“Mix or Match?”: Transnational Fertility Industry and White Desirability

ABSTRACT

Does the transnational process of gamete selection challenge ways of mobilizing race and whiteness? Based on a mobile ethnography of the transnational fertility industry, I argue that fertility experts and intended parents (IP) co-produce the desirability of whiteness through “racial matching” for white, heterosexual IP, and “strategic hybridization”, or strategic mixing of gametes, for some same-sex IP who do not identify as white. Although disruptive of notions of racial purity of whiteness and the heteronormative focus on resemblance match, the transnational legitimizing of such desires as intimate and innocuous choices depoliticizes conversations around race, racialization and whiteness as privilege.

KEYWORDS:

• Egg provision
• racial matching
• strategic hybridization
• transnational fertility industry
• white desirability

Transnational assisted reproduction, or reproductive travel (repro-travel), involves clients traveling across the world to fulfill their dreams of having a genetically related baby or a baby tailor-made to their expectations (Inhorn 2015). The factors that shape this include the high costs or non-availability of technology and procedures at home (such as legal restrictions on surrogacy, egg provision, or preimplantation genetic diagnosis), legal restrictions to accessing the services for a certain demography (such as single parents, and gay couples), and long waiting list for procedures. Preference for anonymous egg provision, or desired traits in gamete providers, also fuel such travel (Bergmann 2011; Deveaux 2016; Pande and Moll 2018). Drawing on mobile ethnographic fieldwork of the transnational fertility industry, I argue that the medical management of gamete selection shapes but also is shaped by intended parents’ demand for eggs from particular racialized bodies, which in essence reproduces the desirability of whiteness. This is manifested in two ways. One is “racial matching,” wherein the desire for a single race family is made natural and universal for intended parents (IP) who identify as white. While racial matching has been observed in multiple settings by several scholars (Almeling 2007; Ikemoto 1995; Kroløkke 2014; Quiroga 2007; Russell 2015; Thompson 2005, 2009), I demonstrate that the transnational fertility industry allows the naturalization of a second set of choices: what I call “strategic hybridization” or the desire for white mixed-race babies amongst some IP who do not identify as white. Transnational clinics shape and facilitate both these sets of desires, of matching and mixing, by offering “traveling” whiteness, from cross-border egg providers, at a bargain price. With transnational assisted reproduction, racialized imaginaries and notions of race and whiteness are manipulated, transformed and put to new use. For many heterosexual IP, racial match remains paramount, and the desire for traveling whiteness is legitimized as phenotype resemblance, ancestral proximity, and a “proxy for kinship” (Russell 2018). For some others, mostly single and/or same-sex couples who do not desire to “match a partner,” mixed whiteness takes precedence over racial purity and a racial match. The desired whiteness, achieved through the strategic “mixing” of the intended father’s sperm with eggs from a white egg provider, is about cosmopolitanism, esthetic beauty and yet familiality – the “best of both worlds.” Although disruptive of notions of national and racial purity, and the heteronormative focus on resemblance match, the radical potential of this desire for traveling and cosmopolitan whiteness is limited. In effect, the transnational legitimizing of such desires as intimate and innocuous choices depoliticizes conversations around race and racialization. It undermines the critical fact that individual desires, legitimized by enterprises and experts, are embedded within power relations and hierarchies – wherein whiteness and the whitening of future generations are reaffirmed as legitimate and worthy choices.

Racialized reproduction and white desires

One of the most vocal critics of the racialized nature and impacts of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) is legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, who has systematically laid out the inherent whiteness of ART within the United States. ART normalizes the invisibility of African-American women, despite that African Americans make up a disproportionate number of people experiencing infertility (Roberts 2011: 937). Black women are deemed guilty of hyper fertility and hence their reproductive needs are denigrated and ignored. The only time blackness makes its media appearance in assisted reproduction is in stories of lawsuits and couples suing clinics and gamete banks for “malpractice,” often involving a white woman being “mistakenly” inseminated with black sperm and suing the gamete bank for damages. While Roberts comments on the invisibility of blackness, others observe the link between race and reproduction as an incessant desire to racially match one’s offspring (Almeling 2007; Ikemoto 1995; Kroløkke 2014; Quiroga 2007; Russell 2015). These scholars have demonstrated a fundamental irony of race in assisted reproduction – while social scientists continue to argue that race is a social construct, these technologies reinforce the concept of race as a biological category, and shared race as shared kinship. In the US, for instance, Ikemoto (1995) highlights the naturalization of the desire for a racial match within the egg provision industry. Although in artificial insemination, recipients routinely emphasized a racial match, this is never discussed presumably because racial-matching is seen as an obvious and natural desire; only when black women choose “white eggs” and color lines are crossed that the topic is deemed newsworthy (Ikemoto 1995: 1016). Clinics and gamete banks become “matchers” in actively shaping individual decision-making about reproduction and forming racially homogenous families (Lenhardt 2017; Moll 2019).

When this normalization of racial matching is juxtaposed with the invisibility of blackness from the fertility industry, ART ultimately privileges genetic relatedness in ways that reaffirm and reproduce hegemonic notions of white hetero-patriarchal families (Nordqvist 2010, Quiroga 2007; Roberts 2012). For instance, in her work with “nonwhite” intended mothers (Latina and Asian) in the US, medical anthropologist Quiroga (2007) observes several instances of “biomedical chauvinism,” clinics placing more importance on offering a racial match for the intended father than on the intended mother’s choice of donor sperms – resonating with Lisa Ikemeto’s observation over a decade earlier that “at the root of matching are concerns about maintaining the fictions of paternity and racial purity for white fathers (Ikemoto 1995: 1027). Together, laws, clinics and gamete agencies naturalize the idea that the race of the child must match that of its white intended parents to such an extent that it is not even deemed a choice (Russell 2015: 605). What happens when we shift scales from the local to the transnational fertility industry? Does transnational reproduction challenge or reaffirm naturalization of a racial match and the desire for whiteness?

While phenotype matching has been observed in the fertility industry across the world, with IP, gametes and gamete providers crossing borders, “whiteness” becomes a purchasable trait with multiple, often conflicting, meanings. In her study of the British import of Danish “Viking sperm,” Andreassen (2017) argues that although the import of non-British racial whiteness may threaten the national purity of whiteness, “Viking sperm” is assumed to retain the racial purity of whiteness. The historical racial superiority of “Nordic race” and contemporary “blonde hair and the blue eyes appeal” come together to promote Viking sperm as representing mono-racial, masculine and authentic whiteness (Andreassen 2017: 129). Viking whiteness can travel because of its alleged inherent superiority and monoraciality. In her work on cross-border fertility travel within Nordic countries, Homanen (2018) demonstrates that although Finns have historically been dismissed as “dark people of Asian descent” and their whiteness “questioned,” within transnational egg provision, they are desired as “Nordic kins” because of their white and blonde phenotype and “Nordic look” (Homanen 2018: 29). Despite the ambiguity about Finns’ ethnoracial superiority within Europe, their whiteness is declared “pure” by transnational fertility clinics, especially in comparison with donor eggs from Russian and post-socialist populations (Homanen 2018: 33). In another study of the global fertility industry, Amy Speier (2016) finds “fertility holidaymakers” from middle-class United States choosing the Czech Republic as their destination partly because of the relative low cost and to fulfil their desire to be matched with a blonde, blue-eyed egg provider. Eastern European populations, rarely considered natural “kin nationals” by North Americans or Nordic IP, become preferred destinations to ensure whiteness and racial purity (Homanen 2018).

While for Nordic, British recipients and American fertility holidaymakers, crossing of borders and the choice of “traveling whiteness” allows racial matching, clinics and IPs may prioritize lighter skin or whiteness in the matching process even when recipients do not identify as white. Within the egg provision industry in India, for instance, lighter skin in an egg provider is not only seen as desirable and a symbol of social advantage but may even recreate a biologically driven caste hierarchy (Banerjee 2013, Deomampo 2016, Majumdar 2017). In Israel, Michal Nahman (2006) observes an emphasis on certain phenotypical characteristics as well as the celebration of light skin as a perpetuation of the “hegemonic Europeanness existing in Israel” (Nahman 2006: 204). Others notice a celebration of whiteness more in the form of a gradation. For instance, Elizabeth F.S. Roberts argues that, in the Andes region, developments in ART are embedded in the region’s colonial racial history. Roberts talks of “assisted whiteness” within the practice of ART, with whiteness inscribed into the (private) standards of care received (Roberts 2012: 75). Women of all races are able to gain access to whiteness through the process of IVF and private care, otherwise the privilege of white women. At the same time, Roberts emphasizes that there is nothing liberating about this pliant version of raza (a rough equivalent of race), wherein shifting one’s raza, in case of IVF through the choice of a lighter gamete provider, is just another step toward the “goal of whitening” (120). Although these scholars have focused on fertility industries of particular regions, they bring attention to a desire for whiteness that is no longer simply about racial purity or resemblance match but a strategic hybridization.

As the fertility industry grapples with nationally restrictive laws, and shifts scale from national to transnational, crossing borders to access ART and third-party reproductive services becomes a legitimate way to reimagine racialized desires about our next generation. I demonstrate that as intending parents and fertility professionals “co-produce” racialized desires about eggs and babies, the transnational fertility industry naturalizes choices that reaffirm the desirability of whiteness – whiteness that is fluid, traveling, cosmopolitan and yet hypervisible as a heritable privilege.

Mobile ethnography and the global fertility industry

In 2010, when I started the fieldwork for this project, several countries, for instance, Czech Republic, India, Mexico, Thailand, Ukraine and the US, served as transnational reproductive hubs for third party reproduction, especially gestational commercial surrogacy and egg provision. Since 2014 the industry has scuttled around the globe, pushed out from one country to another, as national laws ban cross-border commercial surrogacy (Whittaker 2019). Legalities, however, merely shape the transnational fertility industry; they do not determine it. As “one stop surrogacy,” where a single clinic provides a gamut of services from egg retrieval to surrogacy, becomes rare, clinics and brokers devise ways to break the process into various stages, with each stage outsourced to a country with favorable (or no) regulations. Intended parents cross borders to collude in these transnational circumvention practices (Bergmann 2011). This research required that I keep up with these transnational circumvention practices through a multi-sited “mobile” ethnography, whereby I moved across borders with the respondents. To fully understand the transnationality of this process and to map the global trajectory from egg retrieval to embryo implantation, I conducted research in three related sites – the “preparation” of (white) egg providers by global egg agencies in South Africa before their travels to various reproductive hubs across the world, the egg retrieval and making of an embryo in a transnational fertility clinic in India, and the transfer of embryo into the womb of a gestational mother in a clinic in Cambodia.

In much of the existing work on transnational reproduction, scholars have chosen to, or been compelled to, immerse themselves in one location (Gürtin 2011, Inhorn 2015, Knecht, Klotz and Beck 2012, Pande 2014; Whittaker 2015). Some managed to follow patients from their home country to the country where they received care (Bergmann 2011; Nahman 2016; Speier 2016), but in most cases the challenging nature of fieldwork limited researchers’ mobility and made the research dependent on the “goodwill of gatekeepers” (Deomampo 2013: 521). Although my research is relatively mobile, such gatekeepers have shaped my research as well. My entry into the egg provision market in South Africa, in 2012, was through some key transnational players in the fertility market: an egg bank manager who coordinates the travel of egg providers from South Africa to various reproductive hubs; a fertility specialist who works in these repro-hubs; and a global investor who manages fertility clinics in various hubs. My gatekeepers’ transnational careers are just one instance of the transnationality of the fertility industry, acting at a scale larger than that of nations and states. The global egg banks and clinics are satellite spaces with little to do with the local; the investments are often from select entrepreneurs who are well-established in the transnational fertility industry and well-versed in circumventing local laws; and although a few local medical professionals may be involved, procedures like egg retrievals and embryology are often conducted by transnational fertility consultants, and the clients are predominantly transnational.

For the first segment of my research, egg retrieval, I interacted with “traveling egg providers” (Pande 2020; Pande and Moll 2018), women who regularly travel across the world to provide their eggs to various partner global fertility clinics, before and during their travels. Between 2012 and 2018, I traveled with three groups of egg providers from South Africa to India and Cambodia.¹ Additionally, I conducted detailed open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 15 medical professionals and fertility professionals. The agency managers and fertility professionals connected me to 21 egg providers and 28 intended parents from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Canada, China, Israel, and the US, who use the services of these transnational fertility clinics. I conducted unstructured interviews with intended parents via Skype and/or had face-face interactions with them at hotels in India and Cambodia. While the South African segment of my research has been continuous (from 2012 to 2020), research trips to Cambodia and India were intermittent, and synchronized with the travels of egg providers and fertility specialists. In total, the Cambodian segment of my research lasted 6 months, over three trips between 2016 and 2018. In India, the research was conducted between 2015 and 2019, in two transnational fertility clinics, and lasted 8 months. I obtained permission to conduct the research from the clinic directors and the University Ethics Review Committee as well as consent from all IP, fertility professionals and egg providers.

Desiring whiteness and a racial match

There is a deep irony that the demand for whiteness within the transnational fertility industry is filled by women from South Africa, a country that is majority Black and where more than two decades after apartheid has ended, racial classifications remain the foundation of society. Within the health-care sector, public health-care systems flounder, yet there is increasing investment in new technology and five-star luxury hospitals to cater to international clients mostly from the global north (Crush, Chikanda, and Maswikwa 2012). Reproductive travel, a growing portion of this industry, has similar paradoxes and is riddled by debilitating inequalities, based on race and class (Coovadia et al.2009). For the majority of South Africans who cannot afford basic health care and are not covered by any insurance system, assisted reproduction remains a “luxury” (Namberger 2019: 41), but as a global hub for reproductive travel, South Africa maintains a thriving industry in IVF, and, relatedly, egg provision. While the technology for egg retrieval was available from the 1990s, egg banks became common after 2000. In 2004, an American entrepreneur started an agency to partner South African egg providers with clients, mostly from the United States, the first step toward establishing the country as a repro-hub. Recently, global egg agencies have started recruiting young, white South African women willing to travel all over the world to provide eggs. South Africa is one of cheapest source of “white eggs” in the transnational fertility market, with average compensation at USD 2000 as compared to anywhere between USD 4000 to USD 15,000 per cycle in the US (Johnson 2017).² Unlike egg providers in countries like Spain and the US, who provide mostly for the domestic market, young, white South African women are willing to travel across borders to provide eggs and combine an act of altruism with the desire for world travel and a few thousand dollars.

To understand the dynamics of the demand for white egg providers from South Africa I talk to Dr. Peter, a European fertility expert who also consults for clinics in South Africa. Dr. Peter gives a quick explanation as to why the market for white South African traveling egg providers exists:

See … An egg donation cycle in the United States can cost anywhere between 25 000 to 30 000 dollars. But, now think, if you were smart and instead recruited egg donors in South Africa? You have to pay them only USD 2000 and they are happy to fly anywhere and donate! These girls are also white, have blue eyes and are blonde like the Americans … A white face is a white face and often that’s what a person wants.

According to Dr. Peter, a simple substitution of North American “whiteness” with South African whiteness reduces the costs substantially. Intended parents’ narratives reveal a far more complicated motivation for desiring white (South African) gametes. In many cases, they choose a white egg provider because they identify as white and desire the child born through assisted technologies to “pass” as their own. Becker et al. (2005) related this to the ubiquitous nature of “resemblance talk,” constant public observations about a child’s physical similarity to parents. All respondents who identified as white (16 out of 28 respondents) gave some version of “resemblance talk” to legitimize their choice of a white south African egg provider. In 2015, I interviewed Cynthia, a 44-year-old white IP from Canada, in a hotel near Kalpa fertility clinic in India. Kalpa had matched her with an egg provider and a gestational mother. The clinic did not offer the services of its own egg bank, which has a database of over 300 Indian and Nepalese egg provider profiles; the assumption was that Cynthia would want a racial match. When I interviewed Cynthia, one of South Africa’s biggest egg banks had facilitated the movement of white South African egg providers to India. Cynthia was sent the details of this company and their “girls.” She described her determination to choose an appropriate egg provider as an “obsession:”

Elizabeth (Liz), the manager of the South African egg agency became like a friend, I asked so many questions and wanted so many details! I felt possessed, it was like an obsession. I literally put all the qualities of the donors on an xl sheet and weighted them to choose the ultimate donor … All the girls that Liz offered were white, except one or two mixed race ones. I guess she knew what I wanted. I mean, I have no issues about race but honestly, I felt like I needed to have a whole spiritual connection with my donor, if this had to work. If not my own genes, then the closest imitation … I wanted the hair, the freckles, the eye color, the works.

While Cynthia insisted she had “no issues with race,” she simultaneously highlighted the need for a close resemblance and racial match to establish a “spiritual connection” with the child. All IP who identified as white refrained from using the word ‘race’ when talking about the choice of gamete, and instead talked of skin tones, eye color and hair color, yet the hunt for the closest imitation was “a key part of maintaining a narrative of whiteness” (Ryan and Moras 2017: 590). Other scholars have noticed a similar “coding” of racial desires in nonracial terms by white IP. In their study of white lesbian gamete recipients in the US, Ryan and Moras talk of the “the explicit mobilization of ‘optional ethnicities’ and a simultaneous silence around race” (Ryan and Moras 2017: 588). They quote Mary Waters’ conceptualization of optional ethnicities, to highlight the white privilege of opting for a situationally specific ethnic identity, not available to many other racially marginalized groups.

Claudia, a white intended mother from Germany, was keen to avoid discussions of race and instead emphasized her Dutch ancestry as a reason for choosing an Afrikaans speaking white South African egg provider. I interviewed Claudia over Skype in 2015, while she was in the process of getting an egg from Liz’s egg bank in South Africa and to be treated in another clinic in India. Claudia described her desire for a white South African egg provider as ancestry and ethnicity, not race-based choice:

I know I could have gone for the Indian ones (egg providers). It would have been simpler, I suppose … But I was looking for a deeper connection and when they (the clinic) offered me a South African girl. At first I was like, oh, I didn’t even know there were so many white girls in Africa! … I read up all about the Afrikaan speaking girls in South Africa … Did you know Afrikaans has both Dutch and German connections? That sealed it for me … For me it’s not about race here, it’s about my ancestors, our connected heritage.

Although Claudia mentioned the importance of “heritage,” this can only be symbolic as the Afrikaan speaking egg provider will have no real connection with the child borne from these technologies, and hence little chance of transmitting any culture or linguistic ability to the child. Claudia’s attempt at establishing deep connections resonates with Laura Mamo’s (2005) “affinity ties,” wherein IP imagine their sperm donors’ characteristics, for instance, a hobby, as rematerialized full personalities (Mamo, 2005: 246). For Cynthia and Claudia, whiteness travels. Gametes are assumed to carry the genes and the imagined heritage that can be shared between white people. But while Viking sperm was assumed to be a carrier of authentic whiteness because of its masculine and esthetic “superiority,” here African and Southern whiteness was acceptable for other reasons. In her work on donor oocytes in South Africa, Moll (2019) analyzes this appeal of South African white donors amongst Australian recipients as a shared settler colonial history, or the appeal of “neutrality” and seeming place-lessness, which gives these egg providers the kind of “globality” that cannot be attained by providers, for instance from Greece, or Ukraine, with geographical and ethnic specificity (2019: 592). This desire for globality is reflected in the narratives of egg agency manager, Liz:

First off, you will not believe it, but there are many, like educated ones, who say ‘What! There are so many Caucasian women in South Africa!’ But then they see the pics … I love to see their expressions when they see the pics. Seriously, some of our girls looks like any American or British model!

Liz reveals that most IP are surprised at being offered gametes of “Caucasian” women from South Africa, presumably because they are not familiar with South African demography. Yet, once they see photographs of former egg providers on the agency website, IP realize that South African egg providers resemble a “typical blonde.” Liz adds:

A lot of our girls can be mistaken for European or American, you know their features, is … very, uh, say American, some are very your typical blonde! Maybe that is the draw, we can pass off as anyone. Even when I travel, I can be mistaken for any European, or even British!

Liz believes that IP choose white South African egg providers because of their ability to “pass off” as any nationality. Whiteness travels from the Southern (and African) context and is deemed acceptable because of its ability to pass off as whiteness in Northern (i.e. European or American) contexts. In the transnational fertility market, this neutral and/or global whiteness can be purchased at a bargain price.

Desiring whiteness through strategic hybridization

Orchid Fertility Clinic in Phnom Penh, Cambodia was founded as a clinic specializing in transnational surrogacy after India, Thailand and Nepal prohibited the practice in their countries. In 2015 and 2016, Orchid’s business flourished with clients coming from all parts of the globe – mostly same-sex partners and single men searching for egg providers and gestational surrogates. Although married heterosexual couples comprise a vast majority of users of ART within national fertility markets, same-sex IP, mostly same-sex men, popularly labeled “gay IP” are conspicuous at the transnational level as they are more likely to be barred from accessing third party reproductive services at home. They are also more likely to be implicated in the ethical and justice scandals around the industry, hence their disproportionate visibility (Mamo and Alston-Stepnitz 2014). All fertility professionals and matchers I interviewed commented on the stark differences in the needs and expectations of their “gay” and heterosexual clients in the gamete selection process. Liz, the South African owner and manager of a global egg agency, made a clear distinction between her “straight” and “gay” clients, and the egg provider traits they emphasize.

For straight couples, they want to choose a donor that matches the mom, the closest match the better. If she is a tall blonde, of course, she will choose a tall blonde donor … Because she is giving up her DNA and there is a whole lot of grief that goes with that. It’s different for gay couples, you know! Gay couples just want an attractive donor, that’s it. I would want to say that there is a deeper meaning in that, but I cannot! I may be generalizing, but I often even tease this gay client of mine about his hunt for “pretty donors.”

Liz does not comment on her white, heterosexual clients’ desire for a racial match; she naturalizes it as intended mothers’ intense desire to have the highest possible degree of resemblance. Her “gay” clients, however, are teased because of their, allegedly, shallow quest for a pretty donor. Although Liz’s observation is stark in its crude generalization, it is useful to ask: what do IP emphasize when they are not looking for a donor that matches a partner?

In 2016, I interviewed (via Skype) Yoav and his partner Guy, both born and raised in Tel Aviv. The Israeli surrogacy law, at that time, did not allow surrogacy (and egg donation) for gay men so Yoav and Guy had been on a transnational hunt for a suitable clinic. In 2014, they found a clinic in Thailand but were forced to abandon the process because of the military ban on surrogacy in Thailand. In 2016, a transnational fertility professional connected them to Orchid for their egg donor and surrogacy needs. In 2016, Orchid had their own egg bank of over 100 Asian donors, and connections with several global egg agencies, including the one that Liz managed. Yoav and Guy chose a white South African provider, Lucy. Yoav, who was the sperm provider added:

For us Lucy was the perfect choice, the right package and not as expensive as some others we were shown (from the US). We had already seen the babies she helped with (a set of twins for another same sex Israeli couple) … .This move (from Thailand to Cambodia) turned out good, at the end. I don’t think they had so many white donors in Thailand.

Yoav described Lucy as “the right package at the best price” – affordable “white genes,” and successful in (re)producing healthy white babies. Yoav was not keen to discuss their preference for a white egg provider, so we changed the topic. David, 37, another gay intended father from Israel, and his partner, Daniel, an Argentinian Jew settled in the US, were far more talkative and amenable to conversations about race. Their journey also involved a white Jewish South African egg provider and Orchid fertility clinic. David related, in detail, the complex mix of race, religion and cultures in his family and in Israel. His grandparents trace their roots to places as varied as Turkey and Algeria, and the only time he automatically checked a “white” box of racial classification was in a financial form in the US. David, however, is candid about his choice of a white egg provider:

In our country, everyone, gay or straight, is obsessed with kids! It has been in my sub conscious since I turned 16 and came out. … So when I chose to become a dad, and paid so much for it, I wanted the best option possible. Her health was important, height, overall her looks – I wanted a white donor with blue or green eyes. (He repeats) I wanted the best option possible, in a way, you can say … for genetic improvement (he laughs). Why not? See for us (as gay parents) genes are everything. Because one of us is already being left out of the gene pool of the family, we aren’t getting pregnant, so we are not going to make a moral issue about choosing the best gene if we can.

Despite his knowledge of race politics in Israel and the US, and his multiracial family, David made a definite choice about the race of the gamete provider. He talked about her “attractiveness” and emphasized whiteness as genetic improvement and the best gene money can buy. Yoav and David’s desires need to be unpacked within the rather complicated terrain of same-sex couples managing their bio-genetic parenting within the technological process of conception and birth. In her work with same-sex users of ART in the US, Dempsey (2013) found a preoccupation with choosing a donor most likely to create a child who could pass as a “genetic hybrid” of the same-sex parents. For Yoav and David, however, the desire is for a genetic hybrid of another kind – a “strategic hybridization” that is no longer about resemblance match, but a concerted effort to technologically attain a mix of traits that is deemed universally appealing.

I observed a similar desire for strategic hybridization amongst some (single and same-sex) intended fathers from Asia. The manager of Orchid clinic, Dr. Mia, explained that when there are no intending mother present, as in the case of her same-sex male clients, the desire was often not about a resemblance match,

Many of our Asian married patients (intended parents) choose from our Asian database. … But yes, every third patient asks for white eggs. Everyone wants a beautiful face for the next generation … We let the patients make the choice, we don’t question. And many don’t ask for our advice. … They (the IP) hear from word of mouth that that is a possibility here—that you can get white egg donor. And they see these pictures of couples with lovely mixed-race babies and they say ‘why not’? And we say ‘why not’?

Dr. Mia’s narrative above revealed a far more complex categorization of racialized desires than the narratives in the previous section, which were about the desire for racial (white) purity and racial matching. What is striking is Dr. Mia’s claim that one out of three of her Asian clients desired a white egg provider, and the clinic fulfilled this desire by matching them with a global egg bank and a white provider. This strategic hybridization, although not common, has been noticed by others. For instance, in her work in fertility clinics in Hawai, Daisy Deomampo (2019). talks of a predominant focus on race-matching or “like-like” phenotype match. Yet there are some IP in her study who chose to create a “mixed race” child to celebrate the hapa (half Asian and half white) identity. This trend is not common, and may, in fact, be in stark contrast to observations made by many fertility scholars. In the US, for instance, scholars have observed physicians and egg bank managers working as “gatekeepers of fertility” to undermine any attempt by people of color to “blur the boundary of whiteness” or subvert notions of racial purity through strategic mixing of gametes (Quiroga 2007: 153).

Later, Dr. Mia clarified that this desire for white mixed-race babies was most prevalent amongst her “gay and single” clients. Dr. Mia introduced me to one such client, Kim, who she suspected was gay but introduces himself to me as a “single want-to-be-papa.” Kim, a Chinese businessman, spoke English but not fluently, so we started a conversation via an interpreter. Kim explained: “I came here after I was turned away in Bangkok in 2015. I am ready to pay whatever it takes to get a child of my dreams. I have told Doctor that I do not care about the costs.”

Many transnational fertility clinics, including Orchid, give promotional talks about their technology and success rates at fertility “roadshows,” hosted in big hotels in different parts of the world and financed by global pharmaceutical companies. Kim revealed that he met Dr. Mia at such a roadshow and realized the possibilities of strategic hybridization.

Amrita:

How did you hear about this clinic?

Interpreter (for Kim):

I saw a poster (in a fertility conference in Beijing). There was a good-looking egg donor. I wanted a professional model or film star as my egg donor, but they could not find me one.

Amrita:

So, you came to this clinic because you wanted a beautiful donor?

Kim:

Yes, model donor. I have seen on their posters (in transnational fertility clinic roadshows) and I thought they (can) give me one.

Kim utters one sentence to me in English, which stands out: “I am looking for a white, Asian-looking girl.” The interpreter gives me a short explanation of what he says: Kim likes Asian-like features, but blue eyes and white skin.

Amrita:

Why? Why do you want blue eyes and white skin?

Interpreter (for Kim):

He is looking for the top race but doesn’t want to give up his traditions. So we (the clinic) will find an Asian beauty who resembles Caucasian or a Caucasian who resembles Asian.

I continued the conversation around the quest for the “top race” with Dr. Mia and Dr. Max, the fertility experts at Orchid. The following excerpt is from a conversation with both the doctors present in the same room and confirming each other.

Dr. Max:

I notice with some of these clients (intended fathers) that they are all looking for the same kind of face, a special Caucasian egg donor. I don’t know why, perhaps because they find “mixed” race babies so cute. No one knows why this is the trend.

Dr Mia (responding to Dr. Max):

Yes, oval face, fine features, bit Asian type, but of course, Caucasian – blue eyed and blonde! They have a special beauty ideal, which is quite hard to find. I think deep inside he likes the Asian beauties, but don’t want it. They want white, white!

Amrita:

And this clinic provides them with white donors?

Dr. Max:

We have Asian donors, and the white donors, who you have met. Yes, we offer them both. Our clinic is so popular because we can offer them both kinds (of donors – white and Asian).

While the doctors simplified Kim’s hunt for the top race as a hunt for “white white,” the complex entanglements in his narrative cannot be understood as a simple black and white binary. In his hunt for the “top race,” Kim is not looking for racial purity, but a way to combine familiar notions of (Asian) beauty with the (assumed) universally desired “blue eyes and whiter skin.” This desire for racial hybridity needs to be understood as a transnational moment interacting with particular local histories. Historically, in much of East Asia, racially mixed children were a reminder of colonial or Euro-American military presence and related “immoral” liaisons. The post-colonial desire for white-mixed race babies is thus distinct from both the desire for “Caucasian” whiteness and from the historical and local discourse of race with clearly defined racial boundaries and an unquestioned desire for racial purity. Media studies scholar Ji-Hyun Ahn observes a similar desire for mixed whiteness in Korea, where the desirability of whiteness is intricately woven together with “racial hybridity” and the neoliberal commodification of cosmopolitan whiteness “as a marker of coolness” and desirable beauty. Here “mixed whiteness” becomes a marker of desirable otherness in terms of esthetics – mixed race white individuals are celebrated as embodying beauty, cosmopolitanisms, and metrosexuality. In her work on “Eurasian” Mixed Race-ness, Mathews 2007) expands on this notion of cosmopolitan whiteness by debating the appeal of Eurasian/mixed race as “cosmo chic,” one who is familiar, knowable, sophisticated and worldly. The allure of this particular form of mixed-raced ness lies in its “racial ambiguity’ (Mathews 2007: 51). Unlike the Viking sperm that travels and carries its masculine white authenticity, for intended fathers Yoav, David and Kim, whiteness, mixed strategically with their own sperms, provides the best of both worlds.

Although the co-creation of cosmopolitan, traveling, and “mixed” whiteness (by clinics and clients) is analytically revealing and disruptive of the usual ways in which race is materialized within gamete provision, its radical potential is limited. The desire for mixed-race whiteness that we are witnessing in these transnational fertility clinics does not challenge racial hierarchies. The desire for mixed-ness does not extend to black mixed-race babies, who do not embody this desirable mix of white exoticism and familial familiarity.³ What is being desired, demanded and purchased is a specific kind of mix that will allow the next generation to access their parents’ privileges (in terms of class privileges) but also be technologically enhanced through a strategic hybridization of the local familiar and the “top race.”

The “intimate” politics of race and reproduction

Race has always underlined the fertility industry. With the advent of ART, especially third-party reproduction through surrogacy and egg provision, the “natural” basis for establishing kinship has been disrupted. These relationships have to be constructed and legitimized through a process that Charis Thompson (2005) labels strategic naturalizing. Race, racial matching, and resemblance match effectively become “resources” for IP and clinics in this racializing and naturalizing process, and in establishing which contribution to the child’s birth can be claimed as authentic parental status (Russell 2018). Strategic hybridization, the second set of choices, analyzed in this article, fulfills a very different desire – that of technologically “improving” the life chances of the baby by designing white mixed-race babies.

In her book Desiring Whiteness, Seshadri-Crooks (2000) argues that although race can never be reduced to “the look,” it is fundamentally a “regime of looking” and “a practice of visibility” (Seshadri-Crooks 2000). The peculiar resiliency of race, Seshadri-Crooks argues, has much to do with this the “hyper-valorization of appearance.” The esthetic and embodied nature of race highlights the irony that although the scientific validity of race has been disproved, this does not undermine its biologism. As demonstrated by the medical legal battles mentioned earlier in the article, when a white woman is mistakenly inseminated with a black sperm, this “mistake” determines the life of the baby. There seems to be “something” that is inherited as “race” (Seshadri-Crooks 2000: 17). In matters of new reproductive technologies, race and whiteness are assumed to be visible, embodied and inherited, and hence desire for whiteness becomes an esthetic practice. For some, such as Claudia and Cynthia, this hunt for gametes translates into a desire for visible resemblance and whiteness. For others, like Yoav, David and Kim, racial match becomes secondary as science, technology and travel intersect to offer the opportunity for strategic hybridity and a cosmopolitan whiteness.

These apparently dissonant desires bring out the paradoxical nature of ART, which have the potential to be harbingers of radical change, but often replicate social inequities. As Jennifer Parks (2009) noted: “It is still an open question whether ART will eventually bring about radical change or whether radical change is required before ART can be liberating” (Parks, 2009, quoted in Russell 2019). Within the transnational fertility industry, race becomes a manipulable resource available to IP and clinics, at large. On the one hand, the transnational fertility industry facilitates the co-production of multiple and varied desires, some of which challenge assumptions of the normative family ideal as both “monoracial and heterosexual” (Aziza 2018, 2080). While some heterosexual white IP, in their search for a resemblance match, emphasize monoraciality, other IP, often single and same-sex intended fathers, desire other traits that subvert the assumed universal desire for racial matching. This diluting of the desire to “match a partner” resonates with Diane Tober’s observation (Tober 2019) of single women and lesbian couples in their choice of sperm donor. Tober finds her respondents emphasizing traits that are not all about a resemblance match; rather she documents elaborate and diverse preferences of desired traits, ranging from intelligence to race, which are assumed to be inheritable, as “grassroot eugenics.” For Tober, this form of eugenics is individual, innocuous and starkly different from the race-based eugenics of the past. Other scholars of “liberal eugenics,” imagined as a new era of biopolitics led by individual consumer choice, have been as optimistic about this difference between state-sponsored eugenics of the past, and the private choices around technological enhancements prevalent today (Agar 2004; Blencowe 2011; Rose 2007). The fertility industry, especially its transnational avatar, leads us to question this assumed binary. Are these practices merely a reflection of individual autonomy and choice, or are they also shaped by, and embedded within, power relations? As ART becomes a mean to “invest” in a child, intended parents, medical professionals, transnational agency managers and gamete “matchers” become co-producers in designing desires that reaffirm the desirability of whiteness. Although we might want to believe that the days of state biopolitics and eugenics over, and consumers are making rational and responsible choices about their desired child, individual desires are deeply shaped by (post-) colonial ideas of racial hierarchies, race-based esthetics and the desire for freedom and privilege that comes with a “proximity to whiteness” (Ahmed 2007: 130). Whiteness may travel, adapt and mutate, but it continues to maintain its supremacy in the world (Saraswati, 2010). This focus on intimacy and privacy of choices around kinship, familial and racial identity depoliticizes questions of inequalities, and of whiteness as an (embodied) privilege.

Acknowledgments

A special thanks to the anonymous reviewers and the editorial team of Medical Anthropology for their invaluable feedback. A version of this article was presented as a keynote at the Global Ethics Annual Conference, at the University of Birmingham, and at the Race and Biomedicine Beyond the Labs Workshop, King’s College, London. I am grateful for the feedback received from colleagues at both these workshops.

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by two National Research Foundation Grants [Grant number 118573 and 103712] of South Africa. Ethics approval was obtained from the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Humanities, University of Cape Town, South Africa [SOC20/04/2012].

Notes on contributors

Amrita Pande

Amrita Pande, author of Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India (Columbia University Press 2014), is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cape Town.

Notes

1. Elsewhere (Pande 2020) I analyze, in greater detail, the desires of these traveling egg provider and their management by global fertility professionals.

2. These stark and crude race-based labels for reproductive matter reflect the norm in the fertility industry wherein gametes are often stored in color-coded vials, white for white eggs, black for African-American eggs and so on (Russell 2015).

3. For instance, mixed African-Chinese children, or the black hunxueer “hybrid child,” face intense marginalization and even racial slurs as a cultural Other, or a yizu alien race (Wing-Fai2015). The notion of racial purity continues in much of the conversations around mixed race individuals. In fact, even the Chinese term ‘hunxueer’ assumes that mixed race individuals are polluting the bloodline (Wing -Fai 2015).