Suchergebnisse

"Over the last 15 years or so, a new trade in assisted reproduction has grown across the world, offering people the opportunity to form families through cross-border exchanges of gametes, embryos, and gestational surrogates. This trade has been aided by the advent of affordable transport, information technologies, and the movement of assisted reproductive expertise around the world, combined with regulatory differences between different jurisdictions that make it possible for people to circumvent restrictions in their home countries to pursue their imagined families elsewhere. However, the growth of this industry has thrown into relief older forms of inequality by class, race, or economic status, and poses new questions about the social impact of these technologies and the new opportunities and threats they pose to women, particularly poorer women from developing countries, whose bodies are the sources of these products. International Surrogacy as Disruptive Industry in Southeast Asia traces the rise and fall of surrogacy as a commercial service in Thailand. Thailand had been a popular destination for commercial surrogacy from 2011 until the 'Baby Gammy' case in 2014, which caused the military government of Thailand to ban the practice in 2015. Since its closure in Thailand, the industry has moved to other countries in the region, such as Cambodia, which lack any current regulations or legislation. This fascinating ethnography brings to light the lives of the intended parents, the doctors, brokers, and regulators in Thailand, to show how this amazing opportunity for some also offers the potential for exploitation of vulnerable groups of people in the absence of adequate protections"--

Within the expanding bioeconomy of assisted reproduction, there are limitations to providing quality informed consent for egg donation when the long-term risks remain unknown. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Barcelona with egg donors and in vitro fertilization (IVF) professionals, in this paper, we speak of "temporal choreography" to describe how clinical practices delimit and circumscribe the information that will be offered to egg donors by positioning them in an immediate present or "temporal stasis" in which future risks of egg donation are precluded, and consideration of possible future uses or distribution of eggs is truncated. These aspects intersect with the biographical temporality of egg donors, who are mostly young and economically precarious. This choreography is essential to the commercial success of the Spanish egg donation industry, which is the largest in Europe. This article engages with the emerging interest in temporality and IVF by questioning whose bodies are positioned to anticipate risks and fertility as an act of self-care and whose are encouraged to cast aside concerns about harms in favor of short-term monetary gains.

International medical travel (IMT) challenges the notion of health care as a responsibility of a nation-state to its citizens, tied to the territory of a nation-state. As patients travel for medical care, they invoke not territorialised notions of citizenship, but make new claims. In this article, the authors propose the term 'flexible bio-citizenship' that extends the notion of 'flexible citizenship' to describe transnational mobilities for the accumulation of biovalue. They argue that people who travel for medical care come from a variety of backgrounds, identities and circumstances for whom the physical and economic ability to travel and cross borders is a form of flexible social capital enabling them to access levels of care otherwise inaccessible to them. The article explores the implications upon citizenship for a diverse range of people who travel for their health care: from highly mobile cosmopolitan professional expatriate workers, regional border crossers, migrant workers, those who cannot afford care at home, patients whose status makes treatments unavailable, and outsourced patients forced to travel for care. Their mobility allows them to gain biovalue but also alters their citizenship relationships and perspectives.

This paper examines how East Timorese women in Melbourne, Australia view gender relations within the context of their resettlement and integration process in Australia as part of a broader question about gender and the construction of ethnic identities within a diverse community. Based upon a small qualitative study with fifteen East Timorese migrant women, we examine the complexity of the ethnic identity of East Timorese women in Australia, whose community reflects the diversity of their homeland, status divisions used historically within East Timor, different migration experiences and socio-economic and generational differences. The experience of East Timorese women varies according to the circumstances and timing of their arrival in Australia. Although most fled conflict and trauma, for the most part the women interviewed do not describe themselves in terms of a traumatized self-identity and depict their community in terms of engagement, support and resilience. Gender relationships changed with migration to Australia, with women enjoying more 'equality' in their relationships, in contrast to their past lives in East Timor. Yet many women also describe the maintenance of strong patriarchal values within the family, continued expectations of their responsibility to domestic affairs and the importance of maintaining a public face of appropriate behavior as 'good Timorese women.' They maintain Timorese identity through raising children and transmitting the potent cultural markers of food and language skills.