The Motherhood Business: Consumption, Communication, and Privilege
304
The Motherhood Business: Consumption, Communication, and Privilege
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Overview
The Motherhood Business follows the harried mother’s path into the anxious maelstrom of intelligent toys, healthy foods and meals, and educational choices. It also traces how some enterprising mothers leverage cultural capital and rhetorical vision to create thriving baby- and child-based businesses of their own, as evidenced by the rise of mommy bloggers and “mompreneurs”over the last decade.
Starting with the rapidly expanding global fertility market, The Motherhood Business explores the intersection of motherhood, consumption, and privilege in the context of fertility tourism, international adoption, and transnational surrogacy. The synergy between motherhood and the marketplace demonstrated across the essays affirms the stronghold of “intensive mothering ideology” in decisions over what mothers buy and how they brand their businesses even as that ideology evolves. Across diverse contexts, the volume also identifies how different forms or privilege shape how mothers construct their identities through their consumption and entrepreneurship.
Although social observers have long commented on the link between motherhood and consumerism, little has been written within the field of rhetoric. Penetrating and interdisciplinary, The Motherhood Business illuminates how consumer culture not only shapes contemporary motherhood but also changes in response to mothers who constitute a driving force of the economy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817389086 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 11/13/2015 |
| Series: | Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Motherhood Business
Consumption, Communication, and Privilege
By Anne Teresa Demo, Jennifer L. Borda, Charlotte Kroløkke
UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8908-6
CHAPTER 1
The Golden Egg
The Business of Making Mothers through Egg Donation
Charlotte Kroløkke
Determined to give pregnancy one more chance, Rita, at the age of fifty, with money from her divorce settlement, went to Spain for egg donation and fertility treatment. She is not alone. Divergent national legislation on access and availability of infertility treatments combined with cheap flights and a generation of women who are used to — and can afford to — travel all contribute to the willingness to seek fertility treatment abroad. As noted by one British woman in a newspaper account about her choice to go to Spain for egg donation and fertility treatment: "I trekked across South Africa in the back of a truck. I can do Spain, for God's sake." The above two cases, and cases like them, illustrate how privilege — not only financial privilege but privileges linked to the cultural capital associated with previous travel experiences — make going abroad for treatment a choice accessible to some.
Rooted in feminist communication scholarship, this chapter discusses the interplay of consumption with discourses on fertility as it unfolds in a select facet of the European market for assisted reproduction. Similar to the fertility market in the United States, the European market is stratified along categories of age, gender, race, and education, while also complicated by divergent national legislation, different health care systems, and cultural and linguistic differences. To provide the reader with a conceptual frame, I first situate the European market in fertility by linking fertility travel and reproductive privilege with nationality, and then turn to a feminist communication approach to discuss the ways that oocytes are gendered and discursively framed as gifts. The material included for analysis centers on the mediated representations of Spanish gamete donors, including the construction of IVF holidays in Spain and the Czech Republic. In the second half of the chapter, I turn to interviews with three Danish women who negotiate their choice to travel as a form of entrepreneurship, thereby framing fertility travel as well as oocyte donation as an acceptable and potentially empowering choice that not only fulfills their "natural" desire for a child but also, through economic compensation, empowers a Spanish or Czech woman. Fertility travelers depart in important ways from the marketing of fertility travel as a type of "fertility holiday," however. Instead, they foreground the trauma and emotional upheavals involved and, in so doing, these Danish women rhetorically position fertility travel as a resistance strategy.
Framing the Issue: Passport to Motherhood
The travel undertaken for fertility treatments is not unlike the traveling involved in search of medical treatments. In a recent special issue on medical migrations, Elizabeth Roberts and Nancy Scheper-Hughes define medical travel as situated in the nexus between globalization, mobility, neoliberalism, and global health care. It involves the movement of bodies and body parts, such as that undertaken in transplant tourism, in which not only the recipient but also donor bodies travel to donate an organ. Moreover, it makes particular destinations such as India, Barbados, Spain, or California into hub destinations for different fertility treatments.
The transnational business in motherhood relies on a conventional set of gendered stratifications. Feminist intersectional theorists such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins make explicit how gendered stratifications including different forms of privilege associated with, for example, race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality intersect. Similarly, Karen Barad develops the concept of intra-action, which also can be used to illustrate how phenomena such as race, gender, and class intra-act in sometimes surprising ways. In the case of traveling for egg donation, the European market is characterized by a desire and even a legal requirement to match recipient and donor phenotypes. This frequently privileges fair skinned and educated donors, and this is especially true in cases of Northern European fertility travelers. Motherhood is, thus, created through the reinstatement of inequalities between privileged women (and men) in the globalized North or West and comparatively poorer women in the South or East who become, as Margaret Jolly notes, the (new) reproductive assistants. Young, attractive, fair-skinned women currently attending a university and/or already mothers (who have proven fertility) are particularly attractive to the Northern European traveler, and thus, to the fertility industry at large.
The business of making motherhood through transnational egg donation clearly underscores economic privilege as a key to fertility travel. While some Danish women can afford to travel abroad for egg donation, others cannot. And while some Spanish and Czech women can afford fertility treatment in their own countries, others cannot. Other forms of privilege include access and availability of the reproductive technique, which constrain some, while others are able to cross not only, at times, legal and moral but also national borders. Lesbian couples are, for example, denied treatment in some countries (e.g., Italy), while permitted treatment in others (e.g., Denmark). In Norway, the fertilized egg has to be returned to the woman that it came from, and thus, Norwegian women in need of egg donation have to go elsewhere. Women older than forty-six years of age are denied treatment in Denmark yet welcomed in Spain or the Czech Republic. Reproductive privilege, therefore, is intricately linked to not only economic privilege but also privilege related to nationality, sexuality, and age. While reasons to travel vary greatly, fertility travel is often framed by travelers as a "forced" experience.
Positioning fertility travel within a global nexus of reproduction, Marcia Inhorn develops the concept of reproflows. Reproflows refers to the ways that reproductive matter and reproductive assistants, as well as receivers, move or flow in an increasingly transnational market in reproductive services. For example, white American egg donors fly to the Middle East to donate eggs intended for economically privileged Middle Eastern couples. The concept of reproflows captures, Inhorn argues, the transnational movements that unfold when technologies, bodies, knowledge, and reproductive cells cross nation states and enter the sphere of commerce, while also illustrating how these are frequently gendered and crisscross in interesting and even unpredictable ways. Reproflows play with the imaginations of bodily fluids flowing — extracted from and inserted into other bodies — while also presenting a framework for understanding the transnational dynamics at stake, including how technological and clinical expertise flow across nation states and how old and new stratifications reappear.
Fertility travel, like medical travel, draws on this rhetoric of entrepreneurship. Laura Mamo, for example, links the contemporary transnational business of making mothers with late-modern notions of entrepreneurship. Historically, the individualist and entrepreneurial ethos of the West (including the notion that the body is privately and individually owned) has worked to cement women's rights over their own bodies. The rhetoric of choice is now, however, used to make egg donation and fertility travel legitimate reproductive choices that individual women can make. Transnational egg donation is, however, doubly situated — not only in the nexus of globalization and in the neoliberal marketplace but also frequently as a form of gifting while, simultaneously, made into a commodity. I, therefore, now turn to feminist communication perspectives to illustrate the ways in which oocytes in the European market in fertility are rhetorically constructed as both commodities and gifts.
Consuming the Priceless: Eggs as Commodities, Eggs as Gifts
Feminist communication scholarship helps illustrate how some cells are rhetorically framed as more attractive than other cells. The commoditization of gametes is facilitated by several key developments that also rhetorically draw on the notion of gifting: for one, new reproductive technologies make it possible for human oocytes to be harvested, frozen, banked, and, importantly, thawed for later use; yet commoditization is linked to the spread of global capitalism and the speed at which (in)fertile individuals and bio-matter now move. In this section, I wish to outline the feminist communication issues at stake — advancing the idea that when biogenetic substances move from the realm of reproduction to the commodity sphere, specific ideas and values are assigned to particular gametes.
The commoditization of gametes is connected to earlier discourses on the rhetoric of desire and scarcity: Why, for example, "waste" human eggs, when they can give someone else the "gift of life"? To Rene Almeling, conventional gender ideologies intersect with discourses on altruism and commodification. Not only does this rhetoric shape the US fertility market, it also sets the stage through which egg and sperm donors come to understand their reproductive contributions. Sperm donation gets framed as "a job," she argues, while egg donation becomes discursively constructed as "a gift" or, as she states: "It is possible that women donating eggs will be perceived as altruistic helpers who want nothing more than for recipients to have families, while men donating sperm will be construed as employees performing a job with little care for the bank's customers." In this manner, gamete donation is rhetorically framed to fit conventional understandings of gender.
The ways in which reproductive cells become particular commodities illustrate the workings of a postmodern consumer culture in which sperm and eggs are commodities infused with cultural meanings. In fact, Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell argue that gametes are always embedded with cultural values, or rather, "bodies bring with them variously ontological values." Human eggs cannot be understood as stable entities or simply reproductive cells, but rather they must be seen as dynamic cells imploded with varying and shifting "biovalues," as they cross not only time and space but also "varying cultural terrains." Reproductive cells are not only products for sale but are also marketed as particular types of commodities: "One never buys sperm, but 'Caucasian' or 'Hispanic,' 'Muslim' or 'Jewish' sperm," for example. The commoditization and objectification of reproductive cells reveal, in interesting ways, how youth and intelligence combined with attractiveness and race are important in the selection and marketing of gamete donors. Clinics as well as oocyte recipients expect a racial match, while the recipients' desire for an "intelligent" donor produces requests for donors currently attending university.
Reproductive cells exist, as noted by Elizabeth Roberts, in the uncomfortable zone between the home/market, the private/public, value/dignity, and subject/object. This is especially the case with oocyte donation. As Almeling notes: "It may be cultural norms associated with the family, not the workplace, that influence processes of valuation in this market, as these bodily goods are intended to help people have children. Traditionally, ideals of femininity and motherhood have portrayed women as denizens of the private sphere who are selfless, caring, and devoted to others, while ideals of masculinity and fatherhood situate men as hardworking, emotionally distant breadwinners who inhabit the public sphere." The processes involved in extraction and insertion of human ova involves removing what has the appearance of something private, and perhaps even sacred, and positioning it into the market economy. Danish national debates on oocyte donation illustrate a general discomfort with this move while also underscoring the gendered dimensions. For example, in the Danish debates, sperm is narrated as "naturally" traveling outside of the male body, while oocytes are framed as not only inside the individual woman but also, to a higher extent, mirroring her identity.
Oocytes are in fact often framed as too priceless to enter the commodity sphere. Altruism and, consequently, the rhetoric of gifting is the dominant narrative of not only the Scandinavian countries but also the fertility industry at large. It works to remove oocytes from the market sphere and repositions donation in light of a higher purpose. The altruistic narrative resolves the potentially unfeminine motivations, while facilitating a narrative that is also preferred by the intended parents. Janice Raymond situates this in light of conventional gendered roles: "It is the language of selflessness and responsibility toward others in which women's very possibilities are framed." Moreover, Raymond notes that altruism cements women's status as reproductive consumers/assistants, whether it concerns producing eggs (as maternal donors) or producing babies (as mothers).
Few scholars have systematically studied the commodity/gift framework from the perspective of the donors. Yet, in a rare ethnographic study on US egg donors, Anne Pollock illustrates how egg donors themselves engage in the commodity/gift sphere by strategically exchanging one commodity/gift (their ova) for another (money). In her study, the US donors used egg donation to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, such as pay off credit card debt or go on an expensive trip, for example. In a similar study, albeit with Spanish donors, Gemma Orobitg and Carles Salazar found that egg donors rework economic interests and altruism, moving between objectification and subjectification, thereby becoming what the authors describe as "cultural bricoleurs." Becoming a donor thus involves not only administering medical treatments and exchanging eggs out of a desire to help others, but it also involves enabling a particular lifestyle or fulfilling particular dreams and desires.
Consequently, egg donation continues to confuse the gift/commodity dichotomy while collapsing conventional distinctions between nature/nurture, and biology/culture; meanwhile, in the case of transnational egg donation, it also challenges our notion of the making of nationality and kin. I agree with Waldby and Roberts when they point to the limitations of the gift/commodity dichotomy: "Ideas of gift and commodity are inadequate to conceptualize exhaustively their technicity, and the ways this technicity mediates the values and relations associated with particular kinds of tissues." Meanwhile, gifting is, as Mauss notes, a particular mode for circulating commodities. The Danish women traveling to clinics in Spain both express a sense of indebtedness to their anonymous and gift-giving Spanish donors while also hoping to be recipients of at least two "good-looking" eggs.
Turning now to the empirical framework, I wish to apply a feminist communication perspective to illustrate how the business of making mothers through egg donation draws on conventional assumptions related to maternity, nationality, and class. I focus my attention first on the clinical discourses, including the development of IVF holidays, while also paying attention to the presentation and mediation of egg donation and the imagined donor. Toward the end of the analysis, I center my discussion on the business of making biological mothers and do so in light of the narratives told by three Danish women. These are women who are part of a larger interview study and women who have already traveled to Spain for egg donation because Spanish and Czech clinics have almost no waiting lists on egg donation. The choice to center my analysis on Spain and the Czech Republic is made because they are the two countries chosen for egg donation by Danish women.
The Mediation and Commoditization of Oocytes and Fertility Travel
With a reported 187 IVF facilities, Spain is a prominent European center for fertility treatments and egg donation. Especially prominent, in the Spanish context, is the Instituto Valenciano de Infertilidad (IVI). IVI exemplifies the workings of a transnational market in fertility by offering expert fertility treatments in all major Spanish cities (including the coastal city of Alicante) and collaborating with the World Egg Bank — the world's largest online and US-based registry of eggs. At the clinic in Alicante, foreign patients receive egg donation and fertility treatments at a lower price than in the United States, while the clinic's success rate matches or is even superior to the success rates of other Western European and North American clinics. Access, availability, and location (including a comfortable climate, tourist attractions, and the reputation of warm and friendly locales) all make Spain a desirable destination for fertility travel.
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Excerpted from The Motherhood Business by Anne Teresa Demo, Jennifer L. Borda, Charlotte Kroløkke. Copyright © 2015 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS.
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