Making a Match: Curating Race in South African Gamete Donation

ABSTRACT

What shapes would-be parents’ choices of gamete donors for third-party IVF? Following extensive ethnographic fieldwork in South African fertility clinics and egg donor agencies, I explore the work of donor matching, a process in which translational figures mediate patient desires, donor biography and corporeality, and racial imaginaries to assist would-be parents. In doing so, these figures, or “matchers,” draw upon both historical schemas and novel articulations to enact race, and certain forms of whiteness. I describe this through the concept of “curature,” a post-apartheid technology of racialization that reflects a neoliberal shift to privatized sites of power.

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KEYWORDS:

• South Africa
• assisted reproductive technologies
• curature
• gamete donation
• race
• whiteness

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the clinics and agencies, patients, and donors that participated in this research. Your generosity and openness are profoundly appreciated. I wish to thank the participants of the Wenner-Gren Race and Reproduction Workshop at Fordham University for their comments, and in particular Daisy Deomampo and Natali Valdez, the organizers and editors of this Special Issue. Thanks to my supervisor Fiona Ross for her enduring support and guidance. Finally, thanks to the three anonymous reviewers who provided thorough and thoughtful engagement. This research received ethical approval from the Anthropology Section of the Department of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Cape Town, and the Human Research Ethics Committee at the Faculty of Health Sciences, UCT (HREC 013/2015).

Notes

1. All participants have been given pseudonyms.

2. Some define the term “Coloured” as “mixed-race.” Erasmus (2017) critiques this as playing into the politics of purity, whereby certain races are “pure” or otherwise “mixed.” I use the South African spelling of “Coloured,” drawing on Erasmus’s assertion (2017:20–21) that the term was and remains an official category.

3. For more on cross-border reproductive travel within Africa, see Faria (2018) and Gerrits (2018).

4. The apartheid state initially categorized people of Chinese descent as “Coloured” and later as either White, Coloured, or Chinese, as a separate group. People of Japanese descent were “honorary whites” in the Group Areas Act (Park 2009).

5. Some repro-travelers came to South Africa because it is comparatively less expensive than, for instance, the United States.

6. Ciskei and Transkei refer to areas in the Eastern Cape that were declared “Bantustans,” that is “black homelands,” as part of apartheid policy.

7. Local players’ assessment of South Africa’s appeal in the global market for repro-travellers seems to contrast with their assessment in other locales. Amrita Pande’s (2018) research has indicated that eggs from white South Africans are viewed as less desirable than white donors from other destinations, such as the United States.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by the Mellon-funded First Thousand Days of Life Project at the University of Cape Town and the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust.

Notes on contributors

Tessa Moll

Tessa Moll is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. She completed her Masters in Gender Studies at the African Gender Institute at UCT. Her research explores IVF and gamete donation in post-apartheid South Africa.