Charlotte Kroløkke

Click a Donor: Viking masculinity on the line

In postmodern culture, sperm banking is turned into a legitimate business. This article expands on consumer theory and feminist scholarship and analyses the ways in which masculinity is positioned and performed on the website of one of the worlds largest sperm banks, Cryos International. Cryos International brands its product as uniquely Scandinavian while simultaneously engaging in the discourses of a multicultural society. Viking donors are not only white, athletic, fit and young, but also sensitive, witty and moral; intimately connecting images of the donors to images of a nurturing and progressive Scandinavia. The website encourages prospective parents to not only consume sperm, but to also vividly consume images of cute, active, intelligent Nordic children and successful (heterosexual) families.

“I only need her uterus”: Neo-liberal Discourses on Transnational Surrogacy

The authors analyse how reproduction in the Scandinavian countries has gone global and intersects with neo-liberal reproductive practices. Of particular interest is how neo-liberal discourses are constructed in Scandinavian and Indian biopolitical and bioethical debates on surrogacy as well as how they are produced and negotiated by different reproductive actors in cases of transnational surrogacy in India. The multi-sited and cross-cultural empirical approach employed in this article brings the concept of neo-liberalism into dialogue with reproductive assistants or workers such as intended parents, surrogates, and clinical directors. To engage the global assemblage of neo-liberalism and reproductive technologies, the authors develop the concept of “repropreneurs”, illustrating how the individuals involved employ rational and reflexive, individualist and collective, as well as affective and resistant responses to the experiences of surrogacy.

West is best: Affective assemblages and Spanish oöcytes

This article employs the concept of affective assemblage to discuss how fertility travelers make sense of their decision to travel to Spain for oöcyte donation. Motherhood is brought into being through racialized and gendered discourses on ova exchange; idealized and feminized (fertile and gift-giving) Spanish donor bodies. In their accounts, fertility travelers employ a narrative in which oöcytes become necessary spare parts, yet also, exotic substances with temperament and racialized nationality as well as collective bodies – shaped by the recipient woman’s body, intent, and desire. In this manner, kinship is created through shared blood and space, desire and intent while differences between recipients and donors are minimized. The directionality of desire, hope, and imagination has the effect of naturalizing transnational egg donation and transforming it into a shared western European femininity of sorts.

Fertility Travel: The Commodification of Human Reproduction

Assisted reproduction in a global world produces not only new babies and new parents but also new citizens and raises new bioethical concerns (e.g., Campbell 2007; Franklin 2001; Thompson 2005). This essay outlines an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective in understanding how fertility travel and transnational reproduction unfold from the perspectives of the different actors involved. Three theoretical pairs—care and engineering, reproscapes and reproflows, and gifts and commodities—are suggested as theoretical frameworks for understanding transnationalized reproduction. The authors conclude that reproductive movements and fragmentary bodies confront legal and administrative systems in interesting and often highly complex ways.

On a Trip to the Womb: Biotourist Metaphors in Fetal Ultrasound Imaging

The case study for this analysis is the rhetorical construction of the three-dimensional fetal ultrasound session. A cross-cultural selection of marketing material from elective ultrasound clinics is discussed in light of earlier feminist scholarship detailing technocratic, holistic, and consumer culture models of pregnancy. In the analysis, the different models are explicated, and it reveals that the marketing of the 3D/4D ultrasound image invokes both old and new understandings of pregnancy.

Fertility Travel: The Commodification of Human ReproductionCharlotte Kroløkke, Karen A. Foss, and Saumya Pant, Guest EditorsFertility Travel: The Commodification of Human ReproductionCharlotte Kroløkke, Karen a. Foss, and Saumya Pant

Assisted reproduction in a global world produces not only new babies and new parents but also new citizens and raises new bioethical concerns (e.g., Campbell 2007; Franklin 2001; Thompson 2005). This essay outlines an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective in understanding how fertility travel and transnational reproduction unfold from the perspectives of the different actors involved. Three theoretical pairs—care and engineering, reproscapes and reproflows, and gifts and commodities—are suggested as theoretical frameworks for understanding transnationalized reproduction. The authors conclude that reproductive movements and fragmentary bodies confront legal and administrative systems in interesting and often highly complex ways.

Dad and Daddy Assemblage Resuturing the Nation through Transnational Surrogacy, Homosexuality, and Norwegian Exceptionalism

Transnational surrogacy and the reproductive practices it entails raise interesting questions about genetic relatedness, kinship formation, and the stratification of reproductive labor and rights. This article discusses two high-profile Norwegian cases involving the Crown Princess Mette-Marit and Øystein Mæland, who served as chief of the Norwegian police from 2011 to 2012. While surrogacy is illegal in Norway, the article demonstrates how newspaper debates on both cases discursively decentered the illegality of surrogacy practices and instead developed notions of “good” and “bad” practices, positioning surrogacy in California as ethically regulated, while surrogacy in India was framed as fraught with ethical issues and exploitative. The article concludes that the two cases point to how specific formations of gay surrogacy work to simultaneously produce legitimate citizens out of commissioning parents and children, as well as a superior and exceptional nation-state.

Sperm on Ice: Fatherhood and Life after Death

Abstract Freezing technologies and extraction techniques make posthumous reproduction possible. This article discusses the bioethical and legal debates that surround the possession and use of dead mens sperm as they unfold in three select cases in Denmark and Australia. In the analysis we use feminist perspectives on reproduction to argue that the debates frame posthumous reproduction in light of four discursive configurations: The ‘child’, the ‘father’, the ‘widow’, and the ‘necrophile’. Whereas the performance of responsibility and maturity is key in the production of the ‘good’ widow in the Australian legal cases, the monstrous figure of the necrophile takes on a more prominent place in the Danish bioethical material. The legal and bioethical debates jointly, however, resurrect the nuclear, patriarchal family, while they also tend to re-naturalise heterosexed, romantic reproductive desire.

Grrl explorers of the World Wild Web

Scholars in feminist rhetorical theory and linguistics have documented ways in which online environments reinstate patriarchal forms of control, leading to the continued online victimization of women. In this article, young womens resistance to a narrative of victimization is seen through the lenses of a feminist reconstructionist perspective and a gender diversity perspective (Foss, Foss and Griffin 1997; Condit 1997). The author finds that grrls are best understood within a gender diversity perspective on rhetoric (Condit 1997; Butler 1990, 1997). Grrls appropriate the frontier metaphor and engender masculine talk to communicate resistance and change. The author concludes that the rhetoric of young women broadens the scope of feminist rhetorical criticism and calls for a re‐visioning of feminist rhetoric.

Freezing for Love: Enacting 'responsible' reproductive citizenship through egg freezing

Abstract The promise of egg freezing for women’s fertility preservation entered feminist debate in connection with medical and commercial control over, and emancipation from, biological reproduction restrictions. In this paper we explore how women negotiate and make sense of the decision to freeze their eggs. Our analysis draws on semi-structured interviews with 16 women from the Midwest and East Coast regions of the USA who froze their eggs. Rather than freezing to balance career choices and ‘have it all’, the women in this cohort were largely ‘freezing for love’ and in the hope of having their ‘own healthy baby’. This finding extends existing feminist scholarship and challenges bioethical concerns about egg freezing by drawing on the voices of women who freeze their eggs. By viewing egg freezing as neither exclusively liberation nor oppression or financial exploitation, this study casts egg freezing as an enactment of ‘responsible’ reproductive citizenship that ‘anticipates coupledom’ and reinforces the genetic relatedness of offspring.