infinite Partibility and the Sourcing of Embryonic Stem Cells
- Policy Link
- Transilient Kinship and Embryo Donor-conceived Children
- Summary Link
Chapter 10. Unconcealing Regenerative Transilience
- Spotlight on the Final Frontier
- Envisioning the Problem of Ovarian Tissue and the Life-giving Death
- Reconstituted Persons and the Extensional Imaginary
- How it is Imagined Breath Circulates between Persons
- How it is Imagined the Unborn Sibling Blood-donor Child Will Make New Life
- Discussion
Chapter 11. Conclusion: Relations of Non-relations
Appendix I: Donor Biographical Profiles Appendix II: Recipient Biographical Profiles Appendix III: Treatment Protocol
Bibliography Index
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