Lost in Egg Economy! Young Turkish Women as Invisible Reproductive Laborers

Özyeğin University's Department of Humanities and Social Sciences invites you to "Getting Lost in the Egg Economy! Transnational Reproduction, Egg Donors and Invisible Labor", the first event of the talk series titled "Reproductive Technologies, Gender and Medicine". Dr. Burcu Mutlu from Özyeğin University will join us as the speaker together with Assoc. Prof. Berna Zengin from Özyeğin University as the moderator. The event will take place online via Zoom on the 24th of November 2021 between 16:00 and 17:30. 

Please click here for the event registration form. The online Zoom link will be shared half an hour before the event with participants who filled out the registration form via the e-mail addresses they provided on the form.

Note: The event will be in Turkish.

Abstract

Today, with new reproductive technologies such as egg donation, the reproductive capacities of the female body are commodified at the cellular level, not only leading to new economies and forms of exchange, but also creating new biological materials (such as donor eggs) and new subjectivities (such as egg donors and donor egg recipients). Young women who go through various bodily and medical processes and assume the risks of these processes, who "donate" their eggs in exchange for money and are called "donors", constitute the biological "supply" part of egg donation. In this talk, I focus on the egg economy phenomenon, which has emerged between Turkey and Northern Cyprus since the early 2000s and forms a large part of the transnational reproductive network, referred to as “in vitro fertilization tourism” in the media, and I do this from the perspective of egg donors, who are important but invisible actors of this bioeconomy. This study is a part of my doctoral thesis, which was completed in 2019, based on a year of ethnographic field research and interviews that I conducted at an IVF clinic in Northern Cyprus between November 2014 and January 2016. In this study, which makes use of Feminist Science, Technology and Society Studies and bioeconomy discussions; I treat egg donor as a stigmatized (and relatively invisible, especially when compared to surrogacy) form of reproductive labor. My purpose; It is to discuss how young women from Turkey, under various socioeconomic insecurities, participate in this transnational bioeconomy (even though it is forbidden, precarious and risky) by going through what kind of moral questioning and legitimation processes, how they reproduce this economy with their reproductive capacity and try to protect it with care. Because egg donation is not only a new economic opportunity, but also about women's management of the social and ideological boundaries of "acceptable" womanhood and motherhood in the context of the realities of their own lives.

Dr. Burcu Mutlu

Burcu Mutlu is a lecturer at Özyeğin University, Faculty of Social Sciences. Dr. Mutlu received her bachelor's degree from Marmara University, Department of Political Science and International Relations, and her master's degree in Sociology from Boğaziçi University. She completed her PhD in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2019. His research interests are: assisted reproductive technologies and biobanking anthropology; medical anthropology; feminist science and technology studies; family, kinship and gender.