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What happens when people are reduced to products? By pulling back the clinical curtain on the multi-billion-dollar per year global egg industry, that is the central question Eggonomics seeks to address. Tracing the emotional and physical journeys egg donors embark upon as suppliers of valuable commodities, this book reveals uncomfortable realities at the heart of the industry. Donors — and the eggs they provide — are absolutely essential to helping others create the families of their dreams. But not all clinics treat their donors as well as their paying patients, and many donors suffer as a result. Technological innovations allow the egg donation industry to expand, fueling the private equity incursion into fertility medicine, turning once-private clinics into highly profitable, multinational conglomerates. Drawing upon international anthropological fieldwork, Eggonomics reveals the clinical spaces where egg donor's bodies are tested, prodded, and poked for ever-increasing sums of profit, eugenic forces drive donor selection, and the unrelenting pressures of global capitalism threaten medicine's prime directive of ‘do no harm.'Timely, meticulously researched, and written with surgical precision, Eggonomics is a crucial read for researchers, medical professionals, policymakers, and anyone considering becoming or using an egg donor.

Same-sex marriage is now legal in twenty-nine countries and the subject of continued debate around the world. The Political Economy of Same-Sex Marriage: A Feminist Critique considers this debate from a political economy perspective. Rather than engaging directly in the now well-rehearsed social-movement and academic for-and-against debates, this book focuses on processes of institutionalization of same-sex marriage and so-called'rainbow families'within (neo)liberal capitalist democracies. It examines how states and markets appropriate same-sex marriage and family to enhance their own political and symbolic capital, consolidating power and profit within existing systems of gendered and raced socioeconomic stratification. Taking a radical feminist, heterodox, qualitative and intersectional approach, this book investigates the political economy of same-sex marriage across three axes: same-sex marriage as institution; same-sex marriage and the market; and the political economy of the'rainbow family'. The examination of case studies from different countries and regions enables a comparative analysis that foregrounds cultural, political and economic path dependencies while at the same time highlighting a number of striking commonalities. In all the countries discussed in this book and in most respects, same-sex marriage has been integrated almost seamlessly into a mainstream/malestream political economy of marriage and family and its translation into added market and productive value. The Political Economy of Same-Sex Marriage: A Feminist Critique will be of use to researchers and students alike, and indeed to all those who are curious about the mainstreaming of homosexuality within twenty-first-century capitalist democracies.

Intercountry adoption has undergone a radical decline since 2004 when it reached a peak of approximately 45,000 children adopted globally. Its practice had been linked to conflict, poverty, gender inequality, and claims of human trafficking, ultimately leading to the establishment of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption (HCIA). This international private law along with the Convention on the Rights of the Child affirm the best interests of the child as paramount in making decisions on behalf of children and families with obligations specifically oriented to safeguards in adoption practices. In 2004, as intercountry adoption peaked and then began a dramatic decline, commercial global surrogacy contracts began to take off in India. Global surrogacy gained in popularity owing, in part, to improved assisted reproductive technology methods, the ease with which people can make global surrogacy arrangements, and same-sex couples seeking the option to have their own genetically-related children. Yet regulation remains an issue, so much so that the Hague Conference on Private International Law has undertaken research and assessed the many dilemmas as an expert group considers drafting a new law, with some similarities to the HCIA and a strong emphasis on parentage. This ground-breaking book presents a detailed history and applies policy and human rights issues with an emphasis on the best interests of the child within intercountry adoption and the new conceptions of protection necessary in global surrogacy. To meet this end, voices of surrogate mothers in the US and India ground discourse as authors consider the human rights concerns and policy implications. For both intercountry adoption and global surrogacy, the complexity of the social context anchors the discourse inclusive of the intersections of poverty and privilege. This examination of the inevitable problems is presented at a time in which the pathways to global surrogacy appear to be shifting as the Supreme Court of India weighs in on the future of the industry there while Thailand, Cambodia and other countries have banned the practice all together. There is speculation that countries in Africa and possibly Central America appear poised to pick up the multi-million dollar industry as the demand for healthy infants continues on.

Assisted Reproductive Technologies in the Global South and North critically analyses the political and social frameworks of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART), and its impact in different countries. In the context of a worldwide social pressure to conceive – particularly for women – this collection explores the effect of the development of ARTs, growing globalisation and reproductive medicalization on global societies. Providing an overview of the issues surrounding ART both in the Global South and North, this book analyses ART inequalities, commonalities and specificities in various countries, regions and on the transnational scene. From a multidisciplinary perspective and drawing on multisite studies, it highlights some new issues relating to ART (e.g. egg freezing, surrogacy) and discusses some older issues regarding infertility and its medical treatment (e.g. in vitro fertilisation, childless stigmatisation and access to treatment). This book aims to redress the balance between what is known about Assisted Reproductive Technologies in the Global North, and how the issue is investigated in the Global South. It aims to draw out the global similarities in the challenges that ARTs bring between these different areas of the world. It will appeal to scholars and students in the social sciences, medicine, public health, health policy, women's and gender studies, and demography.

Prominent examples from contemporary vampire literature expose a desire to re-evaluate and re-work the long-standing, folkloristic interpretation of the vampire as the immortal undead. This book explores the'new vampire'as a literary trope, offering a comprehensive critical analysis of vampires in contemporary popular literature and demonstrating how they engage with essential cultural preoccupations, anxieties, and desires. Drawing from cultural materialism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and postmodern thought, Piatti-Farnell re-frames the concept of the vampire in relation to a distinctly twenty-first century brand of Gothic imagination, highlighting important aesthetic, conceptual, and cultural changes that have affected the literary genre in the post-2000 era. She places the contemporary literary vampire within the wider popular culture scope, also building critical connections with issues of fandom and readership. In reworking the formulaic elements of the vampiric tradition — and experimenting with genre-bending techniques — this book shows how authors such as J.R. Ward, Stephanie Meyers, Charlaine Harris, and Anne Rice have allowed vampires to be moulded into enigmatic figures who sustain a vivid conceptual debt to contemporary consumer and popular culture. This book highlights the changes — conceptual, political and aesthetic — that vampires have undergone in the past decade, simultaneously addressing how these changes in'vampire identity'impact on the definition of the Gothic as a whole.

Establishing an interdisciplinary connection between Food Studies and American literary scholarship, Piatti-Farnell investigates the significances of food and eating in American fiction, from 1980 to the present day. She argues that culturally-coded representations of the culinary illuminate contemporary American anxieties about class gender, race, tradition, immigration, nationhood, and history. As she offers a critical analysis of major works of contemporary fiction, Piatti-Farnell unveils contrasting modes of culinary nostalgia, disillusionment, and progress that pervasively address the cultural disintegration of local and familiar culinary values, in favor of globalized economies of consumption.In identifying different incarnations of the'American culinary,'Piatti-Farnell covers the depiction of food in specific categories of American fiction and explores how the cultural separation that molds food preferences inevitably challenges the existence of a homogenous American identity. The study treads on new grounds since it not only provides the first comprehensive study of food and consumption in contemporary American fiction, but also aims to expose interrelated politics of consumption in a variety of authors from different ethnic, cultural, racial and social backgrounds within the United States.