Anonymous Exchange Relations: Assisted Conception between Ova Donors and Recipients in the United Kingdom

350 Pages·1996·15.3 MB·English

by  Monica Konrad

Anonymity, gifts and non-returns
Anonymity and kinship distance
Anonymity and gifts between general others
Anonymity, gifts and time
Anonymity and circulation (I):
Body parts and gender (i): transforming women into potentially
matchable parts
Substituting body parts: the ideal of equivalence
Women's 'recruitment' work
Making superlative relations
Circulating body parts: the pool and the allocatory flows of persons
Units into batches
Ranking between recipients
Non-divisible batches
Conclusions
Body parts and gender (ii): feminist perspectives on assisted
reproductive technologies
Body parts and gender (iii) partible persons and agents
3 Working with the un-named: some notes on methodology 81
Research design and execution (I)
Approaching clinics and ethical clearance
Gaining access: donors
Sample profile: donors
Interviewing donors
v
Research design and execution (II)
Gaining access: recipients
Sample profile: recipients
Interviewing recipients
Methodological problems and constraints
The problem of representation and 'grass roots' analysis
Atomisarion
Rhetoric, imagination, and 'unspoken' discourses
PART TWO: THE BODIES IN THE GIFT
4 Un-binding blood 107
Separating medical from lay discourse
Innate substance and the medical version of 'the donating body'
Separating out the different strands of women's discourses
Donors' apparent reproductions
Substance as action: assisting, facilitating, initiating
Remote parenting
Distant connections
Neither inalienable nor forgettable
No ties, no commitment....
The work of donation
Women 's time
Acquiring 'fame' and making changes
The mediumship of 'someone'
Conclusions
vi
5 Parthenogenesis and intercommunity life 150
Agency, extension and intersubjective spacetime
Donors and 'vistas of circulation':
Odelle: genes by proxy
Penny: relations as ripple effects
Rita: donating adoption
Meena: pardon and renewal
Conclusions
Delia and Fay: spacetimes of renewal
Conclusions
6 Active recipients 184
Agency, extension and polite fictions
Relations of visibility
The optics of own
Forgetting
Conceptive onlookers and spectacles of difference
Wendy: the spectacle of race
Yvonne: the spectacle of sex
The procreative 'body' of the hospital
The work of recipiency
Blood-food and continuing lines
Women's time
Pooling relations: gendered substance as action
Conclusions
vii
7 Circulating no-bodies: a case study of redonation 230
Redonation and 'spare' embryos
Recipients and 'vistas of circulation':
Yasmin: one person: many women
Winifred: passing on second-hand gifts
Thea: invisible bonds and unbounded kinship
Conclusions
PART THREE: NON-IDENTITY
8 What is the substance of anonymity? 252
Paradoxes of value
Anonymity and circulation (II):
The value of regeneration (i): ovarian tissue and the life-giving death
The value of regeneration (ii): the symbolism of Melanesian mortuary
exchange
The value of regeneration (iii): the symbolism of relations of
anonymous exchange
Transilience
Conclusions
viii
9 Conclusions 280
Research methodology and theoretical development
Main findings and conceptual insights
Appendices 292
Interviewees: Donors
Interviewees: Recipients
Donor Information Form
Egg Donation Questionnaire
Treatment Procedure
Bibliography 319
ix
LIST OF FIGURES
1 Desperately seeking mothers under 35 years. ..48
2a Please let me have a baby...51
2b Please help us to have a baby...Thank you to readers who answered caIl...52
2c So desperate for child of their own...53
3 Alternative ova pathways...60
4 Synchronised treatment cycles of ova donor and recipient undergoing. ..66
embryo transfer with normal (as opposed to absent) ovarian function
x
Those who know not how to be absent, know not how to love
xl
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction: recombining gifts, bodies and anonymity
Contents
Research focus
Anonymity and the gift
Identifying strangers
What kind of reproduction?
Exteriorisation
Anonymity and bodies
The discursive limits of biology
The western self and property claims
Implicit links
Anonymity
Melanesia
Thesis structure
Chapter One 2
Research focus
This research investigates a series of paradoxes arising from the observation that ova
donors and recipients constitute relations of exchange as they give and receive from
each other genetic material. Against the view that as mutually non-identifiable persons,
these two groups are not sufficiently aware of each other's identities for their actions
to be considered as kinds of exchange transactions, the study advances the premise,
first, that anonymity is a form of sociality, and second, that the time of exchange is
constituted in the way that persons, as anonymous agents, are able to project
themselves as social relations.
The paradoxes the study highlights are considered initially in terms of the conceptual
conjunction of the construct of anonymity in relation to the categories of the 'gift' and
the 'body'. This is a somewhat transient project, however, in the sense that what this
study seriously aims to explore are the less conspicuous features whereby these
categories shed their old associational shackles and transmute into new definitional
constructs specifically by virtue of their multiple recombinations.
The forum of this exploration is the contemporary practice of 'assisted conception'
whereby medical advances in 'new reproductive technology' circumvent temporarily
women's and men's infertility. Not by chance, the particular practice of ova donation
considered by this research employs a language of gifts as part of its discursive frame
of 'assisting' others, and significantly, it is these gifts that are seen to originate from
bodies that also denote anonymised persons. The research seeks to answer how gifts
Chapter One 3
that embody the power of reproductive substance, namely 'gifts of life', can be made
by women as sets of relations from out of their bodies, and just what kinds of persons
and relations might be in the process of being exchanged. It asks how such relations
might be enacted, through what medium these relations may be recognised as forms
of social agency, and from just what kind of substance such relations emanate.
Anonymity and the gift
Identifying strangers
From David Cheal's (1988) speculations that gift exchange is a moral economy of
'redundant' transactions, to Jonathan Parry's observation that a discourse of the 'free'
or 'pure' gift is most likely to emerge in societies with an advanced division of labor
and strong commercial impetus (Parry 1986:467), the lack of a conceptual framework
for theorising the form of contemporary gifts in modem western society has received
some critical attention (Carrier 1995). Despite recent critiques in anthropology that the
constructs of the commodity and the gift do not constitute oppositionally distinct kinds
of power or forms of social organisation (Appadurai 1986; Gel! 1992a; Hart 1982;
Parry 1986; Parry and Bloch 1989; Thomas 1991;), anthropological theorisations on
the gift are still firmly rooted in the premise that such exchange between strangers
bodes a necessary contradiction in terms. Doubtless another factor compounding
conceptual advance, this premise is due in part to the Durkheimian legacy of person
to person relationships constituted from the 'presence-availability' of persons who, as