Browsing by Author "Moll, Tessa"

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    Beyond the petri dish: potentiality in assisted conception in South Africa
    (2019) Moll, Tessa; Ross, Fiona
    Research in assisted conception technologies has examined how technologies open up potential trajectories, futures, and family arrangements, yet remain shaped and embedded within local histories and politics (Franklin, 1997, 2003; Inhorn, 2003; Thompson, 2005; Roberts, 2012). Embryos (Franklin, 2006a), sex cells such as eggs and sperm (Ariza, 2018), and IVF more generally (Inhorn, 2003; Simpson, 2013), offer particular potential futures but also threaten existing social orders. In this thesis, I present an ethnographic analysis of potentiality in IVF in South Africa through tracing sites and processes to apprehend, assess, and manage potential. Potentiality invokes desires and fears about the future while inviting attempts to render the future knowable and manageable (Taussig, Hoeyer, & Helmreich, 2013). Drawing on 14 months of multi-sited ethnographic research in fertility clinics and egg donor agencies in urban South Africa, I draw out the political, affective and temporal registers of potentiality as they materialise in concrete instances of reproductive medicine that is entangled within a context of capitalist biomedicine. Here, I argue that while biomedical knowledge systems frame certain objects, times, and futures as having potential, it simultaneously negates and neglects other kinds of futures, an attribute I describe as “scoping.” While ARTs and the social “facts” they reproduce are imaged as global and mobile objects, they are deeply entangled within the terrain — historical, political, economic — in which they become materialised. I argue that while IVF has the potential to disrupt “established” orders, intensive effort, which I theorize as “curature,” works to manage and domesticate IVF’s potential, reinforcing certain shapes of family, gender, morality, race and kinship arrangements. I argue that examining potentiality in IVF in South Africa reveals the politics — namely political-economic and racialised — and histories that shape reproductive technologies and potentialities.
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    Bodies across borders : embodiment and experiences of migration for southern African international students at the University of Cape Town
    (2010) Moll, Tessa; Bennett, Jane
    In context of increasing global migration and its correlation to heightened tensions around the meaning of a "foreign" body, this research questions the experiences of bodies crossing borders into the social and historical space of Cape Town, South Africa. Grounded in theories of surveillance, embodiment, and feminist geography of fear of crime, the study employed a feminist methodology using qualitative group interviews with international students from the Southern African Development Community at the University of Cape Town. The transcribed data was analysed through the participants' use of discourses and their descriptions of experiences. Questions arose around the meaning of surveillance and notions of respectability in transition. Furthermore, participants navigate amid new spaces of fear and insecurity in relation to their subjectivities, particularly as "foreigners". The research suggests that fear becomes a fundamental attribute of bodies in migration through which individuals mitigate through "passing" subverting expressions of embodied nationalities, knowledge gathering of the local terrain, among others. The challenges and techniques to overcome these fears become part of a process to re-establish the "self" in a foreign context.
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    Gendered bio-responsibilities and travelling egg providers from South Africa
    (elsevier, 2018-10-30) Pande, Amrita
    ‘Unsuspecting young South African women are heading overseas to donate their eggs to infertile couples and earn a free international holiday in the process. But, at what cost? This was the voice-over during a news show in South Africa in 2016 that described the phenomenon of young white South African women going abroad to donate their eggs. Through the media, medical professionals sought to warn naïve girls about unscrupulous agencie taking advantage of them, and in doing so putting them at grave medical risks in Third Worl clinics. Yet owners of agencies and egg providers themselves countered this imagery; here, the egg provider becomes a far more complex biocitizen who finds an opportunity to combine an act of altruism with an opportunity to earn money and travel. Through interviews with travelling egg providers, doctors and egg agencies, and analysis of public and social media, we analyse these competing discourses critically by situating them within the specific context of egg provision in South Africa. We argue that travelling egg providers' defence of their involvement may challenge some gendered assumptions made by the media and medical staff, but at the same time reaffirm what we call gendered bio-responsibilities or the gendered nature of the emphasis on (individual) responsibilization of biological citizens. By focusing on a relatively understudied aspect of the burgeoning literature on biocitizenship, we argue that the project of biocitizenship assists the expansion and normalization of new biomedical technologies, often without proper emphasis on the disproportionate obligations on the women involved.