Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: In South Africa's urban hubs, young women are increasingly participating in the global fertility market by donating their eggs. Egg providers, who supply oocytes for others’ use in fertility treatment, are a key resource in the fertility market, and they are emblematic of new forms of biolabor. Egg markets have tapped into a precariously middle‐class population of young Black women in Johannesburg, where the neoliberal state has largely retreated from fostering social mobility. What role does egg donation play in the social world of young South African women? I approach this question by extending Cohen's concept of “operability,” which can illuminate how egg donation becomes a means for young women to enact modernity, or relationality beyond the postapartheid state and the horizons of their social worlds, structured as they are by the entanglements of race, class, and gender.
Source: American Ethnologist
DOI: 10.1111/amet.13350
Author: Tessa Moll
Institution: University of the Witwatersrand
Language: English
Subfield: Reproductive Medicine
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,240
Awards: G4266550611, G7989563688
OpenAlex ID: W4402889363