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Project

Fertility Frontiers: A global history of transnational reproduction in Belgium from cross-feminist perspective

The global demise in intercountry adoption procedures is opening up newer, technologically advanced fertility frontiers, including transnational egg donation and surrogacy, through which infertile couples are building the biogenetic families of their dreams. Rather than understanding assisted reproductive technologies through the “hyperbole of radical novelty” (Franklin, 2007), this research resituates them within older yet ongoing histories of empire, racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy. This project reconstructs the global history of transnational reproduction in Belgium and empirically maps the dis/continuities between older and newer technologies of transnational reproduction, using a cross-feminist perspective. This approach foregrounds the material-discursive life stories of “motherworkers”: the first mothers, surrogates and egg cell providers whose reproductive lives, bodies, biologies and labours have been made cheaply available on the reproductive market but whose narratives remain invisible. This project combines archival and ethnographic research at the Centre for Descent on three technologies of transnational reproduction in Belgium corresponding to the past, present and future: the forced transfer of Belgian Metis children, transnational adoption and surrogacy. In this way, it examines the con/divergences in the gendered and racialised regimes of 1) labour/extraction, 2) nature/biology and 3) kinship to which motherworkers were and are subjected.

Date:1 Nov 2022 →  Today
Keywords:global history, transnational reproductive technologies, cross-feminist approach
Disciplines:Research, science and technology policy, Globalisation, Gender studies, Postcolonial studies, World history