Assisted Reproductive Technology: Capital, Affect, Kinship, Bodies, Faith, Mobility, and Coloniality

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) has proven an empirically and theoretically abundant arena for medical anthropology. From intensifying and globalizing stratified reproduction (Whittaker and Speier 2010) to highlighting the geographies and politics of knowledge (Bärnreuther 2016) and reigniting classic anthropological questions of kinship (Mohr 2015), work on ARTs has contributed to Medical Anthropology’s commitment to theoretical sophistication and ethnographic richness on the social patterns of health, illness and wellbeing. This special virtual issue of Medical Anthropology showcases a sample from a decade of work on ARTs from a range of phenomena (cross border reproductive travel, surrogacy, egg donation), ethnographic locations (Israel, India, Denmark, and the US), and theoretical incisions (questions of “reproductive exile” and access, the politics of knowledge, commodified reproduction, and the negotiations of tradition and modernity). With this virtual issue, we hope to demonstrate the diverse areas of social life that intersect with ARTs – capital, affect, kinship, bodies, faith, mobility, and coloniality, among others – and yet how they unfold in unique constellations across ethnographic locales.