Anonymous Exchange Relations: Assisted Conception between Ova Donors and Recipients in the United Kingdom

ANONYMOUS EXCHANGE RELATIONS: ASSISTED CONCEPTION BETWEEN OVA DONORS AND RECIPIENTS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of requirements for the degree of PhD by MONICA KONRAD

London School of Economics and Political Science February 1996

LONDI)

ABSTRACT

Aspects of contemporary practices of assisted conception in the UK are explored by means of a critical ethnography of ova donation between strangers. Fieldwork is based on in-depth interviews with women donors and recipients during 1993-94 and was conducted in conjunction with fertility clinics in London.

The transfer of genetic substance between donors and recipients is analysed as a system of exchange. It is argued that the bodily parts of persons assume a nonbiological value as they circulate in time and space between women in their capacity as agents. What is exchanged between persons are sets of relations rather than notions of reproductive substance as the innate and unique characteristics of particular individuals.

Official and lay discourses of anonymity are juxtaposed to show how anonymous relations emerge as a form of sociality. This contrasts the conventional assumption that anonymity amounts to a sense of personal alienation. What are revealed here as the social ties between anonymised agents are substantiated in terms of the different vistas of circulation women enact as they make metonymical extensions of themselves. This is identified as the multiple bodies that circulate as parts of persons in the 'gift'.

Set against the conceptual backdrop of selected Melanesian ethnography, it is argued that these non-biological forms of reproduction comprise a regenerative kind of sociality. This view supports a critique of reciprocity and the related constructs of inalienability and alienability that have informed conventional understandings of the gifticommodity in the anthropological literature. What emerges as non-possessive sets of identity and forms of the self are discussed in terms of the notion of transilience.

1

To my

dear late father and the indefatigable courage

of

my mother

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Field research, analysis and conclusions are my own, and for any omissions and errors I am solely responsible. I would, however, like to extend my appreciative thanks to a number of institutions and people for helping me both academically and personally.

For their hospitality and willingness to participate in the research, I am especially grateful to the many interviewees who let their views and experiences be known. All the staff at the Assisted Conception Units of Bridge Fertility Centre, The Churchill Clinic, King's College Hospital, The Lister Hospital, London Women's Clinic/Hallam Medical Centre provided invaluable assistance and expertise at various phases of the research. I am particularly grateful to Hossam Abdalla, Prue Bakpa, Virginia Bolton, Peter Brinsden, Alison Bagshawe, Kate Brown, Rajat Goswamy, Yvonne Hutchinson, Anna Klee, Lena Korea, Kathryn Parkinson, Tanya Patmore, Mary Power, Tim Rackett, Susan Smith, Edmund Thompson. Ben Plumley and Jennifer Woodside at the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority helped so patiently with many queries, and Claire Brown of CHILD, John Dickson of ISSUE and Joan Walsh of Women's Health all facilitated the research in significant ways. At the London School of Economics, my supervisors Professor Martin Bulmer, Professor Jane Lewis and Dr. Henrietta Moore kindly read and gave constructive comments on work in progress.

I would also like to thank The Economic and Social Research Council for the granting of a Postgraduate Training Award from 1991-94, and The AL Charitable Trust and The Reeves Foundation for financial assistance during 1994-95.

ill

CONTENTS

List of figures x PART ONE: NAMING ANONYMITY

1 Introduction: recombining gifts, bodies and anonymity 2 Research focus

Anonymity and the gift Identifying strangers What kind of reproduction? Exteriorisation Anonymity and bodies The discursive limits of biology The western self and property claims Implicit links Anonymity Melanesia Thesis structure

2 Reframing exchange relations: faces of the invisible 25 Introduction

Anonymity and taboo

Reciprocity/anonymity Reciprocity iv

Anonymity, gifts and non-returns Anonymity and kinship distance Anonymity and gifts between general others Anonymity, gifts and time Anonymity and circulation (I):

Body parts and gender (i): transforming women into potentially matchable parts Substituting body parts: the ideal of equivalence Women's 'recruitment' work Making superlative relations Circulating body parts: the pool and the allocatory flows of persons Units into batches Ranking between recipients Non-divisible batches Conclusions

Body parts and gender (ii): feminist perspectives on assisted reproductive technologies

Body parts and gender (iii) partible persons and agents

3 Working with the un-named: some notes on methodology 81 Research design and execution (I) Approaching clinics and ethical clearance Gaining access: donors Sample profile: donors Interviewing donors

v

Research design and execution (II) Gaining access: recipients Sample profile: recipients Interviewing recipients

Methodological problems and constraints The problem of representation and 'grass roots' analysis Atomisarion Rhetoric, imagination, and 'unspoken' discourses

PART TWO: THE BODIES IN THE GIFT

4 Un-binding blood 107

Separating medical from lay discourse Innate substance and the medical version of 'the donating body' Separating out the different strands of women's discourses Donors' apparent reproductions Substance as action: assisting, facilitating, initiating Remote parenting Distant connections Neither inalienable nor forgettable No ties, no commitment.... The work of donation Women 's time Acquiring 'fame' and making changes The mediumship of 'someone' Conclusions

vi

5 Parthenogenesis and intercommunity life 150 Agency, extension and intersubjective spacetime

Donors and 'vistas of circulation': Odelle: genes by proxy Penny: relations as ripple effects Rita: donating adoption Meena: pardon and renewal Conclusions Delia and Fay: spacetimes of renewal Conclusions

6 Active recipients 184 Agency, extension and polite fictions

Relations of visibility The optics of own Forgetting Conceptive onlookers and spectacles of difference Wendy: the spectacle of race Yvonne: the spectacle of sex The procreative 'body' of the hospital

The work of recipiency Blood-food and continuing lines Women's time Pooling relations: gendered substance as action Conclusions

vii

7 Circulating no-bodies: a case study of redonation 230 Redonation and 'spare' embryos Recipients and 'vistas of circulation': Yasmin: one person: many women Winifred: passing on second-hand gifts Thea: invisible bonds and unbounded kinship Conclusions

PART THREE: NON-IDENTITY

8 What is the substance of anonymity? 252 Paradoxes of value

Anonymity and circulation (II):

The value of regeneration (i): ovarian tissue and the life-giving death

The value of regeneration (ii): the symbolism of Melanesian mortuary exchange

The value of regeneration (iii): the symbolism of relations of anonymous exchange

Transilience

Conclusions

viii

9 Conclusions 280 Research methodology and theoretical development

Main findings and conceptual insights

Appendices 292 Interviewees: Donors Interviewees: Recipients Donor Information Form Egg Donation Questionnaire Treatment Procedure

Bibliography 319

ix

LIST OF FIGURES

1

Desperately seeking mothers under 35 years. ..48

2a

Please let me have a baby...51

2b

Please help us to have a baby...Thank you to readers who answered caIl...52

2c

So desperate for child of their own...53

3

Alternative ova pathways...60

4

Synchronised treatment cycles of ova donor and recipient undergoing. ..66 embryo transfer with normal (as opposed to absent) ovarian function

x

Those who know not how to be absent, know not how to love

xl

CHAPTER ONE Introduction: recombining gifts, bodies and anonymity Contents

Research focus

Anonymity and the gift Identifying strangers What kind of reproduction? Exteriorisation

Anonymity and bodies The discursive limits of biology The western self and property claims Implicit links Anonymity Melanesia

Thesis structure

Chapter One 2 Research focus

This research investigates a series of paradoxes arising from the observation that ova donors and recipients constitute relations of exchange as they give and receive from each other genetic material. Against the view that as mutually non-identifiable persons, these two groups are not sufficiently aware of each other's identities for their actions to be considered as kinds of exchange transactions, the study advances the premise, first, that anonymity is a form of sociality, and second, that the time of exchange is constituted in the way that persons, as anonymous agents, are able to project themselves as social relations.

The paradoxes the study highlights are considered initially in terms of the conceptual conjunction of the construct of anonymity in relation to the categories of the 'gift' and the 'body'. This is a somewhat transient project, however, in the sense that what this study seriously aims to explore are the less conspicuous features whereby these categories shed their old associational shackles and transmute into new definitional constructs specifically by virtue of their multiple recombinations.

The forum of this exploration is the contemporary practice of 'assisted conception' whereby medical advances in 'new reproductive technology' circumvent temporarily women's and men's infertility. Not by chance, the particular practice of ova donation considered by this research employs a language of gifts as part of its discursive frame of 'assisting' others, and significantly, it is these gifts that are seen to originate from bodies that also denote anonymised persons. The research seeks to answer how gifts

Chapter One 3 that embody the power of reproductive substance, namely 'gifts of life', can be made by women as sets of relations from out of their bodies, and just what kinds of persons and relations might be in the process of being exchanged. It asks how such relations might be enacted, through what medium these relations may be recognised as forms of social agency, and from just what kind of substance such relations emanate.

Anonymity and the gift

Identifying strangers

From David Cheal's (1988) speculations that gift exchange is a moral economy of 'redundant' transactions, to Jonathan Parry's observation that a discourse of the 'free' or 'pure' gift is most likely to emerge in societies with an advanced division of labor and strong commercial impetus (Parry 1986:467), the lack of a conceptual framework for theorising the form of contemporary gifts in modem western society has received some critical attention (Carrier 1995). Despite recent critiques in anthropology that the constructs of the commodity and the gift do not constitute oppositionally distinct kinds of power or forms of social organisation (Appadurai 1986; Gel! 1992a; Hart 1982; Parry 1986; Parry and Bloch 1989; Thomas 1991;), anthropological theorisations on the gift are still firmly rooted in the premise that such exchange between strangers bodes a necessary contradiction in terms. Doubtless another factor compounding conceptual advance, this premise is due in part to the Durkheimian legacy of person to person relationships constituted from the 'presence-availability' of persons who, as

Chapter One 4 actors embedded 'in' space and time (Giddens 1979:103;202-210), embody valued networks of social solidarity (Cheal 1988:18; see also Goffman 1971:188-193).

An increasing number of anthropologists have recently speculated as to how applications of the new reproductive technologies may bear upon forms of relatedness, and such questioning has been prompted by the impetus to identify empirically at the local and popular grass roots level the nature and basis of changing conceptions of kinship (Abrahams 1992; Cannell 1990; Edwards et al 1993; Franklin 1993; Ragoné 1994; Shore 1992; Strathern 1992a, 1995). However, it is less clear what kind of model of, or indeed shifts in so-called 'presence-availability' these speculations both draw upon and seek to describe as they outline possible changes to forms of personto-person relatedness. Nor is it immediately clear how spatiotemporal 'distantiation' may inform 'symbolic (meaning forming) processes whereby distanced events or relations become meaning horizons of an actor's present' (Munn 1992a:106). In the case of ova or sperm donation which involve the exogamous collection of 'third party' reproductive substance from respectively female/male exogenous sources, such a line of questioning could be modelled on determining, say, how practices of parenting and ideas about the constitution of the 'family' as a social unit of disparate blood ties, are in the process of dislodging conventional notions of conception, personal origins, and generational continuity, as constructs rooted in popular and discursive understandings of the biological continuity of genealogical ties. Given the conceptual legacy of EuroAmerican kinship as the symbolic and material representations of immutable and enduring forms of relatedness (Schneider 1968), it would seem reasonable to pose as a legitimate field of study the question of how, if at all, the figure of the donor as an

Chapter One 5 extra-conjugal provisioner of so-called 'innate' substance, comes to be incorporated as a figure of kinship. But can, however, such 'third term' figures be rendered empirically knowable within the terms of this conceptual legacy?

What kind of reproduction?

Before attempting to answer, we might say that such a line of questioning may be further prompted by the evidence that the traditional basis of Euro-American kinship, as outlined by the constructs of bilateral descent, succession and inheritance, now come to delimit a further ground for conceptual reclarification (Strathern 1992b). This is evident from the way that the 'new' (as opposed to 'old') reproductive technologies (see Klein 1985; McNeil et al 1990; Stacey 1992) obviate the need for procreative partners to be physically self-present in their own acts of reproduction. The question of what kind of 'kinship' might be unfolding seems evidently one that is necessarily subordinate to the question of what kind of forms of 'reproduction' might now be taking place. Commonly euphemised as 'reproduction without sex' (Basker 1986; Brody 1987; Cannell 1990; Rivière 1985; Scutt 1990; Spallone 1989; see also Fox 1993:119-121), in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) has been regarded as a controversial practice for the way it isolates, or screens off, 'parts' of women's bodies from what might otherwise be taken as their procreatively continuous, or 'whole', persons (see for example O'Brien 1981). However, it is far from clear how such kinds of 'detachable' body parts or substances acquire value in their capacity as the free-circulating parts of persons. Nor is it clear how ostensibly procreatively 'discontinous' persons, that is, women who are treated for infertility or those who commission surrogacy

Chapter One 6 arrangements, embody new social relations in practice as certain variations on the theme of ties of kinship. It is at this juncture that a critical gap in the feminist literature on reproductive politics opens up.

Yet this research does not attempt to deal with this gap by approaching questions of kinship directly. As such, it is not a study about kinship per Se, but rather a contextually specific study which looks to emergent forms of connectedness in terms of how women donors and recipients go about making relations as they exchange parts of themselves with others. It is, then, from this particular starting point on the social dynamics of exchange - given this context of practices of gift donations - that the research seeks to answer the pivotal question: 'what is the 'substance' of anonymity?' The focus here on practices of anonymity serves strategically as a critical counter to exchange relations hitherto built from the normative precept of reciprocity. Throughout the study, what is developed conceptually as a discourse of anonymity challenges the theoretical centrality previously accorded to the construct of reciprocity since Malinowski and Mauss's ethnographic excursions into the territory of the gift in the 1920's.

Exteriorisation

The question of defining the substance of anonymity in terms of a discourse of anonymity is approached by investigating the symbolic value of detaching body parts from persons as flows of social relations. Gifts are identified as the circulation of female body parts, and for the moment I outline in this section only how the

Chapter One 7 circulation in social space of such female body parts between persons raises the issue of exteriorisation. For the purposes of this study, two different levels of exteriorisation may be identified. The first concerns the question of the status of female substance once it is removed or detached from the human body, and the second concerns the transfer of a substance from a source originally exterior to the recipient. Both of these levels connect to the wider question as to what kinds of persons and what kinds of bodies the category of 'woman' accedes to, when reproductive substance can no longer be regarded (and quite literally visualised) as the interiorised and innate essence of an unitary and bounded 'self'.

One way of beginning to answer is to examine how the event of exteriorisation creates what has already been alluded to as new procreative settings whereby female (and male) reproductive substance (or gametes), may be brought together independently of the actual physical presence of the persons themselves. In this sense, it is possible to see how the transformation of substance into, and as the exteriorised body parts of women and men, relates not so much to the physiological constitution of persons in their tangible corporeal form, as to the time during which different persons' substances are extended as apart from their person. This then raises questions of how substance can become 'detachable' from 'the person', and in turn, how persons are actively implicated in these processes of exteriorisation. A related issue is how such processes implicate reconceptualisations of 'the person'.

In terms of current medical and legal discourses on donation, the time of making substance into the exteriorised form of persons is however viewed only in terms of the

Chapter One 8 teleological purpose of ensuring that substance is put back into women's bodies. Not only does the body, according to such discourses, represent an ostensibly 'naturalised' boundary between persons, but also the time that is the extemalisation of the person in the form of exteriorised body parts, relates to a time which anticipates the body's/person's imminent and inevitable closure (see Grobstein et a! 1983). Symbolically, the person receiving exteriorised substance may still be conceptualised as a person kept in 'tact': somebody who has not acted with a capacity to effect social transformations.

This research takes as its starting point a very different set of assumptions. It looks at the ways by which substance may become exteriorised not only outside of 'one body' but between multiple bodies: this relates to a second level of exteriorisation regarding the activation of substance that has been donated exogamously from a source (originally) exterior to the receiving body/person. By considering the practice of ova donation as an instance of how female exterioi-ised substance circulates in social space between different women, it asks how relations of exchange are set up between donors and recipients. As such, the analytical focus is centred on how female substance creates value between persons, and it is suggested that substance is seen to be circulating as sets of social relations. As opposed, then, to the abstracted and gender-free acts of opening bodies and persons as sites for surgical extractions and implantations, this study aims to look to the way bodies and persons are 'opened up', symbolically and materially, with regard to what women actually do and accomplish when they engage in these kinds of extrinsic 'circulations' of their persons. In this way the research draws together the themes of exteriorisation and transformation by

Chapter One 9 considering how the relationship between ostensibly 'whole' and 'part' bodies/persons is mediated by the creation of persons apart from their physicalised or 'whole' presence in social space.

Outlining components of an anthropology of reproduction, Greenhalgh (1995a:263) argues that an important task is to 'theorise the spatial dimension of reproductive processes and chart its empirical contours'. The ways in which the body parts of women circulate in time and through space are approached in this study, first, in terms of a critique of biological reproduction, and second in terms of a critique of assumptions underpinning a possessive model of western constructions of 'personhood'.

Anonymity and bodies

The discursive limits of biology

Feminist attempts to challenge biological determinism have focused on refuting the largely universalising and essentialist assumptions about the position of women today and throughout human history as one subordinate to men because of women's biological role in reproduction and motherhood. Whether commentators have sought to counter the potentially polluting and negative value of female procreation by arguing against the denial of creativity and historicity to human reproduction (de Beauvoir 1953), or have pointed to the medicalisation of childbirth as a loss of female

Chapter One 10 sociability around the birth event (Martin 1987; Oakley 1987), feminist scholarship on the politics of fertility has been characterised by the claim of the fundamentally gendered nature of reproduction (Callaway 1993; Greenhalgh 1995; Homans 1985; Rapp and Ginsburg 1991).

A major theme of this literature has been the marginalisation of women's reproduction in terms of western culture's disavowal of women's roles in cultural reproduction. This is borne out by assumptions that women make procreative contributions of 'matter', as opposed to the male party's power to engender 'form'. Such passive-active dichotomies underpin the discursive construction of women as physically constrained and reduced to positions of near immobility by pregnancy, lactation and infant care, in contradistinction to the unconstrained, creative and mobile dispersals of men spilling their 'seed' (see Collier and Delaney 1992). Arguing against traditional assumptions that two mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories of people must pair for the social and economic ordering of 'society', feminist critiques of this functional model of the physical reproduction of persons have striven to 'de-naturalise' the differences in women's and men's 'natures' that render the sexual division of labour and power 'natural' (Bleier 1984; Collier and Yanagisako 1987; Errington 1990; Hubbard 1990; Jacobus et a! 1990; Rapp 1995; Yanagisako and Delaney 1995). They have also stressed how women are to be socially situated as historicised agents, capable of constructing, both symbolically and materially, their own reproductive outcomes (Greenhalgh 1995; Rapp and Ginsburg 1991; Weiner 1992).

Since the ethnographic examples from which traditional exchange theories are

Chapter One 11 formulated have been premised almost exclusively on examples of men's production and men's exchanges, lack of conceptual attention to women's roles as cultural reproducers is partly due to the sparse literature on processes of exchange between women transactors (but see Barlow 1995; Feil 1984; Lepowsky 1990; Sexton 1992). One reason for this limited anthropological record on exchange between women concerns the exportation up until broadly the mid 1970s of constructs of gender as stereotyped sex-roles by western-trained, predominantly male anthropologists. As feminist scholarship in anthropology has sought to illuminate, women have thereby been rendered in a textual sense as more passive than perhaps might otherwise be suggestive during the actuality of field encounters (Bell et a! 1992; del Valle 1993; Moore 1994:107-150). Annette Weiner's point (1976:229) that forms of women's power might appear peripherally as only the shadowy recesses of social and political life is instructive here, and parallels Marilyn Strathern's preoccupation with the need to draw out present absences as the elicitation of certain forms of power (Strathern 1984a,1987,l988,1991b).

This study proceeds to work through forms of absence, placing the way that women are discursively defined as entities of a non-identifiable kind and as persons with no names, at the forefront of analytic concern. It is by considering how women come to be produced as discursively

invisibilised

kinds of social identities and relations in this

particular reproductive context, that I shall go on to suggest the ways in which donors and recipients are nonetheless able to be situated centrally as the creative agents of their selves and, by implications, of others.

I

therefore analyse how the kinds of

productions that women are making, define them as cultural producers (see Weigle

Chapter One 12 1989).

The western self and property claims

The above points lead to a further set of interests concerning the construct of the person and the social character of 'property'. Contrary to assumptions informing a specifically western approach to the concept of property, the circulation of body parts between persons does not necessarily entail the question of determining, nor resolving, the issue of whose body parts are being transferred in intercorporealised space. This is because a radical disjunction between 'persons' and 'things' cannot provide an appropriate conceptual framework for theorising the socially reproductive circulation of parts of persons (Hirschon 1984; Strathern 1984b; Whitehead 1984). Nor can it theorise adequately the forms such reproductions assume.

In legal terms, a person's body has traditionally been conceived as devoid of property claims, such that one person cannot be said to have 'property' in another (whole) living body, hence the illegality of slavery (Matthews 1983). This view relates to the Kantian doctrine of investing a moral duty in one's own (whole) body such that '[a] human being is not entitled to sell his limbs for money, even if he were offered ten thousand thalers for a single finger' (Brecher 1994:995). The issue of the ownership of tissue has recently been examined by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. The Council's Report (1995) concludes that the statutory language adopted by the Human Fertilisation Act of 1990 is predominantly one couched in terms of property assumptions. It points out how although the Act circumvents the thorny issue of

Chapter One 13 property by emphasising the need for consent prior to the removal of gametes, it nonetheless reifies body parts as things by decreeing that the control and transfer of gametes and embryos rest finally with the donor or license clinic (67-70;73). It also draws attention to how the question of parts of the body, as opposed to a body conceived as an intrinsic 'whole', should be the conceptual basis upon which subsequent legal claims can be determined (68). However, even such constructively critical pointers are themselves steeped in an historically and culturally situated tradition of western forms of 'private ownership'. Since the Report assumes that valued goods/body parts may be transferable as objects between legally constructed individuals, it sustains the notion of property as consisting in objects/things possessed by individual actors who are predisposed to defined rights vis-à-vis others.

This question of individuals' rights over their body parts has been stimulated by topical debates on the sale of organs and the commercial procurement of human tissue (Brecker 1994; New et a! 1994:67-68; Nuffield op cit:49-52;81-82; Sells 1994:10131020), as evidenced, for instance, by the American John Moore's claim that, as the world's first patented person, he has been 'essence-raped' (Vidal and Carvel 1994). Upon discovering that without his consent the removal of cancerous tissue from his body had subsequently been cultured into an 'immortal' cell line, Moore proceeded to sue unsuccessfully his doctor at the University of California claiming a violation of his property right in his body. At issue was the event that the cell line taken from his body produced blood proteins of important therapeutic value for the treatment of immuno-suppressive diseases, and was sold subsequently to a biotechnology company for 1.7 million dollars. Whilst Moore proclaimed himself to have been 'harvested'

Chapter One 14 (ibid), the American Supreme Court ruled that his cancerous spleen had ceased to be 'his' property once it had left his body. Thus, the possibility that a person is able prospectively to donate 'his' or 'her' tissue after the act of removal was thereby invalidated. However, yet another legal approach, again endorsing the view of 'no property in the body', argues that tissue only becomes property after the event of its removal. At the time of its removal, that is, during the time that might be taken to signify the intercorporeal circulation of parts between persons, such substance is conceptualised as res nullius: it belongs to no-one. According to this view, it may only be classified as 'property' once it is brought under control, received by and 'housed', as it were, in a new body (Nuffield op cit:72).

Though the terms of reference deployed by the Nuffield Report are themselves problematically illustrative of a rhetoric of property idioms, since the analysis is based on a language of 'procurement', 'use', 'disposal' and 'product development' (1995:4854), it does, however, point constructively to the indeterminate stance of contemporary jurisdiction in this particular field, stating quite plainly that 'the current state of English law makes it unclear (at best) which of these approaches (or another) represents the law' (1995:72). This study attempts provisionally to fill this hiatus by re-conceptualising the issue of 'ownership' as a relationship between persons, and it does so by drawing out the interval that is the circulations of time and space between the removal of body parts from donors and their (re)implantation (in)to recipients.

Chapter One 15 Implicit links

It has been noted by one commentator how debates in the field of reproductive technology are 'instructive not only with respect to what they say about contemporary ethics but also with respect to what they do not say, that is, the implicit links that are embedded in the arguments and premises on which they are founded' (Melhuus 1992:306; emphasis added). Though this study does not address itself principally to the ethical implications of assisted reproduction', it does work through multiple sets of implicit links: both at conceptual, methodological and empirical levels. The first set of links has already been mentioned in terms of how I have chosen to work towards defining the form of interconnections that I see as productively cutting across the constructs of anonymity, gift and body. In the following section, I signpost two further sets of links.

Anonymity

In western societies, rationalism has been premised on denomination and on the conferring of a name as a mark of personhood (Kripke 1980). Individuality is seen to lie in one's name, such that the act of being given a name equates not only with the individual's induction into an order of linguistic exchange (Lacan 1989; see also Taylor 1985), but with the patronymic power to signify. As Butler points out, this was originally divinely sanctioned with the naming that God the father performs on Adam and has been timelessly perpetuated ever since by acts of baptism (Butler 1993:208218). In essence, Butler's argument is that the name as patronym does not only bear

Chapter One 16 the law; it also institutes it, producing thereby versions of bodily integrity not as a function of biological blood relations, but as a function of nomenclature, that is, of kinship systems structured on prohibited sexual access to those named as family.

One central aim of this study is to consider how identities might be secured precisely in and through the transfer of non-names. A second set of links, then, quite dependent on the first, involves the identification of sets of non-identities in terms of the implications of non-naming on the construct of 'personhood'. However, before turning our attention to this, it is worthwhile recognising how the concept of anonymity has been virtually absent from scholarly study, being deemed neither sufficiently interesting nor worthy a topic for critically sustained empirical analysis. In those remote instances where it has appeared almost by accident, it has denoted negative social trends or characteristics, such as a-historicity, alienation, and passivity2.

In western industrial society, the construct of anonymity has been taken in the main to denote, at least implicitly, a form of a-sociality. The attribution to anonymised persons of concealed or covert kinds of non-identities as indeed indicative of a lack of cohesive social relations, stems partly from a marxist conception of concealment and alienation as the commodity form of social relations (Godelier 1977). Such a view sees 'anonymous' persons as depersonalised or erased kinds of entities on account of the impersonal character of commodity exchange. Firth (1951: 137), for instance, equates the individual of industrial society with 'a high degree of anonymity, of impersonality in the economic situation' such that it is 'his specific industrial characteristics, not his total social characteristics, that matter'. And Parry and Bloch

Chapter One 17 (1989:6) follow much the same line when they argue that money 'lends itself to the impersonal and inconsequential relationships characteristic of the market place and even to a complete anonymity in exchange'. Describing how 'social warmth can only thrive where the Other is recognised and accepted in his otherness, that is, where he is known as a person', van Baal (1975:69) implicitly draws together the mutually exclusive nature of anonymised persons with the production of social relationships. 'Social warmth is not possible', he suggests, 'in a society in which the individual is but an anonymous case' (ibid).

This connection between anonymity and forms of alienation is also foregrounded in a foreward preface to Mauss's locus classicus on the gift. Referring to Titmuss's study on blood donation in her introduction to the W.D. Halls translated version of the text, Mary Douglas also remarks that there can be no such thing as 'anonymous relationship [s]'. Douglas intimates that a gift that is anonymous cannot in fact be conceptualised, not only because it cannot be 'free' (Douglas's reading of Titmuss), but because it involves a logical contradiction of terms: in Douglas's formulation a social relation of anonymity could only be advanced in the remote realm of hypotheticals: 'He [Mauss] would have said 'Nonsense!' just as heartily to Titmuss's idea that the archetypical pure-gift relationship is the anonymous gift of blood, as if there could be an anonymous relationship' (Douglas 1990:viii, emphasis added).

Though from rather diverse sources, these statements show how naming the un-named both presupposes the existence of such entities as discrete individuals, and relatedly the way in which anonymity symbolically denotes a lack of individuality. The

Chapter One 18 assumption of non-identity is therefore deemed quite incompatible with the giving of gifts and with so-called 'relationships of dependence' as configured in Gregory's (1982a) analysis (see following chapter). The construction of a metaphorical equation between anonymity as a form of non-intimacy, and identities fashioned by non-place, seems precisely to be what Augé (1995) has in mind when he outlines an 'ethnology of solitude' in his introduction to the anthropology of supermodernity. Besides conventions regarding the use of time and the excess of space, Augé notes that an emerging feature of our supermodern era may be classified as the conceptual revalidation of 'the individual', and he goes on to qualify that 'any representation of the individual is also a representation of the social link consubstantial with him' (1995:19). This theme of incipient social links seems however to be lost in the ensuing analysis about the contractual relations borne by users of non-places (101). By suggesting how individualisation accedes to a 'right to anonymity' (102) and how nonplaces create forms of solitary contractuality, Augé's 'individual' succumbs swiftly to a possessive model of the seif-proprietorial person whereby the anonymity of nonplaces is deemed to negotiate an ever 'perpetual present and an encounter with the self' (105). The attribution of identities of non-identity seems to connote here a generalised and a-historicised field of solitude in which what is taken as 'the space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude' (103).....'the community of human destinies is experienced in the anonymity of nonplace, and in solitude' (120).

Besides attempting to identify sets of non-identities in terms of the implications of non-naming vis-à-vis the category of the person, this research also considers how the

Chapter One 19 category of the person might be reclassifiable as a non-self identical social entity. Yet to this end, it is the concept of anonymity which itself needs recasting. This is one paradox to be worked out and as an initial pointer, I take from Adorno (1973: 163) the fruitful insight that non-identity is 'opaque only for identity's claim to be total'.

Melanesia

The third set of links, overlapping integrally with the other two sets, devolve from ethnographic and theoretical insights from anthropological scholarship on Melanesia. It is principally the predominance of ceremonial exchange systems throughout the region and the predisposition in some Melanesian cultures to use the body as a conceptual model of and for social action (Leenhardt 1979), that is used as a comparative (and contrastive) basis for testing the thesis of anonymity as a form of sociality.

Yet signalling tentative points of comparison is not intended as a prescriptive agenda. It is not that we should adopt the ideas and practices of peoples from cultures besides our own, but rather that we reflect critically why the assumptions underpinning commonplace ideas and practices of 'western' cultures should seem to us just quite so desirable and natural.

Additionally, my referencing of the Melanesian material can only be limited and indicative since it has been drawn upon somewhat eclectically in the light of material relating to findings from the UK. One consequence of this style of magpie-mode

Chapter One 20 presentation is its inability to deal with the complexities and richness generated by the voluminous ethnographic case material of this region. It is thus only possible for this study to brush in with very broad strokes what appear to be some common lines of concern as these converge on the following themes. First, the symbolism of exchange. This concerns the kinds of gift that people give to one another, and what 'of' the person these gifts are envisioned to embody as the constitution of social relations between persons (chapter 2). Second, the symbolism of fertility, agency and the transfer of life essence or mobilisation of sexuaLl reproductive substance: this concerns the ways in which notions of fertility serve as an idiom for conceptualising the creation of social bonds, gender relations and exchange processes (Biersack 1983; Meigs 1976; Whitehead 1987; Yeatman 1983) and how such substance passes between exchange partners as the making or un-making of sets of previously existing relations (Strathern 1988). Third, the interest in the production and consumption of human body fluids as a scarce resource for the symbolic transformation of persons and the theme of transgenerational linkages. Writing of the symbolic properties of semen as a 'director of people - predicating their perceptions and interactions, molding their selves, marriages, families, and clans', Herdt (1984a:168) has been concerned with how semen transactions between Sambian men indicate 'predicates of relationships between persons' (ibid) and perpetuate the social order. And in the context of recently published ethnography on female initiation and 'rites of maturity' in certain Melanesian societies, Lutkehaus and Roscoe (1995) discuss how the cultural significance of the preoccupation with ideas of menstruation, sexuality and procreation links up to broad social concerns of social regeneration, morality and politics. What may be seen as the creation of indigenous discourses of power and autonomy for

Chapter One 21 women instantiates gender as metaphor through the idiom of female procreation images of the female body predominant in the initiation rituals the authors describe are also key metaphors for the expression of power and forms of social hierarchy taking place among women, and between women and men.

In the broadest of terms, implicit links between the UK and Melanesia are worked through here with regard to how things or powers appear to circulate as the products of transactional processes, and as these take place besides or apart from 'what others can consensually experience of them without knowing or even meeting them' (Battaglia 1990:84).

Thesis structure

Chapter two examines some of the anthropological literature on the category of the gift and the notion of reciprocity is discussed as a background context to the forms of exchange subsequently considered. A section on the medical practices and procedures at one infertility clinic is then summarised in order to help situate the textually multiple bodies which follow.

The third chapter explains research design and execution, and considers some of the methodological problems of undertaking research with this particular kind of 'covert' population. The status of informants speech and the problem of representation are also discussed.

Chapter One 22 The central ethnographic chapters (chapters 4-7) then move on to chart, firstly from the perspective of donors and then recipients, the processes of exchange taking place between the two groups of women. Chapter four considers the question of what donors think they are giving when they donate, and how, if at all, they regard their reproductive substance as a biological part of their bodies. The fifth chapter builds on the findings of the previous chapter and examines the way that multiply circulating body parts come to have symbolic value as the extensional and transferable parts of persons in time and space. The chapters conclude with the apparent contradiction that although donors give other women 'their' body parts, these parts do not come from their bodies, since women, as agents, have not produced gifts that are tied physiologically to a reproductive part of their anatomy.

Switching perspective, chapters six and seven extend this contradiction further, by illustrating how recipients do not in practice receive the same body parts that donors give. Nonetheless, recipients are shown to be much akin to donors in that they too make certain relations from out of these exteriorised substances, even though such likenesses are somewhat masked by recipients' frequent rhetorical oscillations and narrative shifts of focus. Contrary to assumptions informing the reciprocity model of social exchange, chapter six concludes that recipients are not to be positioned as endebted persons in some sense socially subordinate to donors. This is not only because they quite obviously cannot be expected to initiate returns, but because, as socially situated agents, they are seen to go about making their own versions of themselves as 'reproductive' women quite independently of the biological substance of their (missing) ova.

Chapter One 23 The seventh chapter turns the circulations around almost full circle by gauging recipients' actions as donors. As a case study of how recipients' (re)donate 'spare' embryos to other recipients, the nature of the substance for donation has clearly changed from ova to embryos, although this is shown to be a relatively irrelevent factor regarding recipients' conceptions of the gifts and relations they think they are able to make. In the light of certain parallels between donors and recipients and the way women from both groups may be seen to be reproducing certain aspects of themselves over time, it is suggested that if donors and recipients do exchange anything at all, they are in practice giving and receiving from each other similar forms of agency.

The eighth chapter is a critical synthesis of arguments and themes already encountered, presented from the revised viewpoint of modified conceptions of the category of 'the person' as gleaned from the ethnographic chapters, and the final chapter presents a brief summary of the study's main findings.

1. Literature on the ethics of reproductive technology abounds. For a general overview, see Baruch et a! 1988; Bromham et al 1990; Campbell 1992; Chadwick 1992; Edwards 1974; Lee and Morgan 1989; Liu 1991; Morgan and Lee 1991:1-32; Overall 1987,1993; Rodin and Collins 1991. 2. Mention should however be made of a passing interest by certain phenomenologists in anonymity as a form of transcendence. See Ebeling 1987; Merleau-Ponty 1968; Natanson 1979,1986; Schutz 1967. E.M. Forster's problematic essay on anonymity (1925) was concerned with how unsigned artworks correspond to what he argued is the inherent tendency of the literary art form not to want to remember the name of the author, but only the genuine creativity of the words written and the imagination that produced them.

CHAPTER TWO

Reframing exchange relations: faces of the invisible Contents

Introduction

Anonymity and taboo

Reciprocity/Anonymity Reciprocity Anonymity, gifts and non-returns Anonymity and kinship distance Anonymity and gifts between general others Anonymity, gifts and time

Anonymity and circulation (I): Body parts and gender (i): transforming women into potentially matchable parts Substituting body parts: the ideal of equivalence Women's 'recruitment' work Making superlative relations Circulatory body parts: the pooi and the allocatory flows of persons Units into batches Ranking between recipients Non-divisible batches Conclusions Body parts and gender (ii): feminist perspectives on assisted reproductive technology

Body parts and gender (iii): partible persons and agents

Chapter Two 25 Introduction

When a woman first contacts an infertility clinic to enquire about ova donation programmes, she is likely to be informed of the high financial costs and time pressures demanded by the treatment. As the shortage of donors to potential recipients creates a demand for donated ova that far exceeds actual supply, recipients typically have explained to them that they will need to wait up to between eighteen and twenty four months before they can hope to be the beneficiaries of such assistance. At the initial consultations with clinical staff members, it would be explained to newly registered recipients how this time entailed their placement in a queuing system in which they wait for their turn to come round. They are also informed that they are waiting for a suitable donor as a correct 'match' when their turn for treatment finally arrives. Whilst money certainly purchases the right to wait as potential recipients, this initial purchasing power soon becomes a defunct currency for an individual recipient, once she has actually become an active and 'participating' 'member' of this queuing system. If it is at all possible to buy anything in this queue, then the currency is time, and the consumption consists in the knowledge that one's waiting period has been significantly shortened (compare Freedland 1994). I argue here that as women 'queue' behind each other as potential recipients 'ranked' in space and time, this process of waiting functions as a mechanism of exchange.

One method of 'recruiting' women and alleviating donor shortages comprises the practice of 'cross-over' donations, to be distinguished from egg-donor 'swap' schemes or 'deals' whereby women receive as 'payment in kind' free fertility treatment in

Chapter Two 26 exchange for agreeing to donate some of their ova (see Hall 1993; Hornby and Hennessy 1994; Rogers 1993). So-called 'cross-over' donations entail the prospective recipient introducing a friend or relative to the clinic to donate on her behalf. Two women who are known to each other thus present themselves as potential donorrecipient transactors; though the donor does not donate to her 'known' recipient, she 'crosses over' to donate her ova anonymously to somebody else. The donor in effect becomes somebody who enables her friend to receive ova anonymously from somebody else, since she has already done likewise by agreeing to give substance to a stranger. And although the recipient does not then receive 'her' donor's ova directly, she is 'rewarded' by the clinic for having introduced 'a' donor to the system. In this way, a previously 'known' relation is opened Out and reproduced into the extracorporeal (and immaterial) gift of time, as well as into the material gift of (physically) 'extracted' ova; and, in practical terms the recipient effectively jumps the waiting queue. Of course, this is simply a sketchy outline of procedural practice at the structural level and it goes no way towards answering why women should want to 'cross' themselves in this fashion so as to create a flow of body parts and identities that remain un-named and non-identifiable.

Anonymity and taboo

It may be useful firstly to unravel some of the prohibitions underpinning the concept of anonymity. Since the Warnock Report recommended the enforcement of anonymity before, during and after treatments, (Warnock 1984:3.2), notions of protecting the

Chapter Two 27 legal and emotional welfare of donors, recipients and any ensuing children have provided a constant rhetorical backdrop for practitioners, in particular their claims about the need to preserve their patients' identities as anonymous'.

Anonymity has also been the social context for the donation of 'gifts' between unrelated persons. These gifts have been offered in the form of the bodily parts of persons, as with cases of the transplantation of vital organs. In Richard Titmuss's empirical study of blood donation in the UK and the USA, the author considers the implications of treating human blood as a commercial commodity in terms of the administration of modern welfare systems. He concludes that the British system of voluntary blood donation is more cost-efficient and morally superior to the profitoriented blood market operating in America, and that as Mauss had anticipated, the gift still connotes an important social phenomenon in large scale industrial societies. Titmuss entitles his study The Gift Relationship, which on closer inspection is a title replete with significance, particularly when set against Mauss's work about social relationships in 'archaic' societies, elaborated in his study, The Gift, discussed in the next section. Titmuss extends upon Ferdinand Tönnies's notion of 'fellowship' relations with his claim that blood donor systems 'represent one practical and concrete demonstration of fellowship relationships' (Titmuss 1970:243) on account of how an ethic of voluntarism produces social cohesion 2. In particular, he sees these fellowship relationships as bonds between 'anonymous others' (1970:212) that manifest themselves as 'gifts to (universal) strangers' (209-246), and, in the context of massscale and technical society, he interprets these anonymous transactions as expressive outlets or 'opportunities for people to articulate giving in morally practical terms

Chapter Two 28 outside their own network of family and personal relationships' (Titmuss 1970:226, emphasis added).

Titmuss's work is suggestive for the present study insomuch as it points towards anonymity as an 'integrative' practice in modern western society whereby 'generosity towards strangers' may 'spread among and between social groups and generations' (225). Underpinning this vision is Titmuss's reference to 'anonymous helpfulness' (212). This term is loosely woven through the latter part of the text, yet never quite manages to impress upon the reader how the dynamic of an anonymous social order would be manifest as a particular kind of configuration of social relations 'outside.. .of family and personal relationships'. Since Titmuss does not set himself the task of addressing how social relations between 'anonymous others' flow between persons as types of relatedness or inter-connectedness in (contemporary) mass society, this is hardly a fair criticism. Nonetheless, it is intriguing that he should choose to gloss what is the anomaly of the social dimensions of non-identity in such an oblique and unsubstantiated way.

Donations that preserve existing life have also been given as 'gifts of life' (Simmons et a! 1977) between relatives. Particularly on medical grounds and for cross-matching purposes, it has been claimed that sibling donors represent 'perfect matches' and a diminished risk of subsequent organ rejection for the recipient. In their empirical study of organ transplants undertaken in the early 1970s in Minnesota, Simmons et a! conclude that for the majority of donating relatives, very little deliberation prior to donating was necessary. Most donors also considered a period of reflection prior to

Chapter Two 29 donating as an a-moral gesture that cancelled out, in their view, authentic or uncalculated gifts given, as it were, spontaneously 'from the heart'. Reporting from the many anecdotal testimonies of donors, the authors infer that this is something donors 'simply know they must go through with', noting also how donations between same-sex siblings are statistically higher than for opposite-sex siblings; how men tended to display a more self-congratulatory attitude about their donation than women whilst also expressing more ambivalent feelings about the procedure - something the authors suggest may well be attributable to the traditional role model afforded to women of devout suffering or caring for others.

These points are salient as many of the donors I spoke to also showed little or no hesitation over whether or not to donate. As women who voluntarily self-referred themselves as 'anonymous others', I will be interested in why this group of persons, like the group of 'related' donors in the study by Simmons et a!, also expressed no regrets or misgivings about their donations. First, however, it is necessary to consider how such claims about protecting persons' welfare and preserving persons as nonidentifiable or unknown identities, are informed by particular sets of assumptions.

The first point to raise concerns the way that what may be taken as practices of anonymity represent a certain structuring or ordering of relations which preserve other (already existing) relations (cf: Strathem 1988). This becomes apparent in terms of how the donor is equated with the figure of a 'third party' person and how according to statute, the donor's revelation as a named and socially acknowledged person may be seen as an invasive threat to conjugal stability since it potentially represents 'the

Chapter Two 30 introduction of a third party into the marriage' (see Warnock 1984: 6.4;4.22)). Popular representations of anonymity, in particular the voices of religious commentators articulating their concerns about developments in this field, have also focused on what they see as the 'adulterous' party to the marriage3.

Arguments about 'adulterous' behaviour, however, often overlook the very enabling conditions of such reproductions. Since the success of assisted procreation is no longer dependent on acts of sexual intercourse, this being so whether or not the recipient receives assistance exogamously from an outside source, claims that the donor represents an 'adulterous' figure are founded anachronistically on a model of reproduction that presumes a necessary continuity between procreation and reproduction. The following reasoning by John Habgood, the former Archbishop of York, is an example of how the perception of the donor as representative of an outside source is conflated with the general process of fertilisations outside the body: 'The main moral objections to the use of donors centre on the problems of identity, and the nature of the reproductive process. Worries about the sense of identity of children born by these means have frequently been expressed and never satisfactorily answered. The intrusion of third, or even fourth parties into the reproductive process breaks the normal continuum of love, sexual intercourse, gestation and parental care' (Oddie 1994).

Nevertheless connotations of sexuality and adulterous behaviour have continued to work their way into some of the most recent pronouncements on reproductive arrangements, and not surprisingly, authoritative documents report how similar

Chapter Two 31 perceptions inform lay fears about 'intervention' from an exogamous party (HFEA 1994c:39). By continuing to legitimate themselves as official views, and as though they are seemingly representative of lay views in general, certain representations and meanings circulating as 'public' debates crystallise as dominant definitions over other less represented or more marginalised voices (see Van Dyck 1995). In such a fashion, I shall show how assumptions about anonymity and notions of personal identity have been perpetuated without critical debate.

A normative rationale of conjugal ties and sexual conduct also underlie assumptions that donors' identities can only be revealed partially so as to prevent donated children 'inadvertently' committing incest with one another. Interestingly, the law has worked into its terms of reference the statistically infinitesimal eventuality that related siblings might meet one day and wish to marry (HFEA 1990:31(6)(a); HFEA 1994c:39). By law, an ova or sperm donor may donate on multiple occasions, though may only continue to do so because the outcomes of each donation are recorded centrally by the statutory body, the Human Fertiisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). In the UK, the HFEA monitors the activities of infertility clinics offering IVF treatments and from its central records, it ensures that a donor is automatically struck off its lists once the ova or sperm from each donor have resulted in the births of ten children. It is on the premise that a donor-child would wish to check the status of a prospective marriage partner, that the HFEA keeps a list of 'non-identifying information' of each donor based on the personal details provided by fertility clinics for each patient undergoing treatment (see appendix 3). As no donor-birth children are as yet old enough to create families of their own, the present policy of anonymity is based

Chapter Two 32 entirely on a future speculation that such children would seek out and value this type of information.

Claims that anonymity is a protective measure also underscore arguments about donor recruitment. In relation to artificial insemination by donor (AID), it has been suggested that the number of sperm donors would drop were the model of anonymity to be revoked. In line with the trial-run of temporarily lifting a ban on anonymity in Sweden in the mid 1980s which precipitated a fall in voluntary sperm donations, it is thought that men would be less likely to become donors were they to be identified retrospectively and forced to accept parental responsibility for an AID child, including the financial responsibility of maintenance payments (see the Glover Report 1989:3243).

This brief review of some of the main assumptions informing the legal model of anonymity shows how the construct of 'anonymity' functions as several parallel and concurrent social practices. I will extend upon these points later, but would first like to draw attention to how the idea of women donating their eggs has been modelled very centrally on the older practice of sperm donations by men4.

Warnock's notion that anonymity provides legal protection to the donor, and ostensibly minimises an invasion of the 'third party' into the family, was a notion initially formulated in relation to sperm donation. In the Warnock report, the matter of ova donation is appendant to the issue of sperm donation in a way that implies it can be evaluated as simply a 'female' variant of sperm donations. The assumption is

Chapter Two 33 that actions that are 'female' (with what is 'female' being modelled on the implicit conflation between ova as the matter of women's reproductive substance and 'women' as the bearers of specifically 'female' bodies) can be predicated straightforwardly on bodies that are 'male' (by virtue of a similar 'sex'-'substance' nexus). If women's actions are getting caught up conceptually in men's bodies, this is because ostensibly internal substances are envisioned as though they can make similarly effective actions when released from 'the body' of an ungendered person. It is also because these substances are envisioned as though they are separate and separable from the 'person', woman or man, doing the donation. Such a view stems from the idealised co-optation of the female body by the symbolic primacy of the figure of the sperm donor. It is an essentialised model of the male body that symbolically fills the place of the standard measure of extra-corporeal reproduction, this giving rise to the implicit assumptions that women's donations can be subject to the same principles, regulations and considerations as men's donations.

Considering in turn artificial insemination by husband, by donor and then the procedure of IVF, the Warnock report goes on to state in quite explicit terms, that the same kinds of objections apply to ova donation as to AID (Warnock 1984:6.4) and that 'it is both logical and consistent that the law should treat egg donation in the same way as AID'. The question of whether women should donate anonymously as in the case of AID is subsumed by this rubric. (op cit:6.6). Though more critical of the supposed need for donations to be anonymous, the Glover Report adopts much the same tone: 'Egg donation raises the same issues of social attitudes as sperm donation'. (The Glover Report, 1989:38). Though the Warnock report does makes slight mention

Chapter Two 34 that there are some differences between the two forms of donation on account of the health risks posed to women donors, it does not go on to question whether, and how, women's perceptions of these risks may contribute to different kinds of lay understandings attributed to these donations. And because the greater physical involvement of donation for women is not fully recognised, the Report does not discuss how women's donations assume a temporalised input and commitment as a kind of processual activity.

In the light of current concerns about strategies of donor recruitment and the 'shortage' of a sufficient 'supply' of ova, and moreover having had the opportunity to speak with women involved in these processes, it is important to include in the discussion how women act as agents and producers when they engage in these practices. Here, the practice of setting out persons as un-known identities is referred to in terms of the 'operationalisation' of anonymity as a form of non-presence. Though I make reference to the term 'anonymity'- by which I mean the discursive practices of anonymity - I hope to show how such a discourse is comprised of a multiple cluster of meanings, which, in analytical terms, unfold as the multiple levels of (discourses of) anonymity (see Abu-Lughod and Lutz 1990:16). Understanding how anonymity is 'operationalised' as plural and differentiated registers of meaning requires interpretation of how such a discourse is (re)appropriated as a lay register of 'value'. Throughout the study, I am interested to develop - alongside the official discourse (of anonymity) - the ways in which such (re)appropriations produce an unofficial (counter)discourse. I am also trying to show how this sub or counterdiscourse of 'anonymity' cannot quite signify itself in terms other than as a version

Chapter Two 35 of official discourse.

Instead, then, of considering anonymity as a prohibitive mechanism, the approach adopted here asks how it is possible that forms of non-identity may mediate persons as types of exchange also constitutive of those very persons.

Reciprocity/Anonymity

Reciprocity

In The Gift, Mauss uses his thesis of the lack of any absolute disjunction between persons and things as the basis of his claim that the gift embodies something of the person: 'to make a gift of something to someone is to make a present of some part of oneself' (1990:12). His most vivid illustration of this claim was his interpretation of the Maori 'hau' - the so-called 'spirit' of the gift, which, as a case of 'third party intervention' (11) set up a 'chain of users' (12). Precursory to Levi-Strauss's (1969) theory of 'generalised exchange', Mauss uses this 'chain' to demonstrate how, even in a case more complex than two-way dyadic exchange, gifts are impelled to return to the 'original' owner, to the 'place of origin' (13). Thus, whereas the principle of anonymity in contemporary British law posits the donor as the potentially intervening third party to two marriage partners (Warnock 1984), Mauss's version of 'third party intervention' relates to the theme of mobility and the extension of the gift, and of relations, beyond two reciprocating partners.

Chapter Two 36 Contra Sahlins (1972), Jonathan Parry (1986:457) has defended Mauss's analytic extrapolation of the 'hau' with the argument that it is not simply one particularistic description of an ethnographic instance. Mauss, he suggests, did not dress up the construct of the 'hau' as a piece of over-inflated and generalised theory, but posited it instead as one of a number of pointers throughout the text which cumulatively substantiate the author's main claim: namely, the inseparability between person and thing, persona and res, in ancient Roman and 'archaic' society. Yet whatever the subsequent interpretations and critiques of Mauss's deployment of the 'hau' may be, for instance, as the over-generalised and excessive mystification of indigenous belief (Levi-Strauss 1987) or as the conflation of different uses of the hau, for instance, regarding the threat of witchcraft (Firth, 1959, or as with Sahlins' interpretation of the principle of the profit or yield of the original gift, the status of gifts in the Maussian scheme can be seen nonetheless, following Parry's argument, for the way they procure a certain theoretical purchase for the notion of 'equivalences' (Mauss op cit:12,13). It was these equivalences - reridered intelligible through the constructs of reciprocity and inalienability, and as a series of anticipated and ongoing exchanges between persons - that functioned for Mauss as an enabling mechanism of social order and cohesion. In this way, The Gift introduces the notion of 'origins' both as a core feature of the gift rubric, simultaneously constructing the notion of impelled return to originary sources as a related adjunct of the analysis.

Mauss's influence on theories of social exchange has been a pervasive one, and the majority of anthropological accounts of gift exchange have been modelled on the construct of reciprocity and on the centrality of returns as inalienable. Whether gifts

Chapter Two 37 have been seen to create extensive networks of rights and obligations between gift partners (Malinowski 1922), or whether reciprocity has been conceptualised as a moral norm (Gouldner 1960) and as an universal feature of human nature entrenched as a permanent structure of patterns of cultural thought (Levi-Strauss 1969; Schieffelin 1980; Schwimmer 1979), reciprocal gift giving has been ascribed by anthropological theory as a mechanism attributable to the preservation of social integration and social cohesion: creating, what in general terms, has been described as relations of dependence by the exchange of inalienable objects between transactors who are related, in contrast to the supposedly objective relations and form of equality established by the commodity exchange of alienated objects between independent transactors (Gregory 1982a).

The notion of gift exchange as exemplary of 'relations of dependence' rests implicitly on the value of reciprocity as a measure of balance, equivalence and mutuality, with the more or less equivalent returns of gifts and counter-gifts restoring a sense of proportion between actors. Theorists have thus regarded gifts and the mechanism of reciprocity as 'evening up the score' (Schieffelin 1980:505), noting how an otherwise inevitable 'sidedness' (Sahlins 1965:146) between exchange partners represents a symbolic devolution into a mutually satisfying symmetry of equal kinds of social relations. Though things exchanged may be concretely different they are presumed equal in value in the sense that a balanced reciprocity represents the 'hallmark' of equality (van Baal 1975:19) through the matching series of reciprocal prestations. This 'matching' of powers to make like returns has been theorised as the form of delayed exchange with continuous debt partnerships.

Chapter Two 38 Yet though the equivalence thesis epitomises relations of imagined equality, the ideal of matching also denotes relations of force, power, domination and difference. It is useful to bear in mind how, for instance, the notion of relations of dependence evokes the analogy of 'tennis-balls-on-a-string' (Gregory 1980;1982b). The original owner or producer of a thing could, as it were, 'pull' this thing back to himself or herself by 'jerking' the strings to which relationships were symbolically attached, and crucially, the relationships within which the donor was implicated (Leenhardt 1979). This description suggests not only how claims over things previously given have an imperative of inalienability worked into them, but in addition, how such returns to the donor require some degree of coercion and intention to make them effective. In this schema, reciprocal gift giving functions as more than a benign levelling mechanism, since it is also a material and symbolic conduit through which personal power between exchange partners passes, creating thereby schemas of ranking, hierarchisation and social difference between the persons involved in such relations (cf: Gel! 1992a).

Though the women in this study do not know each other, and though the donations they give and receive do not return to the original donor as in the reciprocity model of exchange, all the women I spoke to nonetheless felt very strongly that the 'valuables' passing between them constituted kinds of 'gifts'. Before considering the value of anonymity as a medium of exchange, it is helpful to 'filter' the construct analytically in terms of the assumptions governing the reciprocity model.

Chapter Two 39 Anonymity, gifts and non-returns

Since anthropological theory has equated the cancellation of gift-debt with the potential for social imbalance and instability (Sahlins 1965), non-reciprocal gifts have either been rendered intelligible as 'free' or 'pure' exchanges (for example Malinowski 1922), or else as independent of the social flows of dynamic circulation (Howell 1989; Weiner 1976,1992)6. Because anonymous exchange concerns the creation of a debt that cannot possibly be repaid, in this case the giving of a female sexual procreative body part, the first point then is the way that anonymity blocks the principle of balance, thereby making it fundamentally an a-social and unequal form of exchange. Recipients cannot give back, anonymously or otherwise, an equivalent kind of donation to the one they have received.

Anonymity and kinship distance

Sahlins' claim that 'non-kin' in non-state societies are tantamount to the 'negation of community', or synonymous to persons of an 'enemy' or 'stranger' status, has pervaded anthropological theorising on the gift. Within the terms of its own logic of a social distance model of person-to-person relations, the ideal of 'generalised' reciprocity, characterised by altruistic sharing and symptomatic of relationships between close kin, regards the production of gift relations between strangers as something anomalous or contradictory. Sahlins summed up this position when he paraphrased Deuteronomy: 'With distance there can be little tolerance of gain and loss even as there is little inclination to extend oneself' (1965:150).

Chapter Two 40 As with Fortes (1970) prescriptive altruism, Sahlins' version of 'primitive' reciprocity, incidentally a phenomenon he saw as salient to western society, is located in the 'private' domain of bounded and familial relations. That gift giving tends to occur between people who are relatives feeds into the (marxist-derived) view that as the kinship distance lengthens and exchange transactors become strangers, commodity exchange emerges (see Gregory 1982a:23). In part, this resistance against 'anonymous relationships' as expressive of a particular sociality is attributable to the ideal of egalitarian sharing; the idea that 'the family look after its own', this deriving from the theories of socio-biologists and the argument that nature or biology is at the core of mutual support in families - quite literally because 'kin' share the same genes (see for example Wilson 1975, 1978).

Anonymity and gifts between general others

Gifts have also been connected with productions that have specific persons in mind. Maureen MacKenzie (1991) describes how for the Telefol women of West Sepik Province, the gift of bilum string bags creates value, not in terms of the thing itself, but in terms of the value that a woman confers on the recipient to whom she bestows the gift. The introjection of the other as a value is embodied by the donor as part of the productive process of looping the bags, and as a practice whereby value is created. This is in contradistinction to Marx's notion of 'abstract labour', and to the view that the amount of labour power (measured in time) put into the production of a commodity in a capitalist system, counts as its intrinsic value. As MacKenzie remarks: '..the Telefol women do not like to give a bilum unless they have 'seen the face of

Chapter Two 41 the recipient' while they are looping, and they can invest their labour in a social return' (1991: 154-55; emphasis added). Seeing the faces of others is connected to the notion that work cannot be measured separately from social relationships because of the way that the transfer of labour is something that is implicated within a particular relationship (cf:Strathern 1988). Moreover, to be named, and to be known by one's name is part of the possibility of entering the exchange 'domain', that is, of being an active participant in ceremonial exchange practices, since the 'self' is the social circulation of how one's name accrues as forms of symbolic prestige and fame (Battaglia 1990; Munn 1992b; Strathern 1988). In connection with this, Strathern (1988) suggests how action must take a singular form and be directed to one specific relationship in order for the agent to 'appear', as for instance the collectivity of Hagen men are able to direct their actions as 'one man'. The question taken up in this study involves the apparent anomaly as to how it is possible for anonymous exchange partners to be positioned socially as distanced, abstract and generalised kinds of social entities and yet still to be effective as agents7.

Anonymity, gift and time

Cheal (1988:174) has argued that because gifts are redundant they circulate within closed social worlds and are comprised almost exclusively of people who have 'preexisting' relationships. This bears upon the view that gifts between strangers cannot be constitutive of long-term social relationships (see Parry and Bloch 1989) since transactions between strangers are necessarily cursory and short-term affairs. Much of the ethnography on kula exchanges for instance deals with how exchange partners are

Chapter Two 42 in fixed life-long relationships with each other, as well as how these relationships are inherited by sons newly initiated into their father's or uncles' networks.

A central question then for this study becomes the one of how does anonymity, as a form of non-reciprocity, not equate with the severance of social relations? What kind of value is anonymity, and how is Levi-Strauss's interpretation of reciprocity as 'the most immediate form of integrating the opposition between self and others' (LeviStrauss 1969:84) to be reworked?

In order to explore this, it is necessary to consider what kind of conceptual shift is involved from the Maussian conjunction of the person-thing, now that the 'thing' that is given is a corporeal part of the person. In other words, what value inheres in the transformation from person/thing to person/body? And, in order to answer this, it is necessary to ask firstly what exactly is being made a part, and, secondly, to what and to whom the parts relate? Does the detachment of parts of the person's body render the person 'fragmented', for instance? Without understanding the relationship between parts of persons and between these parts and the persons they ostensibly relate to, the currently topical discussions on policy directives in the UK about whether or not persons 'commoditise' their parts/bodies if they receive payment for them (HFEA 1995a:20-21; Lauritzen 1992) cannot properly begin.

The following three sections embark on a discussion of the value of anonymity in terms of the symbolic aspects of the social circulations of persons as exchangeable parts. As background context to the ethnographic chapters (4-7), they start to plot out

Chapter Two 43 a series of implicit links.

Anonymity and circulation (I):

Body parts and gender (i): transforming women into potentially matchable parts

The previous section on reciprocity/anonymity considered how the reciprocity model of gift-exchange has been based conceptually on the notion of equivalence as measurements that balance out as pre-determined value in the form of delayed and matched counter-returns. But 'matching' is also a feature of the non-reciprocated gifts exchanged by the women in this study and constitutes a basic tenet of clinical practice by which donors and recipients come to be 'paired off' medically with each other.

In clinical terms, 'matching' is the practice of allocating a recipient to a donor, and in most fertility clinics is a procedure undertaken solely by the egg donation coordinator - usually somebody with nursing qualifications or a training in embryology. It is a procedure based on the normative principle of achieving 'a likeness' between the recipient and donor in the form of a physical resemblance, with the express aim of making it seem as though the recipient could herself have been the genetic mother. Prior to matching, the physical entity of the person and their genetic make-up is broken down into a set of diverse characteristics according to such criteria as ethnic group, skin, hair and eye colouring, height, weight and build (see appendix 3). It is ideally the sum of these physical traits - perceived to be separable from the person that are then 'matched' together as closely as possible to constitute as close a likeness

Chapter Two 44 as possible between donor and recipient.

Though the aim is to use the donor as though she is a kind of credible genetic substitute for the recipient, the shortage of donors often means that it is more than likely that not all of these traits can be matched to any exact degree for each intending recipient. Since co-ordinators have at their disposal a finite number of characteristics with which to convert single persons into potentially matchable 'pairs', there arises a covert hierarchisation and ranking of these personal features, often with one or two traits assuming predominance over the others. Though approximate similarities in height and build follow skin colour, the co-ordinator typically constructs a measure of 'likeness' on an individual basis for each recipient, so that the physical characteristics outlined above, though indisputably a guiding criteria for the matching of persons, can only serve in actual practice as an ideal frame for the envisioned exchange of 'whole' persons. Nonetheless, the value of matching lies in the assumption that persons can be matched reproductively as though no exchange whatsoever has taken place, and body parts are thought to be abstracted from and exchanged intercorporeally between persons as though they constitute equal substitutive value between the un-related and anonymised women. To match persons together in this way thus presupposes that persons stand to each other as biogenetically equivalent and determinable prior to their constitution as a matched pair.

Material from the research indicates, however, that if anything, what may be said to be 'matched' or equivalent about such gift exchange is the way that ideals of

Chapter Two 45 sameness are constituted from non-equivalences as the quite contingent outcomes of transactions whose outcomes are produced in terms of effacing traces of difference. To illustrate this, I will consider two interrelated aspects of the medical procedures I observed at one fertility treatment clinic, both of which draw upon the clinical idiom of 'matching' persons. First, I shall briefly outline some of the procedures by which donors and their detached ova are transformed into the substitutive parts of persons. Secondly, I shall consider how these substitutions are operationalised in practice as the circulating parts of persons. It is perhaps worth mentioning that the following interpretation is based on my having pieced together details from discussions with informants in relation to my observation of the organisation of the medical regime, rather than on information conveyed to me explicitly by staff members themselves at clinics (see chapter 3).

Substituting body parts: the ideal of equivalence

Women's 'recruitment' work

A number of recruitment strategies are now being developed by infertility centres in an attempt to systematise what has been a formerly patchy and regionally disparate treatment service, and at one particular clinic I was able to observe how a key motivational strategy concerned the promotional work of publicity. There, a very high premium was placed on generating publicity to raise awareness about the need for women to make donations. Members of staff, donors and, more surreptitiously, recipients themselves, were all used as resources for 'public-relations' style informational 'campaigns'.

Chapter Two 46 Staff would gain visibility through the media, appearing most usually on live talk and chat shows, some of which like the morning television programme 'Kilroy' were thought of as promising recruiting ground for donors given its audience of 'young mums at home'. An informal kind of internal vetting system was also undertaken by ovum donation co-ordinators and nurses who would ask women who had already donated a large number or well 'graded' ova whether they would be willing to appear on these programmes. Ex-donors, in particular those 'regular' donors who had donated on more than one occasion, were also encouraged to contact the editors of women's magazines to recount why they had wanted to help infertile women in this way.

Less conspicuous, however, was the promotional 'work' implicitly demanded of potential recipients as they waited expectantly for their turn to come round in the treatment queue of ranked deferral, mentioned at the outset of the chapter. Though less visible, this work proved for the clinic to be a critical source whereby the extra generation of new supplies of ova could be anticipated. To begin with, I will discuss how, in their collective capacity as a group of waiting women who all remained nonetheless officially unknown to each other as relative strangers, recipients came to signify the collective work of 'hidden' recruiters.

As nameless women with non-identities, recipients were used by the clinic for the promotion of what effectively was a grass-roots kind of popular-front 'people's movement'. In particular, the clinic took advantage of the geographical diversity of potential recipients, seeing them in their collectivity as surrogate kinds of 'out-reach' workers who could ideally extend the campaign's appeal throughout the country.

Chapter Two 47 Getting recipients to take on work for the clinic in this way was an objective that was discretely slipped in as the quite routine aspect of each woman's treatment programme. This is roughly what would happen.

After the preliminary screenings and counselling session(s) were over, potential recipients were each handed out an initial six recruitment posters and asked to distribute these in public spaces where it was thought 'young mothers' under 35 years with young children would be likely to see them. Suggested places were supermarket notice-boards, doctors' surgeries, toddler playgroups, creches, libraries and also D-I-Y stores. The posters were all identical except for the inclusion of each recipient's personalised reference number, which would be written in by the donation co-ordinator before their distribution by the women (see figure 1). These numbers replaced women's names so that each waiting recipient correlated with a reference number. Recipients were told how each time a woman donated on account of having seen one of these posters, the donor would quote the poster's individual reference number which would identify which particular recipient had displayed that particular poster. In turn, the recipient would 'jump to the top of the list' on account of having introduced 'a' donor to the system. Yet, 'not waiting' any longer by merit of being taken out of the general flow of circulating relations could still be deemed equivalent with 'matching' practices, since the 'jumped-up' recipient would not receive directly the eggs of that particular donor because, of course, that donor's set of physical characteristics could not reliably 'match' her own.



48

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So bow can you help? If you are under 35 you can

volunteer to donate eggs. By becoming an anonymous donor, you will enable someone to receive the ultimate gift - the gift of life.

CAN YOU HELP? For more information pl&ise talk to your GP or telephone 071 -259 9038 REI':

The donation co-ordinator fills in the prospective recipient's personal reference number (bottom right hand corner) which identifies latter with a particular (and anonymous) donor. Figure 1.

Chapter Two 49 I would often note the puzzled expressions of some recipients who seemed initially somewhat surprised at the suggestion of this poster-scheme, some turning to their partners, as the doctor went out of the room to fetch a fresh set of hand-outs, that she didn't really want to go around supermarkets asking permission to pin up publicity material. The doctor would re-enter enthusiastically clutching a paper 'package' of hope: '....we've had lots of women who've found donors this way and haven't had to wait any longer. If you put these up..well, it's all very simple...they won't know you, they'll just tell us your number. ..and if they go ahead with the donation, then that's it, you're off and away...eggs next month or whenever...' Distributing the posters in such manner, it would always be stressed that only the clinic could claim knowledge as to who had responded to which recipient's poster, and in this regard, the clinic claimed to be 'logging', in some way never explicitly explained to me, the amount of interest that each woman's recruitment 'work' generated.

Some women seemed to be keen about the poster scheme saying that this was something they could get on with and do for themselves. Yet during our interviews outside of the clinic setting, and some time after first receiving them, almost all of the women expressed the view that this was something they thought they had 'better' get on with and do - even should it not work out successfully, it was better to know they had tried something. Since making the effort to display them in local areas, most bemoaned that nothing had come of their attempts, and they would tell me how they had thought carefully as to where best to distribute the material, ringing the clinic fortnightly or so, as suggested, to check whether there had been any positive responses. LON OIL UMIV.

Chapter Two 50 Many of these narratives seemed to be tinged with disappointment, and were also suggestive of fears about somehow being punished for not having done or 'worked' hard enough. In many of these narratives the clinic also assumed the significance of a kind of elevated and revered space, somewhere 'higher' from where women's 'commitment' was being put to the test. This also fitted in with several women's perceptions of doctors as powerful, god-like figures, and also with the way several women felt they were literally looked down upon by others because they carried the stigma of infertility.

And then there was the business of contacting the editors of local papers and getting newspaper articles written. Strongly encouraged to write short stories about their experiences of infertility, women were told by the clinic to approach local print media with free distribution to office-outlets and homes, and to request 'human interest' appeal stories to be written on their behalf. To this end, the clinic gave every recipient copies of 'model' sorts of stories that had previously attracted interest for other recipients, the same system of anonymous cross-referencing and logging applying to these newspaper articles as to the posters. Using the media in this way as a public channel for assistance, recipients linked up symbolically to form an invisibilised 'underground' band of workers. They were all doing the same thing for the same outcome, so that as 'waiting women' their actions set up a series of imagined relationships that constituted their shared pre-treatment period. If the women themselves did not link up as face-to-face presences, their more or less standardised headline-grabbing pleas to "please let me have a baby" circulated the country interlinking them via others' responses to their plight (see figures 2a,b,c).

51

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PLEASE LET ME HAVE .A BABY A desperate heart-rending plea - help me have a baby has gone out from a Storteleigh woman. Her hopes of having the baby she longs for are lading month by month. Now her univ chan.e is to lund a woman who will help her fulfil her dreams of motherhood by donating eggs. The woman, who us not being named, has been try ing to have a baby for nearly 33 years Two years ago she thought her agony was over when she became pregnant. But she miscarried. Mcdica1 experts say that the only

By HELEN CRANE way she can have a child is to find a generous woman who will donate eggs in a minor medical procedure. The eggs will be fertilized in a laboratory by the Stoneleugh woman's husband and then transferred to her body fur her to carry the foetus till birth 'If someone could help me hate a babe. I would he over the moon. It would be the chance of a lifetime. She us one of a family of Seven and it never dawned on her that she would not he able to have t'e famik she longed for. She married soling, at IS. but did not dcudc to have a bab y until she was 10 intl her huch.ind had

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established himself in his engineering career. Hut in spite of numerous tests the longed for bah did not arrive. There was no obvious reason why she did not conceive 'It made me annoyed, angry and disheartened "I think it %'.t.L'IJ have been cask, to accept if thrre had been an ok'iouis reason fn, it She is no.v 42 and ph ysicall y fit. But every month is vital and The needs ii have ire donor eggs as soon as prssihk to hrlp her have her famuis' "A hat't would ' ust complete our lives. "I ftc1 se have so much to give hc sad asp,,unts The would he ;" tIler is a patient

at the Lister Hospital in Chelce., where the procedures are carried out under conditions of strict sccrecs The Stoncleigh woman cdn be referred to by her rtc'rtnCe number 85509. Any woman who comes to trri aid will remain anon moos Donations of eggs often 'ri.dt:t enough to aid more than on': t•.iurir.,ir desperate for a baby. Specialists try to math 'h5situi build and characteristics ci donor and patient wherever posihle Donors must be aged from fl ii 35. fit, and prelcrabh. have c.r'pkit'd their lamile. Full counselling alti.e a"J nii matron is available frtin the C.uli Lena on 071 2i;g u(.M'



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Chapter Two 54 Making superlative relations

Yet it was because of the possibility of 'buying' or earning time through the tacit 'work' of recruitment that a recipient came to be counted both as a queuing and formally ranked person, and as a particular combination of characteristics: a person of parts to be selectively pulled out at a particular time by the ovum donation coordinator from the larger collectivity of the 'pooi' (see next section) and placed accordingly at the front of the queue. The recruitment of donors by recipients generated, then, not only an actual material increase of new supplies of ova for the clinic as a donation system in its entirety, but it also meant that the system could make hypothetically 'better' matches between selected donors and recipients. Connections could be made from superlative fits between persons.

It could for instance happen that the closest 'physical' match to a donor may be with a recipient positioned as number thirty in line in the queue, and that perhaps, in the normal course of waiting time, this recipient might not reach the first series of ranked positions for another three or four months. Had recipient number thirty managed to 'recruit' a donor as a 'cross-over' or through efforts at publicity, she may jump the queue not only on the grounds of her 'work' but because she - in relation to all the other recipients temporally 'ahead' of her - was, in the clinic's judgement, the bestsuited match for this donor. In this case the 'return' from the clinic to the recipient could take the symbolic form of an even 'more' refined match than otherwise expected - a type of increment of augmented quality.

Chapter Two 55 Such are the expectations of the clinic, not the recipient, since waiting women are not aware of how such kinds of relations may arise. One source of 'misrecognition' (cf: Bourdieu 1977) became apparent to me as a pattern emerged from the interviewing that suggested how those women who had applied themselves most arduously to the task of disseminating posters and articles had received the quickest 'jumps' in treatment. They were also women who, having failed at an attempt, were then to find themselves re-assimilated the most quickly into the waiting 'pooi' for subsequent attempts. Although the clinic indicated to recipients that an unsuccessful treatment attempt did not mean that they had to start queuing all over again, there was no mention of a formal policy to explain how these re-assimilations enabled recipients to sidestep the formal ranking system of the main queue. And because women were formally rendered completely atomised (see chapter three) as anonymous persons, they could not compare respective treatments with others, but simply speculated that such re-assimilations happened, somehow or other, in ad hoc fashion.

If a few of the women did realise that perhaps there were other than financial criteria influencing their re-positionings in the queue, this was something that they, in the main, did not feel confident they could ask the clinic detailed questions about. On the whole, many women were worried about doing anything that might jeopardise whatever treatment attempts or 'chances' they might possibly have, and they sensed it best not to ask too many, nor too detailed questions. This became apparent in the way recipients conveyed how potential matches with donors had been relayed to them by clinic staff.

Chapter Two 56 It was customary for recipients to be given a brief donor profile of their potential match - a basic description of physical features (race, hair and eye colouring, weight, height, build), often relayed over the telephone. In some cases this description would be followed by some kind of subjective comment from the co-ordinator, typically, for instance, that this was 'a really good match', or, quite commonly, that the donor was 'a really nice person'. Potential recipients were often put under extreme pressure to make a decision about the suitability of a donor - or rather more precisely, the suitability of the donor's physical characteristics - with an answer requiring confirmation on the same day. Sometimes recipients felt they were being swayed to agree to a match intended for them, some women vaguely wondering how, in the final analysis, they could possibly make such an important decision on the basis of such scant information - a few physical characteristics and a few words about the sorts of interests women pursued. The characteristics might sound similar, but was this really a 'fit'? Was she really like me, the women wondered. Some recipients even joked that the women described to them all seemed to like doing the same things with their spare time. How was it, they bemused, that so many donors liked knitting, cooking, exercise or reading? Did the clinic perhaps manufacture them? One woman even questioned the clinic whether she was getting the same donor with her second attempt because the hobbies of both women had sounded so identical, even though the physical characteristics were allegedly different. What this recipient told me she really feared was that the physical characteristics had simply been fabricated the second time around to make it seem as though the two women were different. The clinic, she said additionally, were very well aware that she did not want to receive ova again from the same ('failed attempt') donor.

Chapter Two 57 It was much more usual, though, for women not to be so explicitly critical about the clinic, or about 'the system' when they talked to me. Recipients were generally compliant with the way the clinical regime worked - or positioned them to conform. This was expressed when recipients told me, their voices sometimes giving way to embarrassed and barely audible whispers, that they thought they would be perceived as difficult and ungrateful were they to decline repeatedly the offer of a particular donor on the grounds of her being, what in their opinions seemed like an unsuitable match. Usually they worried whether what they took to be their 'hyper-selectivity' might debar them from having some kind of say over potential matches in the future.

These points raise the question of the sense in which 'better' or closer matches amount to 'equal' kinds of allocations of ova. For whom, and why were closer matches - 'superlative relations' - considered 'better' reproductions? This brings us to the second point: the question of how within this system gendered body parts circulate in social space.

Circulating body parts: the pool and the allocatory flows of persons

Complementary to the procedure of matching is the temporalised and spatial entity of 'the pool'. Donating anonymously entails a collective donation to a non-specific person, such that in medical practice the pooi acquires value because of the way it functions as a mechanism for the organisation of social relations. To give to the pooi thus stands in as a clinical euphemism for the transformation of known persons into unknown persons, that is, for the construction of persons into anonymous relations.

Chapter Two 58 But, more specifically, it is also deployed as a blanket term masking the precise breakdowns whereby the allocation of multiple ova traverse the time and space that is women's multiple bodies. This becomes most obviously apparent in terms of the clinic's conception of 'waste'.

If 'better' matches were in a sense 'work'-related, the production of likenesses between persons was also a pragmatic consideration regulating scarcity. To a certain extent, those persons who might not so obviously 'connect' together as a 'match', had, in the final measure, to be made into a connection and into a (social) relation. The reason was none other than that the clinic needed to make a certain number of matches over a certain period of time in order to keep the donation system flowing as a system of exchange. And the scarcity of ova, based on the shortage of available donors, meant that the non-usage of substance constituted what, in clinical idiom would be termed 'waste'; this in turn, being equivalent to the failure of circulation and therefore to the failure of the donation system to continue reproducing itself in the form of these kinds of gift-exchanges.

In a certain sense, then, matches therefore had to be made, yet the way in which the making of likeness constituted new social relations would depend more on the process of eliminating differences than on a process of actively promoting sameness. The next section considers how the making of sameness and the making of superlatives between women was really no more than the outcome of various contingencies.

Chapter Two 59 Units into batches

After a collection from a donor was over, the total number of ova would be divided into multiples of three, so that each cluster of three ova would represent one unit. Divisibility by three reflects the legal upper limit of no more than three embryos to be transplanted at any one treatment cycle (HFEA 1990b:7:6). In cases where a single collection is not neatly divisible into equal units of three's, a unit would always be scaled up to make it in excess of three. Had ten ova, for example, been collected, these would not be divided into three units of three plus one unit of one (total 4 units), but into two units of three and one unit of four (total 3 units). Likewise, eleven ova would make two units of four and one unit of three. In this way, the numbers of one and two only have notional value as remainders that could be added to the minimum threshold base of three; as numbers they did not count as entities that had any conceptual value in their own right.

The significance of the creation of units bears upon the apportioning of a donor as the allocatory parts of a person between recipients. Though a recipient is, in a certain sense, personally matched to a donor, it does not necessarily follow that this donor constitutes her 'personal' match. This is because one donating body, as one person, may be donating to up to three persons as the allocation of 'batches' across women. In practice 'a' (that is, one singular) donor and her ova would be broken down numerically into multiple units that could then be allocated in multiple ways to multiple recipients. When distributed across several persons, these units were referred to as 'batches'.

Chapter Two 60 To take again the example of ten ova. Two units of three plus one unit of four could make three batches, which represents three possible distributable sets or possible 'pathways'

8

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In this way the ova from one woman's body may well end up emerging as different kinds of intersubjective times and spaces according to the 'pathways' along which they would have been allocated to travel. The contingency of these pathways is in part

Chapter Two 61 attributable to the way that the ratio of (the person of) the donor to (the person of) the recipient can never be set as a pre-fixed, stable formula. This is not just on account of how the collection of ten ova may on one occasion go to two recipients, and on another occasion may be allocated between three women, but also because of the way that the quantification of ova is something that can never be exactly pre-determined within this exchange system. In part, this is because the exact amount of ova produced by, and retrieved from individual women, is the arbitrary variable of each donor's cycle. Furthermore, this variability is something that is not completely controllable technologically, since it is mainly an outcome of the way the individual bodies of donors react to the hormonal drugs that comprise the treatment 'regime' (see appendix

5). There is also always an unquantifiable contingency regarding the removal of some ova from each collection - some that would need to be discarded prior to their fertilisation in-vitro, or some that had shown up in scanning procedures but could not be visualised or located upon surgical extraction.

As the linchpin of the donation 'system', the temporal synchronisation and matching of donor and recipient are premised on the value of anticipation, and because of the lack of certainty as to how many units the enumerative breakdown of one particular donor's collection will be distributively equal to, the donation co-ordinator works on the profit-maximising assumption of 'preparing' the highest feasible number of recipients per donor. In practice, this means she works towards 'preparing' the maximum number of batches as the maximum allocatory travel or circulatory-potential of the ova, namely three recipients. But these anticipations are the products of yet other, still more 'hidden' contingencies.

Chapter Two 62 Ranking between recipients

The allocation of one donor's ova to more than one recipient means that potential recipients need to be spatiotemporally arranged in a way that was referred to by clinicians as 'lining up'. One of the important tasks of the co-ordinator is to select-out those recipients who seem to be the closest 'match' to the donor placing these recipients in a ranked order against the name of the donor with a view to the forthcoming transfers. These ranked recipients would represent reserve possibilities, forming a kind of secondary queue to the primary queue of the main waiting list designations of pool space and time.

In this way 'waiting women' came to be transformed into hierarchised reserves. A

'number two' woman, for instance, would only become an actual recipient if her donor, who she 'shared' with recipient 'number one' (who would be placed temporally ahead of her) produced enough eggs to warrant the creation of a second 'batch'. According to the principle of divisibility by three, this would have to be anything upwards from five ova, because five ova would be one ovum short of two 'units'. The recipient lined up as the number three reserve was therefore 'dependent' on 'her' (anonymised) donor producing a larger amount than a two-fold allocatory 'path'. Technically, she would constitute 'relations of assistance' because she would be receiving just the contingency of the hope that there would be enough ova from that particular collection for herself.

For the women concerned, this was very much an envisioning of an intersubjective

Chapter Two 63 kind because as 'lined up' recipients they had to undergo preparatory treatment as though they had the same or equivalent chances of receiving treatment, though in practice it was more realistic for them to see themselves as only reserve possibilities. Were they to receive treatment, this was in part due to what was happening to other likewise hopeful women - and in this way it was as much through the ways in which women could and would not receive ova at particular times, as to the times when they did become actual recipients, that women became most aware that they were 'part' of a waiting system comprised from out of such imagined relations of exchange. Thus it was very much as the embodiment of these non-equal reserve possibilities that these so-selected women formed - as a kind of virtual and invisible queue - an intemalised 'ranking' amongst themselves which really did make them more aware of one another's distant but impressionable presence. For instance, recipients would speak of themselves as numbered persons, saying such things as: 'I was the number one woman', or 'I was lined up as the second recipient' and they would go on to tell me how they had not been able to receive ova on a particular occasion, even though their bodies had been 'prepared' for the eventuality that they might be able to do so.

Nonetheless, this 'lining up' of numbered women as anticipated recipients is not simply a matter of quantification: of counting out a number of collected ova as (equal to) readily transferable ova/embryos. The allocatory pathways forged by the coordinator are the clinic's 'production': that is, 'the body' of the clinic requires its own 'preparation' (cf: 'the procreative 'body' of the hospital', chapter 6). For example, the simultaneous 'preparations' of the donor and the intended recipient(s), part of the medical process of 'synchronising' the women, have to be set in motion before the

Chapter Two 64 approximate indications regarding the quantity of maturing follicles are shown up by ultrasound scanning (see figure 4). And because it is logistically impossible for the co-ordinator to wait until the ultrasonographer has viewed interiorally the donor's body before she arranges who and how many recipients should be prepared with which donor, another source of potential 'waste' for the clinic is exactly this contingency of preparing too many recipients: that is, of 'mis-matching' an incorrect ratio of recipients to 'a' donor. If it happens that recipients who had been physically prepared with costly medical drugs could not in actual practice all become matches simultaneously, on account of the donor producing fewer ova than expected medically, then those women who did not receive ova had not really 'received' any treatment at all, and could not be expected to pay a treatment fee for these non-attempts. For though in practice the primary currency was time, this could not extend to charging simply for the experience of anticipation, 'equal' in practice to the inconvenience and health dangers of having been artificially stimulated for no reason other than the hope of possibly having a chance to receive some 'spare' or 'excess' ova.

Non-divisible batches

Alternatively, ten ova may end up being allocated to only one recipient as the products of non-divisible batches, were just one match to be considered a suitable fit (see figure 3). If, say, the physical characteristics of a donor were only able to be matched up with one recipient, then this recipient would reap the full amount of 'her' donor's production. This type of one-to-one correspondence may arise because a characteristic or set of characteristics are considered in statistical terms to be relatively unusual, or

Chapter Two 65 else because no recipients' characteristics matched the characteristics of a particular donor at that particular time.

A recipient with strawberry-orange coloured hair, for instance, was more likely to find herself receiving a relatively higher proportion of ova because there were fewer other, if any at all, strawberry-haired recipients 'competing' for a share of substance from a similarly endowed donor. Yet the system was itself able to even out what it regarded as the inconsistency and economic disadvantage this one-to-one correspondence of persons represented, since it was likely that a strawberry-haired recipient would have to wait a longer than an average time for a strawberry-haired donor to offer to donate.

In such cases, a single recipient of ten ova would still receive these eggs in the form of divisible units. In terms of an enumerated amount, these ova would be counted as one batch, which, after fertilisation, would be broken down into three units of 3,3,4 if all the eggs were to fertilise successfully into embryos. In which case, these three units would represent the hypothetical eventuality of three separate occasions for treatment - or, three different 'chances' - with the first 'chance' being comprised of the three highest 'grade' embryos out of the total ten. One batch of multiple units allocated to just one recipient resulted therefore as the temporal practice of staggering these 'gifts' over time as 'frozen transfers' because of the physical impossibility of transplanting legally all of these embryos simultaneously.

66

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Figure 4. Synchronised treatment cycles of ova donor and recipient undergoing embryo transfer with normal (as opposed to absent) ovarian function

Chapter Two 67 The economic 'face' of the rationale of taboo now becomes somewhat clearer, for a system based exclusively on known donations would be capable neither of generating an increased supply of ova, nor of allocating these as exogenous products for the simultaneous circulation to multiple women. As with the fictitious case of the strawberry-haired recipient, the ova donated by a friend or relative would travel in a specific direction only to the one (known) recipient, with the spatial allocatory span effected by anonymous donations being replaced by the temporal deferrals of 'frozen transfers'. A match made out of two women who would choose to connect themselves together, thus assumes in this instance, the functional equivalence of a 'mis-match'. If the strawberry-haired recipient is fortunate enough to have more 'chances', this is because of the contingency of not having to share more than one batch with other 'waiting women'. The source of her contingency consists in her being a difficult match - critically because it is not possible to make relations with her, that is, from out of her, quickly. She, like the donor ready to donate to a known recipient, symbolically sets up the condition for an economically unviable match.

Conclusions

This review of matching practices shows on the one hand, how the clinic deploys women as resources installing 'matching' as a mechanism for the regulation of supply and demand, and harnessing the process of waiting as a mechanism of exchange. Whilst on the other, the clinic seems also at times to be quite convinced by its own rhetoric, both believing in the viability of matching as the constructive making of likeness, as it also exploits this practice to its own profit-seeking end. Matching is not

Chapter Two 68 only a pseudo-genetical discourse which posits persons as equally exchangeable parts in terms of genetically similar characteristics, it also constitutes an 'hidden' economy involving the hierarchisation of persons in which female substance is informally allocated across several persons.

However, in the case of two women presenting themselves as a potential 'cross-over' swap, what this hidden agenda reveals, in practice, is how that which comes to be 'detached' from both of them is the relationality of their 'known' relationship. It is the relationship (that is, the persons themselves) that they bring to the clinic that needs to be separated from them, before, and in order that, the donor - as the cultural embodiment of a particular relationship - can be 'crossed over'. And it is because that which is taken as their (prior) known-ness is something that is envisioned as detachable from them, that these relational persons may be converted into the transactional worth of non-particular relations: the qualitative quantity of un-knownness. These transformations from 'known' relationships into 'unknown' ones show particularly clearly how the substitution that is effected as a 'cross-over' is the crossing over of the donor's relation to the known recipient. Therefore, it is not the conceptual entity of the person as such that can be considered as 'crossed', but the particular relationship that is extracted from these two persons as that which makes the 'between' of two persons into persons known to each other. Matching therefore is a cultural arrangement whereby persons are put together as cultural entities from out of whom certain combinations are to be made. These combinations set up relations between persons so that points of likeness are not natural; resemblance becomes a cultural product

Chapter Two 69 Yet the way in which parts of bodies set up social relations and relations of exchange in their capacity as the free circulating parts of persons is a matter that is neither recognised, nor given the attention it deserves vis-à-vis the legal and medical pronouncements that shape these practices. This resistance to the way in which bodies are invested symbolically as the social circulations of particular persons in space finds clear parallels in much of the feminist literature on assisted reproduction and the conceptualisation of body parts.

Body parts and gender (ii): feminist perspectives on assisted reproductive technology

Since the late 1970s and the birth of the first child by in-vitro-fertilisation, a number of feminists have been critical of the scientific developments and social implications of the new reproductive technologies (Arditti et a! 1984; Corea at al 1985; Coma 1988a; Spallone and Steinberg 1987; Spallone 1989; Stanworth 1987). One central critique concerns the notion of reproductive liberalism and the view that these technologies extend greater reproductive choice and control to women over their bodies, and over their lives (Raymond 1994)'°.

One key argument has turned on what has been perceived as women's objectification. Women are seen to be processed as 'living laboratories' (Rowland 1993), as 'maternal environments' for ultrasound imaging and, in general terms, 'fetal-centred' therapy has been seen to promote the status of the fetus as disconnected from women's wombs (Petchesky 1987). The language of so-called 'test-tube babies' has been criticised as

Chapter Two 70 symptomatic of a patriarchal techno-culture that overlooks the specificity of the embodied nature of women's experiences of gestation and birth (Stanworth 1987a:26). Several commentators have responded to this by (re)appropriating the term 'technological fix' (Crowe 1985; Stabile 1994) conveying thereby the way bodies were thought to have been reduced to things that were simply fixed and tampered with, never effectively 'cured' from infertility. This line of argument interlinked often with the view that the capacity to 'reproduce' was being erased (Steinberg 1990), with the term reproduction in these formulations resonant with a view of women's reproductive autonomy as constitutive of a unique source of power - a kind of cornerstone foundation of a woman's identity. As one vociferous exponent, Gena Corea (1988b:89) puts it: 'The new reproductive technologies remove the last woman-centred process from us' (see also Corea 1984).

According to such views technology appropriates women's reproductive autonomy and renders the body a compilation of exchangeable and replaceable parts (Andrews 1988) with many feminists arguing that women thereby forfeit their sense of 'bodily integrity'. The notion of the fetus as a separate entity to the mother and of detaching ova for donation to others is regarded as something malign and negative: an occasion that separates or severs something from the person. Taking inspiration from the marxist model of alienation in which work is detached from the labourer, the 'person' according to these analyses is imagined to be a social entity less than she was - her 'integrity' compromised since she is regarded in some sense as less than whole. Whilst not intending to detract from what these contributions do in a sense achieve, I think it is important to reconsider why (bodily) detachment should appear tantamount to

Chapter Two 71 notions of persons as objectified selves.

In her recent publication entitled Women as Wombs, Janice Raymond (1994) offers a view of fragmented bodies in parts in the context of gift donations. She speaks of the way that the categories of 'donor' and 'donation' are to be considered an inaccurate taxonomy on the grounds that women who donate are only a material source of ova - a procurement of sorts (57). Though women can be figured hypothetically as 'both gift and gift giver' within her schema (ibid), their fate seems to be fixed in terms of an inevitable misrecognition. Since women connote 'reproductive gifts', they cannot, she asserts, themselves be the producers of such gifts in actual practice (see also Raymond 1989, 1992).

The political significance of Raymond's position should not be overlooked for its germane concern with the ways in which notions of altruism are deployed to rhetorical effect: to the strategic investments whereby women, more readily than men, are made to appear in western patriarchal societies, as the natural bearers of altruistic actions hence the all too familiar images of woman as care-giver, a mother's affinity with suffering and sacrifice, and so on (45,57; see also Haraway 1990). Yet within the terms of her analysis, this perspective is transposed to the portrayal of women as 'generous tools': women who are depersonalised because they are seen to be the objectification of their emotions, as though their 'generosity' has been wrenched from them into an object severed from their person. Could, though, these same women project themselves as tools of a productive, non-objective kind were these body parts to be conceived as other than the naturally owned endowments of the person 'in' her

Chapter Two 72 natural self? Such a question, though, is not part of Raymond's agenda since her own conceptual vision draws upon a view of women's bodies as the commoditised things of a technologised 'traffic in women' (see Rubin 1975); a culturally specific view of western personhood, briefly outlined in chapter one, that assumes that a person's body parts 'belong' in a self-evident and originary capacity to the person's self.

Strathern (1987) has commented extensively on many of the assumptions underpinning these western conceptions, making the conceptual connection to what she terms the 'commodity logic' form of western reasoning (see Barnett and Silverman 1979; OIlman 1976). Underlying this view of the self as the original proprietor of itself is the western conception of the body as the fixed ground of a bounded and self-identical self, whereby the so-called cartesian cogito - the pre-constituted, ontologically grounded 'I' - is held to author its own experience of the world and the self. In this sense, persons are seen to be 'individuals', and the conceptually autonomous 'I' is effective because he or she is detached and delimited from others. Further, on account of being a self-identical and separate subject of consciousness, the person is held to engender the possibility of realising a full subjectivity (Weedon 1987) and of acting autonomously. Consequently, a sense of interconnectedness with others is taken as synonymous with the cancellation of one's own personal efficacy as an agent invested with intention. It is, then, only under adverse conditions, or as the outcome of 'precultural' or 'unnatural' activities that the so-derived western concept of the person becomes potentially divisible into parts. And because these parts are conceptualised as belonging to a notionally 'whole' person - this being the presumption of bodily 'integrity' - so a person of parts is assumed to experience their self only in terms of

Chapter Two 73 necessarily fractured identities (Butler 1993:82). Or else, the body comprised of other persons' fragments is envisioned as the transgressive abomination of the person and of the particular society: Frankenstein, for instance, is believed to be comprised of the fragments of dead people and symbolises the destructive potential of new forms of social organisation (Helman 1988).

Body parts and gender (iii): partible persons and agents

Nevertheless, the ways in which a body of detachable parts makes itself known in the context of particular actions and particular kinds of social relations has been asked as the quite routine concerns of recent Melanesian ethnography on local conceptions of personhood and identity.

As noted earlier, it was shown how the construct of reciprocity has provided an analytical tool whereby the description of notions of symmetry, balance and proportion could represent the value of equality and sameness via the predetermination of matched equivalences. Recent literature has speculated however whether the construct of 'value' can be modelled independently of notions of equivalence, in particular with regard to the way that value may be constituted as relations enacted during processes of exchange (Foster 1990; Strathern 1992c). This line of thinking stresses that equivalence is not necessarily a pre-condition or possibility for gift-exchange, but an outcome of the process of the substitution of social relations. Thus, the detachable parts of persons that flow between persons have no intrinsic value in and of

Chapter Two 74 themselves, but emerge as forms of value in the course of the specific relations established between partners/transactors.

In very broad terms, this body of literature posits persons as corporeal persons who are comprised of multiple and interchangeable body parts. Marilyn Strathern's work on the Hageners of the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea considers in detail the ways such body parts may be evaluated for the ways they interact with other persons. In The Gender of the Gift, Strathern (1988) develops the novel argument that besides facilitating certain social connections between persons, gifts also facilitate and 'elicit' certain types of detachments 'of' persons from persons (cf: Marriott 1976). Whereas for Mauss it had been 'persons' who engaged in gift exchange because of their social status as the moral representatives of groups, and not because they acted on their own behalf (Ekeh 1974:32), Strathern shows how the Hageners make themselves into certain 'distinct' kinds of persons as they accrue for themselves, in the process of gift exchange, certain social and symbolic statuses. Key to this twist are Strathern's insights regarding the realisation of the body as 'partible': a construct which denotes how persons can detach from, and attach to themselves, parts of their own and other persons' bodies.

Theoretically, the partible body has masculine and feminine elements only insomuch as these are made known in the form of 'same-sex' and 'cross-sex' relations. This means that the partible body is identifiable as the actions of certain persons, and not as the observable physiological differences of the sexes that appear as visible markers on the surface of the body. Contrary to the unitary body and single sexed self of

Chapter Two 75 western philosophies of gender which, in the main presuppose that bodies are constituted from out of the pre-existing conditions of maleness and femaleness, Strathern shows how men and women have both male and female parts which are activated in different social contexts. Persons' bodies are gendered in the way they 'do' things differently, thereby making persons and power 'intersexual' (1988:15): 'much ritual attention is paid to sexual organs not because the organs sex the person, as it were, but because in her or his relations with others, the person sexes the organs' (Strathern 1988:208). What comes to be stressed in this account is how a person's social influence upon another is carried in the 'part' that passes between them. And it is in this sense that the parts of persons converge centrally on the efficacy of one's personal agency as a set of relations integral to women and men.

One way of becoming an agent in the Hagen cosmos is to detach or eliminate the opposite or cross-sex part of oneself; that is, to detach an aspect of one's multiple identity. Strathern shows how such actions may, for instance, be accomplished by the ceremonial exchange practices of 'big men', the leaders in 'moka' exchange. Such persons achieve their gender attributes by creating for themselves an extra-domestic space of male collective life where 'men' not only detach parts of themselves to effect themselves as agents, but they also detach themselves spatially from their female kin so as to participate in an exclusively male world of male reckoning. They become distinct types of persons because a 'same-sex identity..is effected as a deliberate contrivance' (1988:122, emphasis added).

Other writers also describe the ways that parts of persons can be detached

Chapter Two 76 symbolically, and point to the way that these parts, in motion, across persons, carry the influence of the person, or create new persons. Mimica (1988), for instance, points to how the Iqwaye of Papua New Guinea, notionally 'make' persons by counting out their body parts, and for the Maloese in Vanuato, North of Malekula, Rubinstein (1981) suggests how knowledge is a potentially detachable thing and accrues social validity because of the way it can be attributed to social persons, without it being something necessarily objectified nor personalised: 'facts - bits and pieces of knowledge which are parts of larger bundles of knowledge - may be said to be taken (Iai) by an individual in the same way a person utakes an object. Knowledge, as an object, may be divided, shared, and transferred, although persons who are its source, either immediately or of more distance, may colour that knowledge' (Rubinstein 198 1:156; see also Strathern 1988:108-110). Herdt (1984a) illustrates how for Sambian men, the semen transactions taking place between senior 'husband' initiators and junior 'wife' novices involve the identification of the penis as breast, and the flute as both breast and penis. And for the Gimi of the Eastern Highlands, Gillian Gillison (1980,1991) unravels how a bride's implicitly internal penis is complemented by her father's 'external' penis in the course of marriage exchange.

In an analytical sense, what these body parts can be seen to share is their ability to activate social relations: the body is effected as action/transaction (Strathern 1988). On closer inspection, one might look to how these body parts are activated as different sorts of synecdochal relations with regards to these acting/transacting persons. These synecdochal relations can be seen to represent or signify different kinds of metonymic conflations. These conflations are the effects of different kinds of lay perceptions,

Chapter Two 77 beliefs and identifications as these relate to the assumed or attributed social/symbolic value of these parts. In other words, the body parts engender value for the transformations they effect as they make their bodies and persons into crosstransferable relations (see Wagner 1991). For instance, in the case of the Sambian men depicted by Herdt, semen circulates so as to make new male identifications: novices symbolically detach themselves from their mothers, and as surrogate 'wives', they make a projective identification with their own impending wives. The novice's mother becomes the flute as an instrument evoking the former relationships he once had with his mother, and at the same time, the penis substitutes for the female breast as an alternative source of sensual replacement for the mother the man has 'lost'.

As already noted, these beliefs are markedly different to western notions of personhood in which unified bodies are posited as the natural markers of bounded and self-identical selves. Commenting on western styles of reasoning, Strathern observes that 'Euro-Americans cannot readily think of bodies and body parts as the substance of people's interactions' (1992a:126). How the informants I spoke to imagined their bodies as sources of relational connections between themselves and others has indeed intrigued my attention. The following chapters set out to explore how persons/bodies act and arrange themselves as varied kinds of detachable and transferable parts, showing how such persons are not to be conceptualised as somehow disfigured or mutilated bodies on account of being 'in parts' or 'in pieces', but as agents whose relations are 'the active life on which the person [is] forever working' (Strathern 1992a: 113).

1. In the UK, policy directives on anonymity have some precedence in adoption

Chapter Two 78 legislation. After the first Adoption of Children Act in 1926 and the irrevocable transfer of parental rights from birth parents to 'substitute' adoptive parents was first legislated, regarding persons as non-identifiable entities has been part of the legal institution in England and Wales, and has been linked to the ethical issue of whether or not the adopted child has a right to information about his/her genetic origins and birth parent(s). Following the Hurst Report in 1954, the Houghton Report in 1972 and further recommendations that no person should be cut off form his or her origins (Triseliotis 1973), the Children Act of 1975 legislated in favour of granting to adoptees over the age of eighteen, the right to obtain certain information about their adoption and birth registration. Recent changes have been the developments introduced by the Children's Act of 1989 and the setting up of an adoption contact register scheme whereby information is only released to registered adoptees if birth parents have already recorded their names with the (mediating) Register General. 2. In his study of face-to-face gift-giving in Canada, Cheal also notes how gifts may be 'symbolic media for managing the emotional aspects of relationships' (Cheal 1988:5), though this observation needs to be contextualised more fully as part of his larger claim: namely, that gifts, as 'moral economies', figure as types of 'part societies' and that such societies encompass the small worlds of interpersonal relationships which denote the emotional core of every individual's social experiences. 3. One may add here the rider that in certain psychoanalytic theory the intervention of the third person in the form of the oedipal father has been cast as the rescuing intervention of the ostensibly suffocating symbiosis between pre-oedipal mother and child. Lacanian theory has been organised centrally around the observation that the intervening father, the third term, is social order, law and language (Lacan 1989). 4. Some one hundred years elapsed between reports of the first pregnancy following the use of donated sperm in 1884, and reports of the first 'donor egg' child in 1983-84 by medical practitioners in Australia and the USA (Trounson et a! 1983). 5. See also Mauss 1990:24 for the 'third person' as 'distant partner', the murimuri, first noted in Seligman's translation of the 'remote partner' according to a footnote in Mauss 1990:102. 6. Consider also Levi-Strauss's 'natural economy' type vision of a world without exchange: 'To this very day, mankind has always dreamed of seizing and fixing that fleeting moment when it was permissible to believe that the law of exchange could be evaded, that one could gain without losing, enjoy without sharing' (Levi-Strauss: 1969:496-97). 7. As against the premise of the Western tradition of liberal individualism of an initial equality between transactors prior to the event of exchange or social interaction, this research follows the view that there is nothing inherent to the exchange situation itself which necessarily endows so-called autonomous 'actors' with capacities and rights to action. Persons, as 'agents' must instead be 'qualified' to act by the way for instance that they are 'continuously and recursively (re)constituted through their interactions with others' (Thomas 1985:225). Such a view of persons acting upon the world as a 'transformative capacity' (Giddens 1979) through the exercise of power and as a

Chapter Two 79 reflexive monitoring of a continuous flow of conduct, is opposed to the essentially Parsonian/Durkheimian view of the world in which the actions of individualistic 'actors' constitute a series of discrete acts of choice or planning because they are thought to be governed simply by the pragmatic rationality of 'strategy' or pursuit of optimal personal gain. Bourdieu's work on practice as a developmental structure that works itself out over time (Bourdieu 1977:5-9) has influenced processual approaches in anthropology that are concerned with the form imparted to action by time (see Munn 1992a). In these recent accounts of 'modes of temporalisation' (Greenhaigh 1995 :22) what matters is the conceptual analysis of the ongoing time of activities: the way that time is not merely lived, but is 'constructed' in the living. 8. I draw upon the notion of keda pathways that has been used in connection with imagining the routes along which 'valuables' travel and circulate over the course of time between 'kula' exchange transactors (Leach and Leach 1983:25). However, the 'pathways' envisioned here are allocatory tracks that are not synonymous with the 'roads of gift debt' (Gregory 1982b:344) endemic to the reciprocity model of exchange. In relation to the implicitly political muscle of allocation, the connection between pathways and 'diversions' (see Appadurai 1986; Campbell 1983; Munn 1983) seems more pertinent. Battaglia's notion (1990:135) of the 'kinetic "evidenc&' of a course of a social relationship' is also suggestive here. 9. The latter edited collection by Stanworth was the first substantial contribution by British feminists to the debate, though see also Birke et al 1980. In general terms, writing on assisted reproduction has remained more prolific in America, reflected by some of the references cited here. On other aspects of the new reproductive technologies, see the British collections Edwards et al 1993; McNeil et al 1990; Stacey 1992; and the collected papers in Science as Culture 1993. 10. It is however important to stress that feminists have been divided on this, such that there is no definitively 'feminist' viewpoint representative of 'women's' thinking on these technologies. Though feminist commentators have shared the premise that women's reproductive functions are controlled by a male-dominated medical profession, this view has been elaborated in quite different ways (Van Dyke 1995: chapters 1 and 5). Those who stress connections between the new reproductive technologies, greater procreative choice and women's reproductive rights tend to place an emphasis on women's experiential accounts of treatments, seeing this as an important method for the construction of reproductive and technological knowledges. As Rayna Rapp writes: 'Until we locate and listen to the discourses of those women who encounter and interpret a new reproductive technology in their own lives, we cannot evaluate it beyond the medical model' (Rapp 1991:392). See Edwards et al 1993; Martin 1987; Ragoné 1994, Stanworth 1987a,1987b. See also Crowe 1987 on women's experiences of IVF in Sydney, Australia; and, more generally, Rothman 1986 on the 'tentative' nature of pregnancy with regards to women's experiences of waiting for the results of pre-natal diagnosis in America.

CHAPTER THREE

Working with the un-named: some notes on methodology Contents

Research design and execution (I) Approaching clinics and ethical clearance Gaining access: donors Sample profile: donors Interviewing donors

Research design and execution (II) Gaining access: recipients Sample profile: recipients Interviewing recipients

Methodological problems and constraints The problem of representation and 'grass roots' analysis Atomisation Rhetoric, imagination, and 'unspoken' discourses

Chapter Three 81 Research design and execution (I)

Approaching clinics and ethical clearance

Since the subject of ova donation had not been studied to any degree of depth by social scientists before (though on non-anonymous donation, see Lessor 1993) and as no previous researcher working outside of the medical context had documented ease of access with this sample group, I initially planned to limit the research to a focused study of some forty donors only, wary that this in itself might constitute a hard enough task to execute in terms of recruitment. Whilst conceiving the research design, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) had just established itself as a statutory monitory body for the licensing of research and treatment at assisted conception clinics throughout the UK. The HFEA is mandated to provide information and advice to people seeking fertility treatment, to donors, and to the general public. From the speculative enquiries I initially directed to staff administrators there, it became clear that this was a highly tentative period in which the parameters of practice were still being carefully framed. Much secrecy prevailed, and my main fear was that though clinics may approve of the research, the HFEA may act as authoritative clamp, understandably concerned not to risk at the outset of its institutional career, the remotest degree of adverse publicity or controversy by indirectly supporting a piece of academic research it could not, after all, claim to be funding. It was certainly easier to anticipate how this culture of confidentiality and anonymity would veer towards prohibiting rather than endorsing a socially orientated research proposal from an unknown doctoral student, who, after all, came not even

Chapter Three 82 from within the putatively respectable ranks of medical science.

Recalling some of my own work experience in a clinical context, I calculated in the end that the research had a likelier chance of success were I not to inform the HFEA of my intentions, and I thus proceeded to approach senior consultants directly. Unsure of what kind of response I would meet, I planned a multi-clinic study targeting each of the treatment centres in London that specialised in the assisted conception of ovum donation. It was also my hope that a multi-clinic study would yield a breadth of informant contact in terms of diversity of patient views and experiences of clinical management.

'Targeting' consisted initially of telephoning and writing to the senior consultant at each clinic, explaining briefly the nature of the intended research and requesting an appointment for further discussion. After presenting my ideas, I was asked to submit a formal application for ethical clearance by each of the clinic's internal management committees. This took between two to six months to process (September 1992 to February 1993). In the end, four clinics were willing for me to undertake research at their centres, and stipulated different conditions as to how I was to

'fit in' and work

alongside each of the medical teams.

Gaining access: donors

By this time I had already devised a self-contained postal questionnaire 'pack' for egg donors which was to be forwarded to women who had already donated. The primary

Chapter Three 83 purpose of this was to establish initial contact with a sef-seIecting sample of women. The packs consisted of a fairly extensive set of questions (see appendix 4) and an introductory letter about myself and the purpose of the research. The latter stressed how the research was totally independent from that being undertaken by any clinic, and how I wanted to gather a wide range of views from as large a number of women as possible. I ensured prospective respondents in the letter that they would remain anonymous and that their answers would be kept completely confidential, making it additionally clear how none of the answers could be traced back to any particular individual. In the writing up of the research, I have retained women's anonymity and the names of all informants are fictional (see appendices 1 and 2). I also stressed how nobody from any clinic would be permitted to see the answers, thereby hoping to reassure women they could feel confident about expressing themselves without any fear of repercussions from staff formerly involved in their care. Logistically, this was ensured by including in the packs a stamped addressed envelope for the return of the completed questionnaires marked for my attention at The London School of Economics.

At two of the clinics it was agreed that the donation co-ordinators would write to previous donors on my behalf, enclosing with the postal questionnaires an endorsement letter from the chief consultants. Far from compromising my research autonomy, this was something arranged expressly at my request since I had reasoned that I may so increase the response rate by allaying the caution of possibly doubtful respondents as to whether or not the research was credibly backed with some form of clinical approval. In each case, the letter of endorsement simply requested women to

Chapter Three 84 respond favourably to the research on the grounds that they would personally be making a valuable contribution to the understanding of how the involuntarily childfree can be best assisted, and in retrospect I am quite sure this strategy paid off. The remaining two clinics preferred to distribute the questionnaire packs personally to donors once they had completed their treatment, since they felt there was still the possibility the wrong person may open an ex-donor's mail.

Each of the four clinics had a different recruitment flow of donors, and accordingly, it could not be presupposed that each institution was in a position to distribute to former recipients an equal amount of questionnaires. Over a four month period, a total of one hundred and thirty five questionnaires were dispensed by myself to the respective clinic co-ordinators, and I was duly ensured that each clinic's supply of questionnaire packs had been either sent out or handed over personally. From February to September 1993 (8 months) I received a gradual trickle of sixty one replies (45.1 per cent response rate), out of which 54 women (88.5 per cent) were willing to take up the invitation of an informal face to face discussion, an option that had been suggested at the end of the questionnaire.

Sample profile: donors

Donors were mostly married women and mothers in their twenties and thirties who fitted the clinic's criterion of a record of proven fertility. A couple of donors were single women without children, but had managed nonetheless to persuade medics of their suitability. Also included in the sample are five women (25 per cent) who

Chapter Three 85 donated to relatives. In two cases, this was a sister-to-sister donation, in another case, a niece-to-aunt donation, and finally one case of intended daughter-to-mother donation which was outlawed by the clinic. There was one case of a donor (significantly a childless woman) donating to a very close friend. A few of the women had, or still did at the time of the interview, donate blood on a regular or occasional basis. It was to prove significant that just under half of the sample (40 per cent) had chosen to donate on more than one occasion, voluntarily returning to the clinic for fresh supplies of drugs (see chapters 4 and 5).

Recounting aspects of their life histories, many donors repeated quite similar kinds of career events and personal trajectories. More often than not, donors were lower-middle class women with spartan material expectations living with their families in small and plainly furnished provincial dwellings. Many had been keen to commence motherhood either during or shortly after completing their secondary education and had chosen to marry in their late teens or early twenties. Some had found it had taken them longer to conceive than they had expected, and a few women had experienced over several years the repeated trauma of multiple miscarriages.

Outlining their daily schedule, they would describe how their time revolved typically around the home-based care of young, pre-school children, with many going on to portray motherhood as hard but extremely rewarding work. With the exception of three single status donors who had professional positions, the remaining sample were financially dependent on their spouses, with some women drawing attention to the kinds of limitations they felt this brought to their personal freedom.

Chapter Three 86 Since it was assumed from a clinical perspective that women who were used to spending the majority of their time at home would be more likely to be 'naturally' motivated to help childless women, medics had an interested stake in recruiting such 'types' of donors. This group of women were also perceived as having at their disposal greater amounts of 'free' time than 'working' professional women, it being additionally assumed that these types of 'house-bound' women were less likely to have travelled to high risk HIV areas of the world, and would also be less likely to ask detailed and critical questions about the nature of the treatment. Generally, as mothers spending considerable time with children, these women were positioned discursively as reliable figures of charity and compliance, and sitting in on consultations, it was not uncommon to hear medics describe to recipients the 'ordinary' character of donors.

Interviewing donors

Though four clinics granted access, it soon became logistically impractical as a single researcher to divide my time satisfactorily between these centres, whilst also keeping up the momentum of travelling to different parts of the country to conduct one-off interviews at single-spot locations. Though still able to recruit from the four centres, my intention of observing and comparing the clinical practices at the different institutions had to be waived to ensure I could make sufficient headway both with the interviewing and with the time-consuming tedium of transcribing. As mentioned already in the previous chapter, I chose to spend whatever time was still left to me 'shadowing' medics at one very busy fertility clinic where I was permitted to sit in

Chapter Three 87 on consultations, operations and generally get a 'feel' of the daily organisation of the centre. Once staff became familiar with my presence, I negotiated free access to the main office diary in which the appointment times of each patient, what they were being treated for, and which consultant was overseeing their progress, were detailed. This helped me to plan in advance 'clusters' of donation candidates so that I could selectively 'screen' to my own advantage how I could most profitably maximise this observational time, and incorporate this experience into my own interviewing practice. Needless to say, this kind of observational and participatory arrangement did not run completely smoothly. From different quarters I experienced some attempts at subtle obstructionism, the result, no doubt, of a judicious suspiciousness about my role as a non-medical 'outsider'.

Such kinds of doubts, however, were not to impress themselves in the interviewing space I managed to afford with donors. Our dialogues unfolded as semi-structured interviews and were conducted mostly in the women's homes, though occasionally informants expressed the preference to meet at a neutral setting - something which usually correlated with what would turn out to be their greater reticence to talk openly about themselves. Though the women were not suspicious as such of me personally, some were initially a little coy about my motivations and pressed me to explain my interest in attending to the research. I would usually explain quite briefly that a friend had been through the rigmarole of IVF treatments and a complicated adoption process, and that I was interested in collecting from 'the grass roots' the experiences and thoughts of women who had helped other women to bypass their 'infertility'. It seemed to me that women liked the idea that they were being asked for their

Chapter Three 88 opinions, and that a subject perceived usually as the trivialised and all too simple province of "women's" affairs, could possibly achieve greater awareness by dint of the study's research intentions.

Each conversation tended to last on average a minimum of five hours and meant that I would usually find myself spending almost an entire day with each interviewee. The talks would loosely follow the format of the questionnaire schedule (see appendix 4) and, to my constant surprise, women had often thought reflectively over the contents of the questionnaire since first completing and returning it to me. Though the most successful conversations turned out to be fairly detailed sessions, just a handful of donors were willing to be interviewed more than once, stating usually words to the effect that they thought they really had nothing more of any value to say. What then may be expected ideally to unfold as the gradual development of interviewerinterviewee familiarity, permitting in its wake the steady accumulation of crossverifiable and detailed material over time, was for me an unimaginable fieldwork luxury. Given the circumstances, I could only attempt to surmount this by both compressing the parameters of discussion, and drawing out the interview schedule as extensively as was realistically feasible within the time constraints of each particular interviewee.

Though I felt women to have a genuine motivation to help and participate in the research as best they possibly could, the detailed manner of the questioning usually provoked two typical responses: women would either gladly pick up the interrogative bait, seeming to enjoy the freedom of airing their views with a stranger they knew

Chapter Three 89 they would not be meeting again. Alternatively, and less usually, some women would tend, perhaps unconsciously, to talk their way out of some of the questions, sometimes remarking in a slightly critical manner that my line of questioning did not seem to have anything to do with the topic of donation anyway. Though this produced a tension procedurally in that I felt quite sure that the style of interviewing depended partly for its success on my navigating some degree of conversational slack, the majority of women were, on balance, quite prepared to go through their written answers several times, patiently expanding upon and also exploring new thoughts, to some extent, as and when these became apparent.

Research design and execution (II)

Gaining access: recipients

After in-depth interviews with twenty donors, I felt confident I had a rich base of ethnographic material and decided that I wanted to expand the research by including the viewpoints of recipients. Broadly, the intention was to follow through the theme of how donors had imagined their relations with recipients, and in the light of material already gained, it seemed obvious that what needed further investigation was the question of the kinds of relations of exchange circulating between the two groups of anonymously positioned women. This gave the research a fresh conceptual focus since the subject matter was not just the analysis of the subjective experiences of women, but was about finding a way of substantiating the form of intersubjective relations

Chapter Three 90 whereby so-called 'strangers' interlinked socially. Though this clearly meant a lot more work, it seemed to me at the time the only sensible course of meaningly carrying the research forward.

Yet requesting access to a sample of recipients amounted, I swiftly realised, to what would inevitably be perceived as the hypothetical breach of confidentiality and anonymity on my part. By decree of the HFEA, only practitioners employed at clinics had the right of access to the confidential details of donors and recipients. By now it was July 1993, and further against my favour I could not help but notice how each of the co-ordinators at the clinics seemed noticeably busier, or at least personally responsible for heavier workloads than when I had first introduced myself to them nearly one year previously. It was quite clear to me that they now had available to them far less time for providing points of clarification, let alone spare moments to help facilitate access to a new sample population. Somewhat in my favour, however, was the eventuality that though still cast as a 'stranger' myself in this environment, I had nonetheless transformed myself into a less remote outsider (cf: Ardener 1987), passing as somebody able to converse, at least with apparent conviction, in the medical jargon of IVF-related acronyms. With certain consultants, I hedged the idea of extending the research to accommodate the views of recipients, and to my incredulity one enormous door opened.

I had originally thought I might replicate the postal questionnaire pack scheme with recipients, until one co-ordinator took me aside and gently pointed out I would be wasting my time. Recipients, she said, would be much harder to recruit than donors:

Chapter Three 91 they would be more in awe of disclosing the pain of their perceived 'failure', and would doubtless need the personal touch of encouragement from somebody they could trust - such as herself - before they even considered talking to an academic researcher. This led me to scrap the idea of gaining initial access by questionnaire, and I subsequently worked in tandem with this particular co-ordinator, enforcing her role as 'mediator' by stipulating clearly my own selection criteria. I was additionally fortunate to be referred a couple of names of consenting recipients from the organisers of national infertility support groups such as CHILD and ISSUE, who were helping me publicise the research among their members. A less effective recruitment strategy were my informal presentations of the research at local patient support groups at particular clinics and hospitals. This confirmed to me that mediation through existing medical channels really did make a difference in finally prompting women to come forward.

Somewhat patchily, a sample of consenting recipients began to take shape, though not precisely in the manner of the self-selecting sample managed in the case of the donors. Over several meetings with the co-ordinator, I would specify that, wherever possible, I most wanted to meet those women who had undergone treatment during the past three to six months, or women who had had repeated donation attempts over a course of time and who may have frozen embryos in storage. I also expressed an interest in the more elderly category of women recipients in their fifties. Fulfilling these selection criteria, geographical location and proximity to London soon ranked a low priority, and I again found myself having to travel large distances over much of England to conduct single interviews (July 1993 - March 1994). Because the clinic was so busy,

Chapter Three 92 the names of prospective recipients would be released to me gradually whenever the co-ordinator found she had time to help me with this 'extra' work, and of course only after she had managed herself to contact prospective respondents by telephone to gain their consent. Only then would I be given the go-ahead to initiate a personal introduction, in the first instance, by telephone. In the event, I was to find that even with those women who had agreed with the co-ordinator that their telephone number be released, there was a significant drop-out rate by the time I would call, or between the setting up of an interview date and the interview time itself, despite my best attempts to make such interim periods as slim as possible.

Sample profile: recipients

Ova donation is based on a substitutive technique of replacing the ovarian functioning of one woman with the fertile ovaries of another woman, and may be may required by women who have experienced early menopause, cancer treatment, Turner's syndrome (the congenital under-development of the ovaries), or who are carriers of hereditary disorders such as Duchenne's muscular dystrophy, haemophilia or Huntingdon's chorea. The women making up this sample had been diagnosed with the partial or complete blockage of either one or both of their Fallopian tubes, or had been told they suffered from a condition known vaguely as 'unexplained infertility'. Just under half of the sample (45 per cent) had experienced the onset of premature menopause whilst in their teens or during their twenties. One woman had been born without her ovaries, and another informant had had her ovaries removed during adolescence because of ovarian cancer. Three women in their late forties/early fifties,

Chapter Three 93 one already a grandmother, were being treated because they wanted to start second families. The average mean age of the sample group was 39 years with recipients' ages ranging between late twenties and early fifties. The ethnic composition of both the donor and recipient sample reflects the way that minority populations in the UK do not, in the main, look favourably towards forms of female reproduction by means of 'third party' (extra-conjugal) assistance. Although since beginning this study clinics report an increasing number of mixed race couples interested in or applying for treatment where the recipient of non-European descent says she prefers to receive a donation cross-culturally from a source genetically anomalous to herself - that is, from a white female donor - this research was not able to investigate such views with any degree of systematicity. A significant number of women came from overseas to receive IVF treatment, particularly from the Middle East, but I was told in no uncertain terms by staff members that such cases did not involve treatment by donation and, furthermore, that women patients from overseas would not be willing, or able, to take part in the research.

Every woman I spoke to would recount long and complicated gynaecological histories, some being transferred successively from hospital to hospital, and specialist to specialist in an attempt over many years, to complete as thoroughly as possible their investigations. Remarkably, these drawn out 'investigations' even applied in those cases when women reported their menstrual cycles had ceased prematurely. Hoping they may be receive a more refined diagnosis, the women had agreed without fail to the invasive technique of laparoscopy (see appendix 5), with some women also undergoing multiple attempts at tubal surgery or the surgical removal of ovarian cysts.

Chapter Three 94 During the course of these investigations, many had also experienced lengthy and difficult administrations of hormone therapy.

It was not unusual to find that many recipients participating in the research had undergone IVF treatment several times over several years; and a fairly typical story would detail at least half a dozen attempts with a combination of GIFT and ZIFT procedures prior to the experience of treatment by donor (see appendix 5; for a cynically humorous account of procedure by a successful recipient, see Picardie 1995). Some recipients had received different donors' ova as many as three, four of five times with varying success: sometimes no ova implanted and no pregnancy followed, and very sadly, some women found they could not sustain a pregnancy to full term.

Typically, recipients would describe the considerable financial and emotional burdens of repeatedly undertaking the draining uncertainties presented by these experiences (for an extreme case, see Fleet 1993). Perhaps the most remarkable feature of so many women was their sheer commitment to finding out as much as they could about the treatment; their perseverance with the donor programme against all the odds', and the profound sense of sadness they felt as they speculated on the possibility they might never be able to raise children. Many had resorted to replacing missed children with an abundance of domestic pets. One woman who had been trying to conceive for sixteen years had set herself up with her husband as a professional dog breeder and proudly showed me her family of champions. Another introduced me to her twelve cats.

Chapter Three 95 The sample proved uniform to the extent that the majority of women had not told family or friends about their treatments. Most wanted to keep this a secret between themselves and their partners, expressing a sense of stigma and discomfort at the thought of revealing their conceptive histories (cf: Haimes 1992). One woman recounted how she could not tell her parents or parents-in-law about the birth of her IVF daughter and 'passed off' her child as her genetical offspring despite probing comments about discrepant physical characteristics. The emphasis placed on physical similarities by recipients is discussed in chapter 7. Just a handful of women turned this perceived stigma around saying that the hardship they had been through was more than sufficient evidence of their commitment to parenting. Quite a few women were ambivalent about telling the child of the circumstances of his or her conception, and would often ask me what I thought. On the whole, they said, they had not found the counselling they had received at clinics particularly helpful on this matter. This category of women seemed to have come to terms with the reality that they were not sure how or whether they would 'tell' their child what had happened, but had more or less decided they would play things by ear, leaving possible explanations to a later date.

Interviewing recipients

After two months of recipient interviewing, I realised that I would have to further refine the recipient sample by excluding those women whose attempts had not been successful. Though I had started off interviewing recipients whose treatments had been either successful or still unsuccessful, for various reasons I wanted to change tack and

Chapter Three 96 concentrate on the experiences of women who had given birth, or else who were currently pregnant at the time of interview. There had been some very emotional meetings during which it became apparent that the nature of my questions was causing distress, arousing also in me an acute sense of my ineptitude to counsel or console. On balance, I did not feel it was ethically appropriate to involve this group of women in the kinds of discussions the research rationale demanded, and without intending to diminish the validity of these women's experiences, I resolved that their anguish deserved an altogether differently conceived research project to the one I was conducting.

Confining myself then to recipients with successful outcomes, the co-ordinator steered me towards those women she reckoned would be the most talkative and relaxed. Though I let myself be guided in this to some degree, I too kept a quiet hold on my own suspicions making sure that such advice was not also doubling up as a form of internalised vetting. As some of the women 'recommended' for interview turned out to be some of the sharpest critics of the treatment, I felt more or less confident about keeping my cynicism at bay.

Like donors, recipients initially wanted to hear reassurances from me regarding my motivation and interest in the area of reproductive technology. Though I did not particularly wish to get drawn into lengthy talks about parenthood and children before hearing recipients' own views, I was quite prepared to divulge some of my own thoughts about women's reproductive rights, for instance, as a way of broaching a convenient opening for the interview. Inevitably, this helped to break the ice and made

Chapter Three 97 interviewees a little more comfortable, possibly allowing them to feel they were talking to a researcher with a 'human' face. The interview schedule followed a series of questions structured loosely around the following format:

Getting women to describe their own account of their reproductive/gynaecological history. I would ask women to detail their first investigations and the terms in which their diagnosis was explained to them. This served as a preamble to the specifics of ova donation treatment. I would ask women to describe what the treatment consisted of in terms of what they and donors would be expected to do procedurally; for example, the different drugs taken and alternative methods of embryo transfer. This would include questions about whether women thought their bodies were being 'synchronised' with that of the donor's, as well as how the clinic explained the process of synchronisation. There then followed a series of questions about the meaning of giving and receiving donations as types of 'gifts', and the ways in which recipients thought, if at all, about the person of the donor as well as what it was 'of' the donor they thought they had received given the invisible mobility of the gift. This lead on to ideas about the storage of frozen embryos and recipients' options to 'redon ate'.

Methodological problems and constraints

The above points on access, sample recruitment and interviewing illustrate how a key methodological difficulty during the entire course of the fieldwork concerned the issue

Chapter Three 98 of working in a culture of prohibition and concealment. As already discussed in the previous chapter on the rationalisations underpinning the legalist norm of anonymity, this difficulty relates most concretely to the transformation of donors and recipients into anonymised persons. Though I attempt to set out in parts two and three of this study how certain 'relations of exchange' unfold between donors and recipients, these relations need to be contextualised; firstly, as relations that are not culturally recognised as valid social ties between women 'transactors', and secondly, as relations that ought simply not to take place at all. In their status, then, as kinds of exchange transactors, women are not supposed to regard themselves within the terms of these medical and legal discourses, as persons actively involved in such processes of exchange. Nor are they supposed to realise that they constitute themselves as the cultural producers of a social order of exchange. In terms of the practicalities of conducting research with persons who are anonymous and therefore presumed socially non-identifiable, some obvious constraints should be noted.

The problem of representation and 'grass roots' analysis

First, one methodological difficulty concerned the way in which informants accounts did not relate in any obvious sense to everyday kinds of activities. Going ahead with ova donation treatments - whether as a donor or recipient - represented extra-ordinary kinds of days in these women's lives. In several ways, donors and recipients were both describing social events that could not in any sense be seen as part of the customary fabric of either their own, or others', daily affairs - though, of course, the key point must be that ways of thinking about the new technologies and assisted conception are

Chapter Three 99 significant and valid points of reference for everyone.

Yet one problem concerned the issue of generalisation and the level at which to abstract these kinds of experiences. It was obvious that I could not refer to my informants as representative members of a clearly definable group of persons in society. This is why such profoundly vague terms as 'these women', 'some women', 'many women' that repeatedly feature in this study sound so strained and are ultimately meaningless.

A second and related problem concerned gaining evidence at a grass roots level. This related to the difficulty of not being able to access in any obvious way how women's lay conceptions had been built up over time as indigenous and as specific kinds of local knowledges. For instance, informants views on how reproduction could work out as practices of social assistance, were views that could not be gleaned as snippets of rumour, local wisdom, or anecdotal hearsay. Neither was it possible, in this particular cultural setting, to look to the sheer novelty and extra-ordinariness of female substance as the mobile body parts of circulating persons, as a kind of cultural occasion or achievement that would be likely to prompt public gatherings or social festivities. Not only were these occasions ones that were obviously not marked by ceremonial event, they were clearly activities that were supposed to be suspended in a social vacuum of cultural non-recognition. Not engaging in forms of public celebratory rites to mark the nature of such detachable substances, was simply part of the wider cultural phenomenon whereby no existing cosmological schema could be drawn upon by the women involved in these practices. Informants therefore could not readily begin to

Chapter Three 100 identify themselves as the cultural producers and reproducers of such substance. In this way, what may be heard as women's indigenous conceptions of assisted reproduction are conceptions that could not unfold in terms of my gradual familiarisation with a particular source of local understandings - whether of established myths or publicly recounted tales. In short, there was no obvious past, established tradition or conceptual rubric upon which women could draw when they attempted to explain to me what they had achieved as donors and recipients.

Atomisation

A second constraint of working with a population of anonymous persons concerns the way that women putatively represent socially atomised persons. Since women were not to know one anothers' identities, I was collecting accounts from a 'group' of women who in no way belonged to a definable social collectivity of persons. Women, did not 'belong', as it were, to a group with either a developed or implicit sense of cohesion or social identity - as for instance might be the case with other marginalised groups, whether drug users, a certain ethnic minority population and so on. In this sense, these informants could not be classified in terms of their adherence to any kind of wider social group: what they seemed ostensibly to have in common was their label as former 'donor' or former/potential 'recipient'. But as already mentioned in the points outlined above, such an identity hardly resonates with an immediate sense of cultural viability. This has implications also for the breadth of data able to be collected.

Chapter Three 101 A primary practical problem was that the source of information from each single informant could not be cross-checked. Though I was gaining many accounts from different informants, each account had to be accepted prima facie in terms of that informant's own offered interpretation. With the exception of one case, there was no possibility of asking relations or friends, for instance, to retell the same events from their point of view. This produced in me some sense of something being very strange, and, from a practical point of view, it also made it that much more difficult to gain quickly a wider perspective on these quite unusual events.

It also meant that in terms of building up a sense of women's lay conceptions, the nature of the evidence I was collecting came to be heavily reliant on women's spoken words. And since women's accounts were consistently narrated as the memories of past experiences, there was also the additional complication of women sometimes not being able, or perhaps not wanting to remember, certain kinds of details. Though it seemed that supplementation from other sources might at many times have filled in narrative 'gaps', I also came to realise how many of these accounts were narrated as deeply personal kinds of testimonies. Sometimes, these seemed to be almost confessional in nature, and sometimes women seemed to be unburdening themselves from something which they could not precisely define. A few accounts were narrated almost completely in whispers, and a couple of women interspersed their accounts with expressions like: 'oh my god! if my husband knew I was having these thoughts, he would kill me!'. In another sense, then, it sometimes seemed as though had other persons been present during the interviews, this would have been perceived by many informants as intrusive. In many ways this induced in me a sense of myself tripping

Chapter Three 102 up on something being made too private. This relates to the fourth methodological problem which concerns the nature of women's discourse, or the nature of women's language as narrated speech.

Rhetoric, imagination, and 'unspoken' discourses

We should hear the moment there is a change in direction; the noise of decision. In a word, in an instant, we gain or lose a life, a kingdom. Hélène Cixous (1995)

If anything perhaps seemed unfamiliar or particularly 'strange' about these accounts, it was the way in which so many women spoke of these extra-ordinary activities as though they could be accomplished as quite ordinary, even routine events. At the same time as they relayed what I took to be a personal register of partial memories, very many women also seemed to be talking to me as if they were describing, say, last week's purchase of groceries. Yet I was aware of something interestingly bland getting mixed in and mixed up with the deeply personal. As the research progressed, I came to realise that this was symptomatic of women's lack of an existing language with which to articulate the nonthematizable and the unspeakable. Women, it seemed, were getting caught up in a kind of significatory vacuum in which no discourse was readily available to them whereby they could effortlessly put into words their half formulated, and frequently subconsciously articulated thoughts.

None of these accounts, then, were narrated as smooth rhetorical flows of descriptive

Chapter Three 103 speech. Nor were these systematic accounts about the processes of production and reproduction that in an analytic sense can be seen to be entailed in the circulation of persons as 'bodies-in-parts'. Instead these were accounts that, although seemingly forthcoming in nature (see above section: 'interviewing donors'), were mostly noteworthy for the frequency of silences and partially begun sentences that tailed off as discrepant hesitations and unfinished thoughts. Far from being authoritative or well rehearsed declarations, these were raw and simple narratives that constituted potentially new languages in-the-making. Often at the end of interviews, women would reflect that they had never spoken out aloud such thoughts to others before, and one quite consistent feature of these sorts of accounts, was the strong imaginative element that pervaded much of what informants thought they could say, and could not say.

Much of the content of women's accounts concerned the kinds of visions or the kinds of assistances they hoped they could make. For the reasons considered above, these kinds of visions were however not obviously symbolisable. Perhaps one of the most complex and significant aspects of informants speech was their tendency to rhetorical contradiction.

At first, these contradictions seemed like rhetorical inconsistencies that made their accounts quite hard to follow. Since many different perspectives were offered which seemed inconsistent with one another during the time of a single account, the nature of the contradictions under discussion in the following chapters are not just the contradictions apparent between different accounts, but the contradictions that structured each informant's account. Often points of contradiction did not follow

Chapter Three 104 narratively one after the other in an ordered sequence, so that it was not simply possible to break the flow to ask women to explain how previous points tallied together. Nor did informants recognise these inconsistencies as an obvious part of their belief systems, since what was being said was, in one sense, so deeply familiar that it appeared not to need any explaining at all.

This study aims to show firstly why these contradictions are important and should not be glossed over analytically - either as instances of faltering speech, or simply as informants' inconsistent thoughts. Secondly, it aims to show why these contradictions are not contradictions at all, but the quite necessary and logical tensions produced from the critical juxtaposition between various latently expressed folk models and dominant discourses.

After listening to several accounts, it became clearer to me how apparent narrative inconsistencies were not really women's contradictions at all, but rather a series of rhetorical shifts of emphases. In the process of recalling their experiences, women were switching between different registers of discourse which were manifest as the textual effects of oscillation. And the way in which these oscillations took narrative form bore upon the way informants were invoking different levels of conceptualisation. It became important for the research to identify how: (1) these levels of conceptualisation were variously conflated with one another, and (2) how these conflations produced clusters of textual tension as the apparent form of seeming inconsistencies.

Chapter Three 105 The research tries to make preliminary sense of these rhetorical shifts by drawing out some of the different levels of informants' conceptualisation. To this end, the ethnography may be read as a kind of ordering of these levels of conceptualisation as the different, yet overlapping versions of the multiply enacted 'body'. It is suggested that what may be seen as women's multiple bodies are the different social forms by which women's persons are recognisable as transformative agents. To separate out these various bodies, as well as to adumbrate how these different bodies appear to collide with one another - in the specific sense that they cover over what are the different practices of differently acting persons - I use the generic term of 'the donating body' as a temporary rhetorical device. For though women are describing different bodies when they talk, I wish to stress how they themselves do not draw upon an extended range of categories as the means whereby they can operationalise these perceived differences in discursive terms. One conceptual and methodological problem, then, concerns the way that these differences appear to get subsumed by one another as the form of the apparently coherent and monolithic category of 'the body'.

To begin with, it is helpful to outline how the donating body of medico-scientific discourse both concurs with, and differs from, the multiple versions of 'the donating body' that informs women's lay discourses of assistance. It is to this consideration that I turn to next.

1. The average live birth rate of IVF treatments nation-wide, that is, the number of live births achieved for every 100 treatment cycles commenced, was 14.1 per cent for the period 1.4.93 to 31.3.94 (see HFEA 1995c).

CHAPTER FOUR

Un-binding blood

Contents

Separating medical from lay discourse Innate substance and the medical version of 'the donating body' Separating out the different strands of women 's discourses Donors' apparent reproductions Substance as action: assisting, facilitating, initiating

Remote parenting Distant connections Neither inalienable nor forgettable No ties, no commitment....

The work of donation Women 's time Acquiring 'fame' and making changes The mediumship of 'someone'

Conclusions

Chapter Four 107 The first part of this chapter sketches out some features of the medical version of the donating body and will show how women's conceptions of their bodies as donating bodies appears, in certain ways only, to reproduce the medicalised version of 'the body'. It will then be shown how this resemblance resides not in a common body substance, but in the discursive positioning of persons as certain sets of shared nonidentities (a description of the medical procedure of donation is contained in appendix 5).

Separating medical from lay discourse

Innate substance and the medical version of 'the donating body'

The version of the donating body set out by medical discourse, and based upon the assumed likeness of 'matching' recipient to donor (see chapter 2), regards the stimulation of 'more' ovarian follicles in terms of the augmentation or reinforcement of a person's naturally 'intrinsic' bodily substance. The idea of reproductive substance as an essentially 'biological' part of the person is a frequent feature of the explanations provided by practitioners on the ostensibly 'fundamental' difference between women and men; this being defined in physiologically determinist terms as the difference between the ovary and the testicle. Women, for instance, are said to be born with ova as though they are in some manner 'complete', whereas the testicle, standing in for the general category of 'man', is deemed to manufacture sperm constantly.

Chapter Four 108 Typically presented as a humorous 'biology lesson', this is a common line of introduction at open-evening presentations for women seeking prospective treatment, and it is not unusual for donors and recipients to hear such phrases as: 'the ovary is like a warehouse; the testicle is like a factory - it is easier to mend a warehouse than a factory'. Practitioners may complement such notions by stressing how 'multiple egg stimulation' is simply a treatment to 'salvage' the number of eggs already naturally 'in stock'.

Part of the rhetorical efficacy of these analogies rests on the way that these biological parts of persons, conflated as the matter of innate substance 1 embody the synecdochal substitutions of persons otherwise recognisable as 'whole'. Such substitutions - of part of the body for whole person - also provide the rhetorical ground for other conflations. These same self-evident body parts also make known the obviousness that is a naturalised difference of the sexes: women and men, through the respective attributes that singularise them as differently sexed persons, are discursively produced as gendered individuals. According to the analogies worked here, women are not to be situated socially as persons who actively prepare and produce new forms of growth and change over time. As metaphorical 'warehouses', they (or the category of 'woman' in general) are not productive persons but simply the containers - the storage houses - of productions already 'packaged' and/or 'produced'. By implication, women are simply persons who respond to drugs that increase latent 'stock' already at their disposal, and to this end, their bodies have a natural kind of value predicated on reproductive substance as naturally intrinsic2.

Chapter Four 109 This medical model of simply augmenting 'what is already there' presumes that women who make themselves into 'assisted bodies' do not actively produce forms of assistance, and women therefore are not seen to be involved in a process of making changes.

Of course, one obvious example of how the medical discourse of 'the donating body' denies women efficacy as agents is apparent from the way donors are to have no knowledge whether their 'gifts' do produce significant outcomes for others in the form of new life. In logistical terms, the donor is never to find out how many of her eggs will fertilise successfully as embryos, whether a pregnancy is established or a child born as a result of her actions. Once 'the donating body' is transformed from a 'whole' body into a number of detachable and circulating body parts, these parts standing in (metaphorically) for the donor's naturalised body, but not productiveness cannot be traced back to the person of the donor.

Separating out the different strands of women 's discourses

In certain instances only women's narratives appear to duplicate the medical model of the donating body.

Quite noticeably, women tend not to want to describe how their hormonal secretions triggered by the pituitary gland in the brain are 'overridden' artificially by the drug regime. This is referred to colloquially by medics as 'switching off' (see appendix 5). Though informed of these hormonal changes to their body, women did not consider

Chapter Four 110 it significant or important to dwell on how these extraordinary ovulations meant that their reproductive system did not 'function' hormonally as it otherwise would. The physiological changes produced by the suppression of the pituitary gland are not narrated explicitly as instances of bodily closure or suspension, so that in this particular version of the donating body, women seem not to be alarmed or bothered by how a usual body function has been altered.

Nor do any of the interview sample draw on idioms that suggest they feel out of control of what is happening to their bodies. This is quite clear from the way the procedures do not produce in them a sense of concern about the possible side-effects of ovarian hyper-stimulation, or other risks arising from the treatment. When I would ask women to recount the treatment procedure to me, much of their account is narrated in terms of a simple, sometimes even straightforward process, even though at rare moments, and usually only when prompted, they comment lightheartedly as to how bruised they became from the daily injections, or how the nasal sniffing gave them headaches or nausea. However, within the context of their overall accounts, these comments were brought up as negligible side-remarks - issues, they thought, that hardly warranted concern or further comment.

Donors' apparent reproductions

The following excerpts show how even those women who do acknowledge that they, or a part of their self has been altered, are not unduly preoccupied that something out of the ordinary is taking place.

Chapter Four ill Many women will explain how they think their bodies are doing something 'natural' on account of how they would normally produce more than one ovum in the course of a monthly cycle. And although some do acknowledge that the nasal spray functions as an hormonal suppressant, they do not develop an explicit discourse about themselves as transformed persons temporarily 'switched off'.

Alice: Did you find this quite a complex, quite a complicated procedure to understand? I probably didn't take it all in the beginning - I just really went along with it maybe naively. I feel I knew enough about it, but gradually over the years, I've learnt more and more about it...and with a sort of curiosity - a natural curiosity and the willingness to find out these things, about how it goes. Because listening to you explaining it, it sounds quite complex - how you have to have the injections to boost the eggs and the pituitary gland is shut down, and it sounds like there is a lot going on inside a person 's body to get this whole process going. Did you think it was a lot that was going on? No, not really because I consider it just an extension of your natural body process. It sounds complicated but then you could turn round and say: "well, all you do is you have one injection a day, you have a sniff every four hours, twice before bedtime so you don't have to worry about that bit, two ultrasound scans, a visit at the beginning, a visit at the end - and that's it". So you could actually say it like that to condense it, you could just say it like that probably into one sentence.

Alice describes donation as an 'extension' of a natural body process because it is something that can be attributed to the way that something 'more' is now taking place inside her body:

Alice: And again every month it's a normal process - a normal monthly procedure is you might produce more than one egg, you might have one to ten eggs and they're just follicles anyway - the egg is in follicles so you might have empty

Chapter Four 112 follicles every month - you might have one egg in there. So I just look at it as a more advanced procedure of a natural thing, it's a little bit more powerful..it's still a natural thing - procedure - but it's just that bit more advanced up the ladder, if you like ... again it goes back to nature, it's natural because all you're doing is just helping nature along by producing more eggs and then just giving them to somebody else...it's very simple, that's how it felt tome...

Alice seems to say that what she donates is in some sense different to her normal monthly cycle, though on balance, she does not think that this procedure entails her doing something different with her body. She does not see herself as making a new kind of production from out of her person/body and what she 'gives' is rather a similar kind of production to her 'natural' monthly productions. Here her notion of 'more' conflates extra quantities of her body as detachable body parts with the advanced form of a powerful technology: '..so I just look at it as a more advanced procedure of a natural thing, it's a little bit more powerful'. Since she is saying that she 'does' what she is otherwise naturally endowed with, her view of herself is thus exactly in line with a conception of 'the person' predicated on natural and innate body substance.

Betty also refers to how she has 'more' eggs, and again this is seen to be just an extension of what is a 'natural' part, as it were, of her body.

Betty: for me to generate more eggs than I would normally do which involved having to sniff with a puffer that helped the body to generate more of the hormone ... then they were actually injecting me with a good blast of certain hormones to make me mass-produce eggs basically. I was just generating more eggs to give me.. give them more to take from me to make it worth their while taking them. Because I think if there's less than three eggs, they won't attempt it, because they say that it's a waste of their time and a waste of my time.

Chapter Four 113 They just explained that it would be making me mass-produce eggs basically. I was quite happy with what they told me, they assured me there shouldn't be any side effects - if there were I think there were two or three different things that they were talking about, but they said that should that happen... they would deal with it, sort it out, you know, accordingly whatever...

Betty uses the terms 'generate' and 'mass-produce' with which to convey a sense of how her body, prepared with 'a good blast of certain hormones' enables her to '..give them more to take from me to make it worth their while taking them'. Once again the category of the body is positioned simultaneously as active and non-active - of being generational ('me') and of being generated ('them'), with these activations straddling different points of origin respectively: from both inside the body ('for me to generate more eggs..') and outside the body ('they had to do something to generate'). In this way her person is figured as the dualism of a bounded self that is already the dichotomised difference of an interiorised and exteriorised social entity.

For Cathy, the nasal spray is something which she is primarily concerned to fit into her lifestyle without inconvenience. It is literally small and untaxing; you can simply stick it in your handbag. Once again technology is not seen by her to be something that alters her body, or that makes her think she might be acting to initiate significant change.

Cathy: When I spoke to somebody else who had donated, then I felt I could fit it around my family, then I was happy to do it. I wasn't really so worried about what it was going to do to my body, I mean as long as it all got back to normal...I said to her: "what about the sniff? Is that going to be a nuisance? Do I have to be at home all the time to take it?" "Oh no", she said, "it's like a nasal spray, you stick it in your handbag if you're going out. You can literally fit it in". She was the one who convinced me that really...she had two

Chapter Four 114 children.. .that you could fit it in around your family...

Delia is another donor who comments on how 'they were just increasing what normally happens naturally', reinforcing Alice's point when she intimates she is simply a passive recipient of the effects of technological intervention. Technology is described by her as 'an improvement on what mother nature does', so that the locus of improvement, though stemming from her body, is not narrated here as her own achievement, but rather something that is brought out from her body by practitioners positioned as 'them'.

Delia: I didn't really think about any of it... other than they were just increasing what normally happens naturally. I think I just looked at it as it was just an improvement on what mother nature...that's the way that I looked at it. I didn't think of it as like this shouldn't be happening because this is not a natural thing. I just thought it's a natural thing happening anyway and all these drugs are doing is just increasing someone's chances.

Many women would speak in similar terms, mentioning quite casually that these procedures were not physically demanding. In so doing they seem to be conveying quite consistently how preparing the body into a 'donating body' is something that comes easily to them. In the following excerpts Emma and Cathy talk of donation as a simple and quick procedure. Like several donors, they tend to downplay the considerable amount of time they must invest in the work of preparing themselves as productive donors.

Emma: ..there is nothing involved, I mean it doesn't take anything to donate eggs, it's

Chapter Four 115 not any time really.

When you say that there is nothing really involved and that it doesn 't really take any time, would you say that it is actually quite an easy thing to do? Yes, it is, I mean all you've got to do is go up to the hospital a couple of times, the sniff is not really very much - just remembering when to take it and making sure you take it. And the injections are nothing - they hurt, but that's about it.

Cathy:

.1 would certainly probably think about doing it again if it helped some other person. Because it isn't a hardship..it's not a hardship at all. I think if more people knew about it they'd probably be actually happy to do it - it's a series of injections, a little bit of counselling and a small op - and that's all, it's not time really...

Fay also talks quite matter of factly about the little time donation takes, comparing what she regards as her slight involvement compared to the difficult time that awaits recipients' treatments.

Fay: ...For me it's not so bad - I go up there, I take the drugs, I come home, I do the business, I go up there and then come home. At the end of the day my little bit is over in about a month, whereas theirs [recipients] is hopefully just beginning..

The excerpted passages above show how women seem to comply to the version of 'the' donating body informing medical discourse. They regard their productive capabilities as the interiorised growths of naturalised bodies, and they do not describe

Chapter Four 116 what they have done in terms that suggest they have acted as cultural producers transforming time into altered kinds of social identities and subjectivities.

However, the rhetorical likeness informing women's accounts of donation and the clinical version of donating bodies does not derive from a common substance. Women's narrated bodies only seem to share similar characteristics with the medicalised 'donating body' because both are socially positioned as the embodiment of anonymous persons. When, then, donors say that the procedures all seem very natural to them, they are making very particular kinds of statements. Alice, Betty, Cathy, Delia, Emma, Fay and others, are not appealing to a view of the naturalised body simply because they are prepared to suffer pain to help others; nor is the absence of a narrated discourse of pain something to be elided with the voluntarism uncritically ascribed to the category of altruistic 'woman', nor is it suggestive of docile bodies (Foucault 1973) that are simply being intervened as the objects of medical gaze. Women's narrations of their 'donating bodies' were not the accounts of bodies being intervened, but more complicatedly comprised the rhetorical form of a remaindered discourse about agents who were busy making social kinds of interventions. As the next chapter will suggest, these were interventions that in many senses women also wanted to imagine they could have instigated quite independently of the high technology of medical 'assistance'. This too was another reason why these processes came to be imagined as all very 'natural': they were part of women's visions of power and enablement.

Chapter Four 117 Substance as action: assisting, facilitating and initiating

Before considering how donors make parts of their body into the detachable parts of their persons, and what kinds of symbolic transformations these productions effect, it is necessary to explore how donors think of their bodies as detachable parts. What 'of' the body is carried in the person who gives? Of what kind of substance do women make 'more'?

This section argues that it is only when reproductive substance is contextualised by women in relation to the actions and interactions women are producing as donors, that notions of substance can be registered as a recognisable feature of women's discourses. The following discussion will illustrate how these actions and interactions may best approached as various metaphors of assistance.

Women in general speak a very vague discourse about how they are giving somebody a 'chance' of having a child, which is also referred to as a 'gift of life'. Both of these notions are ones that donors appropriate from the clinical discourses of medicalised 'assistance'. Medics and much of the clinic propaganda on donation (posters, information sheets, etc.) stress how even though donors do not give recipients actual babies, they do nevertheless facilitate new life because they increase recipients' chances for successful conception. In other words, notions of donating 'chances' and of making 'gifts of life' are clinical euphemisms for avoiding terms of interpersonal relatedness.

Chapter Four 118 What significantly is left out from this discourse, however, is the ways in which donors give 'gifts of life' and 'chances' as certain relations that they make. Typically donors would describe these gifts as 'personal', 'special', as things that 'come from the heart'. Some say that they feel they know the recipient 'intimately', and for most women it is important that these gifts carry some kind of specifically gendered aspect that passes productively between the women. This is narrated most explicitly by way of women's references to knowledges of mothering. These knowledges are kinds of presences, in the sense that they anticipate 'like' kinds of experiences that women, as persons who raise children, know about or do. Many donors make sense of, and empathise with what they imagine must be recipients difficult plight of getting through these stressful treatments with their necessarily uncertain outcomes. Partly this is because they draw upon their own experiences and knowledge bases - whether these are of repeated miscarriages, delayed conceptions, difficult pregnancies, or whether these amount to comments about the burdens and fulfilments of parenting. Presuming they can understand the trials and rewarding aspects of mothering, as though in some kind of sense this is a common kind of activity, is something that also finds expression in women's accounts of how they were 'synchronised' together as a donorrecipient pair during the treatment.

What is significant about women's descriptions of synchronisation, as opposed to the clinical discourses of being 'matched' as a same-set identical likeness (see chapter 2), is the way that women produce relations from out of their anonymised (non) identities. Women will say such things as: 'It's almost as though we've known each other for a long long time. We don't know each other, we don't know each other's names, but

Chapter Four 119 we know we're in hospital together at the same time'. Delia, for instance, remarks how she does not try and imagine what the recipient looks like or what she usually does. But, as she says indirectly, she does imagine that a kind of relation is set up through their 'synchronisations'.

Delia: I just try and imagine how she feels.. .you think of each other whatever the other will think. I feel that there's this link and you can really touch on it.

Fay's comments are typical for drawing out a sense of intimate relations from out of mutually unknown persons. She seems to feel that she knows the recipient intimately and that her gift enacts a 'personal' kind of extension of herself. She is also quite typical in that she does not think that these kinds of imagined connections amount to her making descriptively contradictory kinds of statements.

Fay: .Although I don't know who she is or what sort of background she comes from or anything like that - I don't actually know her personally - I feel as though I know her almost intimately. I'm giving something to her so she can have some of the happiness that I've had over the years...it's a personal thing to me - it's between me and the lady in question who is receiving., you're giving something to a particular person. Although you don't know who she is or what she looks like or what she does, you're giving to them personally from you to them.. .in my mind I just see them as people, as ladies who are having for whatever reason difficulties in becoming pregnant and just need that little extra kick to get them going, that's all they need, just a little bit of extra help...

Alice also talks about her gift as something that is 'woman to woman' and she too regards this as something 'personal' on the grounds that she is helping 'somebody'. The kinds of connections she draws upon touch upon 'similar experiences' which

Chapter Four 120 seem to relate to connections between the women, partly in terms of their similar status as (potential) mothers. Alice imagines how giving the gift would be like her receiving the gift; it would be as though she were having a baby, at the same time though differentiating donor from recipient in their abilities to make up 'part of a package'.

Alice: we've both been through similar experiences, except I'm giving and she's receiving. We're both part of a package where I'm the giver and she's the receiver and maybe because we're both women and I'm giving her something she hasn't got...! can imagine it quite well, I think, because I'm a woman and because I've had children and it must be just absolutely the best thing in the world... .because I suppose I imagine it to be me. .as myself.. and how I would feel. So I would imagine me receiving the gift and me taking it and me having a baby - it must be the most wonderful thing in the world.

These kinds of comments by Fay and Alice are part of a wider trajectory on the 'personal' nature of the gift which sees the gesture of donating as a kind of emotion of assistance. Fay's comment that 'I'm giving something to her so she can have some of the happiness that I've had over the years' brings together the way that children, as the potential 'gifts of life', are seen to embody past emotions which can be transferred as a means of making continuous kinds of connections between unknown persons. It is often in this kind of way that women refer to emotions as crosstransferable relations. Yet still the rhetoric remains abstruse because it is not grounded in actual persons or concrete relations.

From out of these rather vague descriptions, the metaphor of facilitation is drawn a little more sharply. Women talk about 'enabling' others not just to become pregnant,

Chapter Four 121 but to 'fulfil somebody else's life'. They describe how they 'give a helping hand' or offer help 'on the front line' in their capacity as a 'means to an end'. Stressing their abilities to assist, women would frequently refer to themselves as a 'means', or describe themselves as donating a 'way' or a 'method' of enablement. Gill, for instance, describes how 'what I did was almost like an exercise or routine. .1 am more of a method'. Sometimes such statements are contextualised as fairly concrete associations in terms of how women think they are making improvements and causing changes for the better. As Fay says: 'I particularly like helping others if it's going to help themselves. Give them that little something that's missing...they obviously want something so badly they're going to go to any lengths to get it'.

This theme of facilitation is closely allied to the metaphor of initiation. Fay expresses how she starts things off when she talks of 'that little extra kick to get them going'. Several women seem to want to think of themselves as some kind of originary point of new inception and growth, and at such moments their comments are suggestive for the way their actions eschew strictly biological procreations. The notion of being, as Alice says, 'part of a package' also informs some of these metaphors of initiation. In the following passage, Betty talks about 'starting things off' as a kind of 'joint effort' between herself and the recipient. To her this connotes some kind of source as a connection between them:

Betty: I think there's got to be something between us...! think there's got to be something because.. .because I gave my eggs to start things off and they continue the process so we've sort of made something that's been a joint effort even though I didn't have much to do with it. But without me, it wouldn't

Chapter Four 122 have been possible...there's got to be something between us...it's just. ..it's the most peculiar thing to try to explain...

But for Alice, Betty and other donors, notions of jointness do not constitute the commonality of a shared bio-genetic substance, but refer to shared actions and shared time during which the donor is thinking of herself as somebody who contributes a 'means' of facilitation. Donors, in this sense, make their body parts into practising parts of their persons, and it is these kinds of actions that constitute the 'time' of their gifts. Holly makes this quite clear when she refers to herself as a kind of distant support. She is active in a construction that is separate from the matter of her eggs as reproductive substance:

Holly: I've just helped part of the process along. I've sort of provided part of the scaffolding and somebody else is building the tower block. I've just provided the means for the pregnancy and as far as I'm concerned once my eggs have gone, then that's fine by me. You know they've gone and somebody else is using them.. .it was just an egg and I just helped get them started off...

She goes on to say how her assistance consists of adding an ingredient.

Holly: I just sort of started the process off, somebody else is doing the rest of it. The father will fertilise the egg, the woman will carry it, she'll do the bringing up of the child and whatever..! gave them to someone to use and that was the end of it ... And I just thought..perhaps I can just do a bit to put things...help things along without actually having to have another baby myself...just assist a bit by adding, you know, just adding in one of the crucial ingredients, really...

In this way, Holly describes herself as a kind of frame for others' constructions. She

Chapter Four 123 imagines herself to be busy assembling something when she provides part of the scaffolding, but it is somebody else who goes on to make the tower block: it is the recipient who brings the child to life. To take up an earlier analogy from medical discourse, Holly's reproductive body parts cannot be said to belong to a 'warehouse', since her eggs only have efficacy because she actively produces the support as the transformative actions for another. Like many other donors, she confusingly couches aspects of her rhetoric in traditional procreative idioms of 'adding' (in the sense of bio-genetic substance) in order simply to stress how the 'jointness' she envisages is not comprised of the physicality of an actual procreative presence, but one of a kind of detached continuity between herself and another. Though this notion of 'adding in a crucial ingredient sounds genetically informed, Holly does not mean to say that her gift is the transmission of her own genetical characteristics.

Like so many other women, she is at pains to stress how her embodied form of absence comprises a practice of intimate disconnection. It is absences that pass and circulate between them as 'special' and 'personal' feelings. The connections Holly 'shares' with her recipients are the connections of not knowing each other, and a vital part of the tie that makes this into a form of relatedness is the recognition that this constitutes kinds of relations of non-relations. Donors partly find a way of expressing this when they refer to themselves as 'methods' and 'routines', highlighting how it is what they do that creates the substance of their interactions, rather than the substance of a once interiorised body part.

Chapter Four 124 Remote parenting

Distant connections

The previous section considered how women think of themselves as 'methods' of enablement. By deploying various metaphors of assistance women provide a commentary on how their donated eggs - as their detached body parts - are not the physicalised parts of their bodies. It is now possible to clarify further the context in which women stress that 'their' exteriorised substance is something that does not come from their bodies, and to show how this is not simply a contradiction or ambivalent position on these women's part, but rather the effect of attempting to articulate new kinds of relations for which no existing discourse is obviously ready to hand.

When Gill describes how she has been more of a 'method' than anything else, she also goes on to say how she does not think of the eggs 'as eggs'. Many women say that the eggs are not 'the actual thing'; that they are not 'like a physical thing' or that they 'haven't come from my body'. Emma for instance comments how: 'I don't think the eggs are mine, they're not something physical that they're my eggs. I don't even think of them as eggs'. Many women seem to be trying to create a non-biological context as the basis for a different originary environment for these sources of life. Sometimes this is expressed as though the substance of the egg is not a 'human thing'. For instance, a few women would draw analogies to, say, 'chicken's eggs', or would stress how the egg has no particularly privileged status as a reproductive capacity of the body: 'they are just like a fingernail or something.. .they are just a normal part, like

Chapter Four 125 any other part' (Gill). However, when women try to de-contextualise eggs from bodies, their discourse becomes quite muddled precisely because they bring together different conceptions of relatedness that do not fit with a genetical discourse of substance as common biological ties.

Even within same sentences, women will comment that the egg is not 'a living thing' nor 'a living part of me', but that it is still a 'gift of life'. Or they will comment that the eggs are something 'special' though they are just a 'bundle of cells', or 'just a very little part of me'. These different formulations relate to conceptions of persons as separated and distant proximities, and women seem to be formulating, in quite an incipient manner of speech, how the connection between them is not the biological egg that is given and received. In the following passage, Ivy equivocates between eggs that are special and personal, and eggs that are just a bundle of cells:

Ivy: it's something very special - it's a little bundle of cells really and that's literally all it is, it's just a bundle of cells but that bundle of cells can bring so much joy, it's unreal. This tiny minute microscopic thing can produce so much happiness and everything else.. Again you're giving something to them that is going to help them in their life.., it's very difficult to explain unless you've actually done it...I was talking to a couple of friends of mine who've done it and when we get together we chat about it - they do it for another hospital outside London - and we get together and we discuss what happened and how we felt and we all get very similar feelings.., the fact that it is a feeling that you get so deep down that they're hard to explain. They are so personal... you'll share them.

Ivy is describing the inconsequential nature of the egg as a biological substance. Partly she conveys this with her comment that the egg is a 'tiny microscopic thing', and she

Chapter Four 126 goes on to substantiate this when she talks of the 'happiness' that the egg, as her gifted body part, can produce as kinds of interactions she has instigated. The substance she gives is not a personalised part of her own biological body, but it is a personal thing she has done. When Ivy and others say how the egg is not the connection between them, they nevertheless also want to convey how the body parts they make symbolise mutual connections between strangers. What becomes difficult for them to formulate are the terms by which they can make distinctions between 'the egg' as physicalised substance on the one hand, and the part of their persons that the egg represents as a type of action and interaction on the other. In the following excerpts women start to formulate, though only very implicitly, how they are drawing kinds of distinctions between body parts as bio-genetic substance on the one hand, and body parts as the extensional parts of their persons on the other.

Betty tries to re-contextualise eggs by positioning them as things that do not come from an interior locus. What she gives is not 'the thing inside':

Betty: I do see it as a gift. Almost like if you closed your eyes and imagined it, this egg would be irrelevant. It would be a big box of bows I'm giving her. I don't see it as the thing inside. I just see it as me giving something to her that's going to enrich her life. It's just a very little part of me which is adding to her happiness. I don't think of it - I don't know why - in terms of a child. It's just my way of giving somebody what she really wants in life.

Other women comment that they donate a way of somebody having a child rather than themselves donating half a child, and one way women describe such substance is in terms of the notion of 'cutting off'. Sometimes women say they cut off from the eggs

Chapter Four 127 after the donation, and sometimes they will stress quite the opposite, precisely in order to affirm how there was never anything in the first place to cut off from, since, by inference, substance given has not been given as a bio-genetical part of their persons.

In both these passages Betty and Alice alternately refer to 'cutting' and 'not cutting off'. Despite this difference, they are both speaking a common language characterised by non-possessive claims to persons marked by this shift from a genetical register of speech.

Betty: ...to be perfectly honest I tend just to cut off once I've donated and then I just started thinking in January, well maybe somebody has had a baby that I just helped things along a little bit with. But apart from that no, I just kind of.. almost like I'd switched off. I did it...passed the eggs on and then it was over...

Alice: After I had donated I didn't feel like: "oh it's gone and I'm empty now". Like maybe you'd lost a baby or anything like that. I don't think I've given away a baby, I don't think it's anything like adoption... I felt like it was more of a continuation of a high where I was passing on this feeling and these eggs onto the women who were going to get my eggs. ..there was no sort of cut off like: "they've taken my eggs away. Bang. That's it".

When donors use idioms like cutting off, switching off, or when they use expressions like 'that's the end of it', their rhetoric slips into a kind of partial defense of what they have previously referred to as the 'personal' nature of the gifts/donation. These kinds of claims can be seen to reinforce their views that they have no automatic rights to, or claims over, their donated substance. Emma and Gill's earlier comments, for

Chapter Four 128 instance, that: 'I don't think the eggs are mine, they're not something physical that they're my eggs. I don't even think of them as eggs', and 'I didn't even think of the eggs as eggs, it's not like a physical thing...it hasn't come from my body', brings together many women's conceptions of non-ownership with the non-physicalised nature of substance. Donors make it quite clear that they think of themselves as having no a priori claim over the substance they donate, firstly by stressing how the eggs are not 'mine', nor how the eggs represent 'my child'. This comes to the fore when women talk about recipients as persons who actively make 'their' (donated) body parts into the body parts of their (the recipient's) personhood. In this context, women start to talk a language of agency, pointing out how it is other women, the recipients, who will transform their once interiorised eggs into moments of new growth. Relatedly, none of the donors taking part in this research considered themselves as the biological mothers to these donated eggs.

In the following passage, Jean talks about how she imagines herself as a recipient of donated eggs, and she is makes the point that she does not think she would feel any different were she to conceive a child from someone else's eggs.

Jean: I don't honestly think that I would feel any different if I had a child from a donor egg than actually having my own. It is all basically to do with how much you love the child, how much time you spend with it, what you do to involve the child. That is how I would be if I had a child from a donor. I wouldn't look at it that it is someone else's child. It's not. It's grown in me for nine months, so it's mine. I don't know what the egg looks like...but once that has left me and it is fertilised and it goes into somebody else, it is their body that is doing the work with that egg, not mine. They are making it. They are making it form and everything. It all comes from her.

Chapter Four 129 Kate also emphasises how the recipient produces the donated body part she has given by transforming it into the recipient's time, namely into the work, the process of feeding that is her experience of gestation. As a donor, she does not see herself as the biological mother of what the recipient does. In this case, Kate equates the substance of genes as simply the flash of a moment's conception.

Kate: The actual conception is just a chemical reaction. It's the actual growth of that child inside you, and it's feeding from your body and you're feeding from your body into it to make it grow.. .not chemistry, not the genes.. .because they're already there, not the chromosomes, because they're already there. But actually you (emphasis original). Your body is nourishing making the chemical reaction able to grow into a child. So you must think it's yours. And I think it would be very difficult for any woman to say: "well, I was just the incubator: biologically it's got nothing to do with me. I just sat there and watched it, you know, watched it extend my stomach and then it came out'. And so it doesn't actually matter whether it's biologically hers or not. It's just that the child has been reared inside her...

These two examples point to the way women donors imagine relations of exchange with recipients, not in terms of relations constituted through the substance of the ovum, but rather in terms of the processes of reproduction they make between them.

Neither inalienable nor forgettable

The previous section showed how it was not a question of locating ova in terms of the donor's natural proprietorship in her body/body parts. Ova represented (re)productive substances that could not be valued in terms of the ownership of the person, and so the question of whose eggs these are, came to be replaced discursively with a vaguely

Chapter Four 130 formulated rhetoric. Nonetheless, it is possible to glean from these rhetorical styles how donors are preoccupied with what they do to these substances as they go about making them into theirs and others' free circulating body parts. Yet although donors comment that they are not the owners of this donated substance, there is still a sense in which these parts are being shared between the women. As a preamble to asking what kind of relatedness this 'sharing' denotes, this section starts to anticipate what kind of sharing is taking place in terms of the 'substance' of anonymity (see chapter 8).

One theme that starts to emerge from conceptions of substance as a-genetical, is the notion of not forgetting. Women seem to be saying that they do not forget how, in a certain sense, they are not the creative co-producers of these exteriorised body parts. This theme is not explicitly developed by interviewees, partly because it represents quite an obvious departure from notions of 'cutting off' mentioned earlier. Generally, women would introduce notions of remembering and time quite discreetly, and my impression was that this was because these kinds of conceptions, along with many others, were ones that had not been worked out beforehand as conscious kinds of thoughts. Speech was partial and fragmented and it is difficult to do justice to this quality of narrative here. The following three passages try to convey how notions of continuity would come into play.

Lucy, Fay and Meena are all describing how something about the experience of donation does not leave their person. In Lucy's case, this becomes manifest through her notion of ex-donors who form a 'club' of what she calls 'elite persons'. Women

Chapter Four 131 who join are automatically life members, she thinks, because what they have done is something that stays with them for life.

Lucy: ...it's something you've done in your life and it would be like saying: well, after a year you've got to do it again. But that doesn't happen because you've done it once and it's always with you, so therefore you will always know you've done it - but other people might not. But you will always know you've done it and that makes you a life member. All the time you think about it and you remember doing it, then your membership stays in force....I know I'm a member, so I don't need a card. I know. It's just something you know you've done.

Lucy feels that donation endows her with a special knowledge: through this imaginary projection of a social collectivity, she manages to invest herself with something for life. Significantly, her 'club' is comprised of persons who have 'done' similar kinds of actions to herself. It is through these kinds of relations with other unknown persons, that she makes something known to herself: she realises that she has acted, at some time previously, in an anonymous capacity.

When Fay brings to mind the imaginary scenario of bumping into a recipient on the street, she talks in quite a different way to Lucy about how she can establish some sense of continuity from her gift productions. For Fay, it is not important that a woman she crosses fortuitously in the street should happen to be the same recipient that she once assisted in the past. She just would like to meet 'a' recipient and find out whether things turned out well. Like Lucy, Fay is also talking about making kinds of knowledges from her actions, and in this passage she is talking about how she would like to know whether what she has done has made some kind of difference to

Chapter Four 132 someone, whoever and wherever that person might be.

Fay: I would love to go up to the person, I would really and truly love to go up say in three or four years time and meet the person I gave to and say: "well, fantastic!" Whether or not to know it's my child or whether they knew or not I'm a donor - just to bump into somebody on the street and say: "well I had donor eggs and this is the child" - great stuff because there's a chance it could have been mine - it could have been somebody else's, but the feeling is always there - at the end of the day you would love to meet a person and say to them: "all the best, I hope it all goes well for you". Not to say to them: "that's my child - I've given something that.." But to turn around and say to them: "well I hope it works and all the best and if it doesn't work get them to give me a shout and we'll try again".

For Fay, 'the feeling is always there' as well as the admission that she does not have a connection with the child, or a connection with a specific recipient. As she says, the point is not to be able to claim: 'that's my child'. What matters to her, instead, is that she has been a successful 'method', that her 'scaffolding' has assisted somebody, and if not, then to let it be known that she is willing to help out again. These notions presage other donors' conceptions about a kind of generalised circulation and continuing distribution of relatedness taking place across and between unknown persons - a kind of relatedness that is never finally fixed and nowhere permanently anchored 'in' a particularised relation as a single person.

When Meena talks about something that does not leave her, she mixes up notions of the genetical and the a-genetical by conflating the extrinsic with something that once was 'housed', or once contained. Instead of the social space of an imaginary club, Meena refers to her body here in order to convey how, like Emma, the eggs that are

Chapter Four 133 in transit from her body do not actually come from 'my body'.

Meena: • . .they are more mine when they are in my tummy - afterwards they are mine in a different way, I suppose. They once belonged to me, but afterwards once they are transplanted they are the other parents... .they once belonged to... I mean a house. Once you sell it, it's not yours anymore. That's yours when you're living in it - which is the same as - like I said - once the eggs are in your tummy then they are definitely yours. Once you give them a different home, then they're not my eggs....but there will always be a part of me that still thinks they belong to me...

Though Meena uses the term 'belong', it is arguable that she wants to convey by this a sense of possessive ownership of her body in her person. 'They are mine in a different way', she says, and the extent to which this 'different way' departs from a naturalised ownership of her body parts only becomes clearer when situated within the overall context of her account. Notions of 'belonging' are best seen as a kind of rhetorical slippage that re-occur throughout these accounts precisely because notions of substance as purely bio-genetic are in the process of being symbolically reconfigured. The blending together of idioms of 'cutting off' with the 'personal' was shown earlier to be another such moment of slippage, and as suggested previously, resonances of the genetic are likely to appear as residual moments in the re-staging of substance as forms of interaction between persons. What Meena perhaps does mean by the expression 'belong' is taken up again in the next chapter when she makes comparisons with forms of sharing back home in India.

When donors intimate such things as they will 'always know they've done [this]', or that 'the feeling is always there', they are not referring to the gift as something that

Chapter Four 134 is inalienable. The gift may appear as such - as though it either never leaves the person of the donor, or simply returns back to her - but the mechanism of 'return' in these cases is symbolically mediated by the ways in which a person's donated and multiple body parts circulate in space and time as a part of her agency. 'Feelings that are always there' are neither inalienable nor alienable from the donor, since the kind of person who makes her body into an anonymised relation for another's activation, is a person who acts intersubjectively: for instance, as a 'method' of the self extending in and through an other's 'self /'selves'. These agents, then, are not discrete persons who can have something returned to their person. This is on account of the way that they do not represent a single or separate social entity, but are anonymised and thus constituted for the way that they and their body parts circulate socially as the detachable, multiple and extendible 'parts' of their agency.

No ties, no commitment....

The way in which these feelings do not get reproduced as, for instance, 'relations of dependency' taken from a reciprocal model of gifting, becomes clearer when these kinds of continuities are seen as the intimate exchanges of no ties and no commitment. As well as talking about feelings that are 'always there', many donors within their same narrated accounts, also talk about how donation involves 'no responsibility'. This ties up with certain of their notions that after donation, 'that's the end of it' (the theme of genetical cut-off), and also with their preference not to have any kind of parenting involvement in the raising of a child born from donated eggs. Many women will say they want to donate anonymously because 'there's no attachment'. One donor,

Chapter Four 135 for instance, comments how:

Jean: there's nothing, there's no attachment. And I'd much rather it that way. I don't mind helping anybody with the donating, but I don't want to know the child, see the child. I don't want to know all the ins and outs...how it's doing. I don't want that...

Another also refers to her preference not to have to have actual contact with the child.

Emma: They've [eggs] gone now. I've passed them to her and I've got nothing with it - no ties, nothing. Why not help somebody else?

In the sense that many women seem to be saying that these 'no tie' relations offer them a sense of creating a space of relationality that is free, informal and not bounded by obligation, these diversions from 'attachment' constitute relations of intimate absences, if not relations built from new kinds of practices of love. Many women seem to gain a rewarding sense of achievement from this critical distance, and on certain occasions I had the impression that some women could even imagine they were recreating or re-ordering existing familial ties. Some women talked about commitments and constrictions in domestic space, or of feeling invisibilised by partners or friends; some talked about difficulties regarding the division of labour in the household, and with some women, avoidance of intimate physical contact with partners was also introduced as a sub-text framing their accounts.

Chapter Four 136 The work of donation

Though donors are not confirmed as agents making changes in the wider social domain, many women do say how they think they have become 'special' kinds of persons through their donations. The notion of women as 'special' works idiomatically at several different, and often overlapping, levels of discourse.

Women 's time

Women would frequently talk of themselves as 'special' in relation to describing how donating was their 'own thing'. Usually they would stress how these donations were something that only women could do; that donation was one's own personal 'decision', or as Cathy puts it, a 'celebration that I am a woman...it's something that men can't do and we can'. Or some women would comment as to how donation is the 'turning point of me knowing that I could do something like that on my own' (Holly). Like other women, Holly makes a point of mentioning how donation is something for which she will not first require somebody else's consent. Holly: ...the fact of knowing that I did it afterwards. It's boosted my confidence, made me.. helped me get stronger - that might have been the turning point, of actually going there and going on my own and doing it. I had many people saying to me they would take me there and they would come with me and my husband said: "I'll hold your hand, I'll come with you" - I said: "no, I'm airight on my own", and I think that might have been the turning point of me knowing that I could do something like that on my own.

Some women further stress that donating is something they knew they absolutely had to do; it was, some said, a kind of 'commitment'. Some of the women had already

Chapter Four 137 donated their eggs several times, and explained how they intended to make repeat donations as frequently as possible, usually at six monthly intervals, until reaching the upper age limit of thirty five set by most clinics. As Ivy says, it is something that she feels committed towards getting done, and something that she anticipates getting ready to do. Ivy: I know when my time is coming up, when the six months is drawing near...it's a commitment, something I have put on myself...doing what you said you would do long after the mood that you had said it in has left you.. .1 really feel a commitment to these women.

I mentioned earlier how donors would tend not to stress the involved nature of donating, particularly downplaying the temporal aspects of the programme. In certain contexts, however, rather different views came to the fore. When, for instance, women drew comparisons to men's donations of sperm, they would usually differentiate the kinds of 'gifts' they gave in terms of how donation had involved considerable amounts of their time. Whilst men, they thought, could simply go into a room and come out again in a matter of minutes holding a sample of semen and calling this their 'gift', women made a different kind of donation. They were, they said, involved in a process that involved them re-organising their time: they had to travel to the clinic, make alternative child-care arrangements, make time for the monitoring and administration of injections. As some women remarked, they had to structure their days around this 'donating' time for many weeks. Nevertheless such observations do not in general provide the narrative focus of their various accounts, and comments about investing their time are noticeably tangential to the main drift of donation as something easy, quick, untroublesome and 'natural' that they knew they could do.

Chapter Four 138 Many women also say how they had felt that their 'minds had not been able to rest' until after the donation, or as Emma puts it, the prospect of donating was like having a 'bee in my bonnet...almost like a fixation'. These kinds of thoughts seem to be related partly to many women's feelings that donation was something that they expected they would be able to carry out successfully, and partly to the way they could feel important and worthwhile through these actions. Lucy says for instance, that 'it's something that you feel deep down...! mean I've never picked up a newspaper in my life and said: 'I can do this. This is what I want to do. It really was as easy as that. Ijust read the article and! knew I can do this, I want to do this'. One dominant image of personal worth and heightened self-esteem concurs around ideas of undertaking work, of women thinking of themselves fulfilling some kind of occupation.

Delia and Betty both talk about donation as a kind of 'important job'. Delia, who donates at regular intervals, explains how donation is not a hobby or ongoing pasttime, but something more structured and involved. Comparing herself to her husband who works as a bank manager, she comments as to how her sense of identity is tied up with the knowledge she has the ability to donate such substance to others. Delia: It's what I do. !t's almost like an occupation. Like what I do. I'm inbetween now. But as soon as my fifth month is up, I shall be there again and I literally sort of work everything around it. I'm a housewife first I suppose, but I'm also an egg donor. That's one of the things that I do.

In contrast to the versions of 'the donating body' discussed earlier, modelled on clinical bodies and 'borrowed' strategically by women as their way of stressing the

Chapter Four 139 ease and naturalness whereby their persons can make cultural kinds of 'achievements' through donations, Delia is saying here how her gift is a process structured in terms of time. Moreover, it is a process structured with regards to her re-deployment of the time she normally has available to her. When she ceases to explain what her body has to do in terms of the medical regime of drug administration, and explains how she acts as somebody engaged in her 'important job', Delia begins a narrative of how 'everything had to be moved out of the way': Delia: It takes up a lot of time. You can't go away because you have to be having your injections. There were things like last time I had to give up my exercise classes. I had to stop my riding lessons. One of my children missed her 'tumble-time' playgroup because that was the only time they could fit me in for injections, so she missed it. Everything had to be moved out of the way.

She also looks ahead to the time when she will be too old to donate which seems to her as though she would be 'retired'. Betty also draws analogies to the work of donation saying that she knew it would be something she would be good at, and that like a 'career', she could go 'full blast ahead' with this, 'launching myself properly into it'. Her sense of progressing forth with her career seems to be based not just on the likely knowledge that nothing would be wrong with the quality of her donated eggs, but because, as she stresses, 'it was from me and nobody else was involved'.

Acquiring 'fame' and making changes

This notion of donation as exclusive action emerges as a predominant theme throughout and it interlinks with notions mentioned earlier regarding women's conceptions of autonomy. Women see donation as a way of separating themselves

Chapter Four 140 from others, that is, of making themselves different. Partly this is because women imagine themselves to be doing something of an 'other' time, and partly it has to do with the way this time is figured as taking place in an 'other' and separate kind of spatial arena: a space that represents the possibilities of 'other' processually enacted 'ties' and other 'enduring' 'commitments' the women are commonly familiar with on a daily basis.

The theme of exclusivity and of needing to be separate so as to constitute oneself as an agent comes partially to light through women's descriptions of themselves as more powerful, more confident, and better persons. Many women would stress such things as deriving a newly found sense of purpose in life, and some seemed to feel as though they had been re-born or were going on to start life afresh.

In the following excerpt Alice explains how donation makes her feel a better woman, and though she mentions a prior hysterectomy as a contributory cause to her sense of a 'lost' identity, she intimates how she exerts choice as the extensions of her many metaphorical 'growths'. Alice: I think it was terribly important that the first time I donated it was something I could do again, but also something - I had lost my sense of identity over the years bringing up three children - probably feeling under the weather and then going to have quite a big operation, well, the hysterectomy. I think I had lost myself and my donating was bringing me back to me again. And I didn't need to ask permission from my husband ... and it was something that I could do.. and I went to London. I went and had the injections, you know, I did it... it was for me... And they said at the clinic: "well did you tell your husband?" Not till he got home and I had written the letter by then. And I said: "I am going to do this, I'm definitely going to do this".

Chapter Four 141 She goes on to say: It wasn't daunting, no - and I think I've grown with it, I've grown with the clinic as it's got bigger. It was smaller before - I've grown with it... probably my whole life apart from the egg donation ... yes and then I've had all the media coverage. But then I've also personally gone on and got a job, I've learnt to drive, so it's like a whole procedure of my life. A lot of things happened from there... it was like a new opening, a new me, so it led to an awful lot more things and even personally probably gave me a lot more confidence. And again, I think it was very important it was something I could do for me. I wasn't mum, or the wife of....you know, this is something special I could do for me. .Yes, I was doing this for me, not for.. .obviously the end result was for somebody else but that procedure was for me. Some women say I've got to talk to my husband before I do this. Well it's my body, it's my eggs, they're my eggs. I'm entitled to do with them what I wish (emphasis added).

Delia likewise associates donation with a renewed or 'other' sense of identity, mentioning also how she has made a 'new direction'. What in her case seems to be 'new' is the distinctiveness of not being taken for granted, of not being symbolically overlooked by family and friends. Stepping out of her conditioned roles, she imagines how donating makes her into an 'other' person, and ceasing to think of herself solely as a nagging mother and wife, she imagines how she could be a celebrity or royal with a high profile, public identity. What generally is being envisioned with these associations is how women could elevate themselves; how they could make themselves into heightened social figures rising symbolically as 'famous' kinds of persons.

Delia: I am a lot more confident. .aware of other people. .1 feel special, important, useful, it's given me a purpose.. it's a new direction..I'm not taken for granted ...It gives me more than what it takes out of me. I just feel so good about it. I can't really explain it, I do. I feel that I'm a better person, it's done so much for me, for my confidence and like being on television, I wouldn't have believed it. I've been in a magazine now - I think it's quite funny really that all these people find me so interesting that they want to talk to me but you know all I want to do out of it is get more donors ....I've become quite a

Chapter Four 142 celebrity. I felt like a queen.. .makes you feel so special. .instead of being a mum making people do things they don't want to do or a wife who is always nagging. .here I felt like number one, the top dog.. .this made me feel so special - normally I don't feel like I'm doing anything..I couldn't wait to donate again..because at last I am doing something for me ...it's a sense of achievement..it's something I am good at, it's worthwhile and special, it's something I'm proud of, something other - other than just being a housewife.. .before I had the children I was working: I had a sense of status, I was quite well paid, then the babies came along and you have to learn how to look after them...it's so easy to put yourself down (emphasis added).

Many women would voice such kinds of ideas, although usually talking in more prosaic terms with regards to how they thought of donating as instigating a reversal of their usual status in the home. As imaginary kinds of social elevations and forms of prestige, such 'reversals' were always modelled in terms of imagining certain altered relations between persons, in particular how women reckoned their identities could be intersubjectively (re)affirmed and (re)acknowledged by others - usually immediate kin. Delia imagines how she becomes a 'number one, top dog' in contrast to her (otherwise) less well recognised status as mother and housewife; a social position she knows only too well for the ease with which, she says, you can 'put yourself down', and in one regard she speaks for many donors with her observation that: '..it's something I'm proud of, something other - other than just being a housewife.. .before I had the children I was working: I had a sense of status, I was quite well paid, then the babies came along and you have to learn how to look after them...it's so easy to put yourself down'.

These are quite typical kinds of descriptions of some of the ways women see donating as making them feel better about themselves. Consistent throughout are the associations between feeling confident and important with doing something for

Chapter Four 143 themselves ('for me') and by themselves ('on my own'). Alice regards doing something 'for me' as something 'special' because of the way that she imagines she extends herself as other than the mother and wife of somebody else. Like Holly, for whom donation is the 'turning point of me knowing that I could do something like that on my own', Alice points out how donation is something for which she will not require her husband's consent. In connection with this, she talks of gaining a sense of independence, and repeatedly refers to herself throughout her account by her first name, conveying also how donation is like a kind of 'a new opening, a new me'. Some women, more rarely, make quite explicit kinds of references to acquiring increased power. Notions like achieving 'gold stars' or feeling a 'boost to the ego' are common enough, but ideas of 'playing god' and 'controlling something', though often a sub-text to several accounts, are narrated somewhat more coyly. Nonetheless, themes of aggrandisement, power and social elevations seem to be a persistent backdrop to women's notions of imagining themselves as 'special', and in their way, these conceptions constitute a localised version of women's discourse of 'making more', as contrasted with the medical discourse of 'the donating body' comprised of naturally 'intrinsic' body substance.

Donors made 'more' from out of themselves not only because they multiplied parts of themselves. They also heightened themselves in a symbolic order of ascension. It is in relation to other 'someone's' that women make themselves 'special', and it is within this context that Delia's earlier quoted statement on donation as something that 'gives me more than what it takes out of me' needs to be framed.

Chapter Four 144 The mediumship of 'someone'

Though donors do not have their actions reflected back to them from an exterior source, they do pass metaphorically 'through' several persons and they thereby do make relations as the parts of 'others' bodies. A recurrent idiom of women's metaphors of assistance are the notions of 'playing a part', 'making a contribution', and of thinking that one is 'doing my bit'. Women would say how they feel they are doing a positive act, some mentioning that this was a 'good cause' and 'good for mankind'. Notions of philanthropy and acting for the social good would be articulated sometimes as the desire to 'improve the world', and a few women occasionally would draw analogies to missionary work overseas or to the supply of aid to developing countries. Sometimes it would seem as though women actually were thinking of themselves as the missionaries they described. Nancy, for instance, conflates the actions of a missionary with her own social 'mission', and along with Kate's comments, these kinds of notions constitute examples of women making interventions as agents in relation to others: Nancy: I feel I've played a very important part in people's lives, just as an important part as my own family. I can help these people, I've got the power to help these women, and I want to help them. That's what all these nuns who are going to Africa - that's what they're doing. They've got the power to help these children. It's their mission in life and I suppose this is my mission.

Kate: ...You realise that you can actually help another woman and that you can actually do something. Like you see starving people in Cambodia or wherever, and then you think if I really did feel strongly about it, I could help, like people becoming missionaries and helping. I just decided that this was something that I could actively do which could possibly achieve a happy ending.

Chapter Four 145 Yet the kinds of persons they imagine themselves to be helping are not persons who are sketched out as bodies of definable substance. The others they want to help do not have names, nor can they even be attributed with particular social characteristics. Gill comments how she is just doing this 'for eggless women in general', and some of the statements considered previously in the section on metaphors of assistance concerned the ways in which helping was taking place intersubjectively as the desire to assist a 'somebody' ('I had a strong wish just to help somebody and I gave them from me to whoever' (Ivy); I'm just glad that I could do it and hopefully give somebody a chance of having a baby' (Gill); 'I go through this because somebody is going to benefit from it in the end so hopefully some good will come out of it' (Emma) and Holly spoke of her role in erecting the scaffolding as helping 'somebody else to build the tower block'. As Nancy says: Nancy: It's very hard for me to get anything into my mind about... I don't picture this woman with a pram or anything... was just donating my eggs to somebody who for whatever reason was unable to use their own... and I didn't actually think about who they were, what they did... I didn't think about who...

One of the most striking features of very many women's speech is this consistent referencing to 'somebody' and 'someone': to persons who are 'somewhere' or 'out there'. This in turn seems to bear upon why so many of the metaphors women deploy seem at times rather vague, or else appear to be formulated rather incoherently as rhetorical styles of discourse. Yet, it is precisely by means of such loosely formulated and generalised 'someones' that women will go on to articulate a discourse about their persons as extensional: about how 'a bit of me is floating about', or how women imagine themselves to be living on 'through' others with 'a bit of myself somewhere

Chapter Four 146 else'.

Conclusions

Systematic questioning on the subject of what donors think they are giving to recipients shows that women do not see their donated eggs as innate bodily or biogenetic substance.

Women's conceptions of their body parts as donated substance also reveals how many donors reformulate the mainstream discourse of anonymity, thereby fashioning anonymous identities for themselves that are not equivalent with the same shared substances depicted by the medicalised version of 'the donating body'. This contrasts with the genetically informed matching procedures undertaken at clinics whereby donor and recipient exchanges are modelled on the sharing of decontextualised traits as though these constitute biological likenesses between persons (chapter 2). Although donors appear to conform to the medical version of the donating body when they comment on the 'natural' ease with which they can offer assistance to other women, they are less willing to accept the taboo of anonymity when this prevents them from knowing the outcome of their actions.

Many women would talk of their disappointment at not having some idea of the outcome of their donation. In one sense, women feel that they, and the project of donation represents an unfinished enterprise because of the uncertainty surrounding whether or not children have resulted from their ova. As one woman puts it, when she

Chapter Four 147 describes how she received a 'thank-you' card from a recipient via the hospital: 'I just got this card and it's like so confirming that there is somebody out there. You know you're beaming all this stuff to Mars and getting a reply'. Delia's feeling that there is somebody out there is precisely about the acknowledgement she receives from an exterior confirming source: what is being 'beamed back' is the knowledge that her actions have had some constructive effect - for herself and for somebody else. As other women say when they comment on what it would be like not even to know how many eggs were collected from their ovaries, 'it's like having a gold star after doing really good work', or 'you want something to show for it'.

As has been argued in the preceding passages, it is not the case that women want to establish concrete relationships with the recipients or with the children born from the donations. They simply want to know if something has been achieved by them and by the recipient - whether a tower block has taken shape from their scaffolding.

Yet the way in which women's discourses both concur with and differ from that of the donating body of medical discourse opens up, firstly, the nature of women's multiple productions and reveals the points of fracture along which these bodies and persons appear ostensibly as 'natural'. Secondly it shows how it is in terms of the extrication of these plural and multiple bodies, only notionally alike, that different women's 'persons', as agents, emerge in terms of the relations they thereby constitute. Although it is difficult for women to articulate how they imagine they produce themselves and others as a shared 'part', donors are able to draw on conceptions of time - usually quite unconsciously - as a way of describing how they make extensions

Chapter Four 148 of their person, and as a way of re-defining what a genetic part of their person stands for.

Women donors therefore may be seen as agents in terms of how they enact multiple versions of their bodies, which has been discussed here primarily in terms of how reproductive substance is 'shared' transmissively between donors and recipients without entailing the ascription of ties as innate bonds of blood. With no sense of a biological tie or social commitment, women experience connections with each other as the unfolding of intimacies at a distance. This seems to create impressions of a remote, free and unbounded 'kinship' divorced from any anticipated obligations towards or rights in persons. This is corroborated by the unanimous and unprompted consensus among informants that donors neither desire, nor think they possess, any maternal privileges or claims over the offspring they may help to create. Finally, this form of extended reproduction of the self across multiple persons shows the inappropriateness of conceptualising genealogies in terms of the mutually exclusive criteria of absence or presence.

1. For critiques of the interior anatomy analogue of the person whereby 'inner body' is cast as symbolically equivalent to 'nature' and the related conflation whereby genitals stand as signs of reproductive capacity, see Errington 1990; Laqueur 1990. 2. Much of this kind of medical propaganda seems to be in line with Emily Martin's (1987) suggestion that scientific constructions of female reproductive capacity are borne out in terms of the intrinsically 'faulty design' that is representative of the category of 'woman'. The financial revenue such 'badly designed' bodies reap for the medico-scientific industries perpetuating this image provides for one strand of feminist critique.

CHAPTER FIVE

Parthenogenesis and intercommunity life Contents

Agency, extension and intersubjective spacetime

Donors and 'vistas of circulation':

Odelle. genes by proxy Penny: relations as ripple effects Rita: donating adoption Meena: pardon and renewal Conclusions Delia and Fay: spacetimes and renewal

Conclusions

Chapter Five 150 In this chapter the focus shifts to the ways in which these detachable parts represent body parts as a part of persons-in-the-process-of-transformations, and the impossible question of asking just whose body or bodies these parts can be said to be a part 'of is posed. This leads to a consideration of how substance may be shared as the multiple circulations between persons who are not consanguineally related. Before considering how these symbolic transformations are mediated by anonymity, and what kinds of social relations these mediations constitute, the following sections consider how some women regard themselves as giving life 'through' themselves and 'through' others, and in what kind of sense this is, as Jean remarks, an extension that 'confirms that a part of me is being continued in somebody else'. The following case studies are each concerned with how body parts circulate as the extendible parts of women's nonbiological persons, and with how these parts keep living on through multiple others over time. It will be shown once again how women appear to conflate genetical and a-genetical notions of substance when they make these kinds of connections, though this time the analysis will take as its starting point the ways in which women's narratives about bodies, body parts and individuals are articulated through narratives concerning body parts, families and generations as collective kinds of linkages.

Agency, extension, and intersubjective spacetime

Nancy Munn is one thinker who has been concerned with developing an account of how persons as agents circulate spatially, and over time, as embodied kinds of values. In her ethnography of inter-island hospitality and food transmission for the Gawan

Chapter Five 151 peoples of Papua New Guinea (Munn 1992b), she examines how the symbolic dimensions of value confirm particular social images of the partners/transactors concerned.

Munn's argument is that food, and its deployment as a medium of inter-island hospitality, represents the processual value of spatiotemporal transformations (of the self) because of the way that it can be converted into fame. Food is converted into fame as an extrabodily component of the self because it extends beyond the immediate person of the donor. It is simultaneously converted into fame because it is the means by which the Gawan island projects itself within the wider world of the Massim inter-island community, thereby creating itself as 'the agent of its own value creation' (20). In this way the island and its peoples act out the implicit belief that they produce kinds of externalisations of themselves beyond themselves.

Alternatively, the act of consuming food may come to acquire symbolic meaning as acts of an unproductive and self-focused kind, symbolically suggestive of a 'selfish' person. Remarking on the descriptive label for a greedy person as 'one who eats', Munn suggests that retentions of the self are personally registered as corporeal effects because a consuming body is one that is held back, as opposed to one released outwards to others (49). This association reveals one way in which Gawan notions of personhood are premised on forms of social actions and the social relations constitutive of these actions, as opposed to the ontological primacy of the self in the western canon.

Chapter Five 152 By such transformations, Munn conveys how persons extend themselves spatially and temporally as the metonymical value of themselves, and her ethnography is suggestive for the interpretation it makes of fame as a symbolic operationalisation of these values. To the Gawan way of life, fame is effected as a series of subjective transformations of intersubjective relations developed by the author in terms of the notion of 'intersubjective spacetime'. Broadly summarised, this notion serves as a theoretical handle with which to describe local conceptions about the imagined nature of projecting the self beyond the self. Set against the present study, this description of indigenous attempts at self-extension is illuminating; and even though the symbolic media are different in each of the contexts, parallels are evident: not just because of the bodily aspects of transmission and transformation, but in the broader sense that both studies grapple with conceptions of agency in terms of how symbolic constructions of value are performed intersubjectively.

In Munn's terminology, the notion of spacetime functions analytically as a kind of 'value parameter' that enables different potencies, that is, different levels of value to be established. The scaling whereby these differences are relativised takes place according to certain 'capacities' of extension which are synonymous with spacetime itself (8). By this, Munn seems to mean that the construct of spacetime is not only deployed with reference to practices of expansion and extension, but that 'spacetime' is a cultural medium whereby the general value of an action may be evinced as an instance of a 'level' of (spacetime) potency. Value is made apparent because of the ways that 'extension' infers an intersubjective capacity to develop spatiotemporal relations beyond the self, and here Munn refers to intersubjective spacetime as 'a

Chapter Five 153 multidimensional, symbolic order and process - a spacetime of self-other relations constituted in terms of and by means of specific types of practice' (10, emphasis added). It is these (intersubjective) extensions of the self that Munn then goes on to describe as 'spatiotemporal transformations'.

Yet suggesting that the formation of symbolic value is processual and dialectical, she sees the notion of spacetime as pertinent not only to the intersubjective extensions of the self, but also to the ways in which the social relations effected by these extensions constitute the spacetime in which these actions are experientially lived out, or enacted. It is in the sense that 'a mode of spacetime defines a form in terms of which the world is experienced by the agents whose actions produce it' (11) that Munn depicts Gawan women and men as autonomous agents.

To a certain extent, this notion of 'intersubjective spacetime' provides a fruitful base framework from which to consider how the kinds of reproductive gifts exchanged between the anonymous women create symbolic value as 'vistas of circulation', where vista is to be defined as a 'long succession of remembered or anticipated events' (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, fourth edition, 1951). It should be stressed that anonymity conceptualised as a form of 'intersubjective spacetime' is not representative of any particular official discourse, nor does it relate in an obvious way to the actual words of the women whose actions I here describe. I am using the term 'vistas of circulation' quite specifically to describe, first, how women's body parts flow as relations that circulate in time as (metonymical) extensions of their persons; second the way women embody imagined relations of

Chapter Five 154 exchange and third how these exchanges relate to the productions they make as agents. Together, these points will show how the women act in different ways as part of a 'multidimensional symbolic order, and process', projecting a particular kind of social domain as the social identities of actively present kinds of absence.

Donors and 'vistas of circulation':

Odelle: genes by proxy

Odelle is one donor who brings together notions of herself as 'living on' through others with conceptions of herself as a support facilitating and assisting others. Her account is structured in terms of the respective agencies of donors and recipients acting 'through' one another.

A single woman in her mid thirties with no children, Odelle describes herself as somebody without immediate prospects of marriage and children, and she talks at length of how she thinks of her 'biological clock just ticking away'. Yet, as she says, she does not want to 'just go out and get pregnant' and she remains troubled by the idea of never being able to pass on her genes. Odelle talks of how she had been reared as an only child by parents who valued a sense of family continuity through the generations. She goes on to comment that perhaps her attempt at ova donation is 'a selfish way of passing on a bit of me onto future generations and also to help someone else as well, although I must admit the selfish motive was more important

Chapter Five 155 than the desire to help'. Her ideas, however, seem more complex than a condensed version of classic sociobiological explanations, since she is saying something other than that her personal identity is simply the sum of her genes strategically pursuing their own survival. Instead she uses a popularised discourse of a scientistic understanding of 'selfish genes' as a rhetorical device with which to draw out a conception of genes and genetics which is not principally biologically informed.

Odelle stresses how any resulting child from the donation would not be 'hers', and how she would be quite happy for the recipient never to tell the child of his or her genetical origins. Like Jean and Kate, Odelle talks quite freely of how the woman who receives the ova 'plays the major role in the creation of a new life and without her the life would not be possible.. .she grows the baby and goes through pregnancy and labour, and it is her body which has achieved this'. These kinds of statements are also interspersed with her remarks that she has no inclination to be involved in any aspect of social parenting.

Since donating her ova involves Odelle in bringing to mind, or in some sense anticipating, the figure of another woman as some kind of person connected to her, these are not simply 'selfish' intentions. Once again, the presence of others becomes apparent as a relation of 'no ties' and 'no commitment'. In Odelle's case, she is able to talk quite openly about the nature of these relations because she herself acknowledges that the status of these ties constitutes just an imaginary kind of relationship. Sometimes she makes this quite explicit when she mentions how her relation to the recipient is based on just a 'fictitious friendship'. She thinks of the

Chapter Five 156 recipient as a 'somebody' who 'somewhere' will receive the help she has given, and it is important to her that this person can be figured in her imagination as someone who, in some ways, is quite alike as well as somebody 'other' to herself. Part of the 'fiction' that makes them into 'friends' is the action of exchanging between them body parts as actions that make them different. This is what Odelle imagines can be extended apart from her in time and space as their shared 'characteristics'. Yet what these kinds shared characteristics encompass is the 'method' , as Gill put it earlier, of the one person (donor or the recipient) being creatively transformed 'through' and as the other donor/recipient.

Odelle explains how she can transform herself into 'somebody' who can help 'a' woman, because unlike herself, some other woman 'somewhere' is ready in life to raise a child at the present time. She uses the term 'win-win situation' with which to describe how both of them become 'like' each other, both deriving benefit from the other, in terms of what the other 'somebody' does for the other. At the same time, however, this putative likeness is only founded as their differences, since Odelle feels that the recipient is probably a 'better' person than her because she has managed, as she says, to create a stable network of relations and friends within which to assume her parenting responsibilities.

Odelle and her recipient create distant connections between themselves because they 'live on', the one 'through' the other. The recipient Odelle helps will hopefully have a child, and Odelle will live on through the transformations she effects with regards to her new social identity: that is, she will live on as a 'somebody' who can imagine

Chapter Five 157 herself as keeping vital her sense of place as the continuing 'part' of her family's genealogy. This sense of place, of being a part, becomes enacted as the extensions of her person when she makes 'new' gifts, but these extensions do not simply come from her body as her ownership of body parts. Her body parts go towards making others as these same parts go towards re-constituting her as the social form of other circulating persons. And these 'other' persons themselves can be seen to be 'persons' to the extent that their identities come into play as the social circulations of such anonymised relations.

Because Odelle's donated substance is not conceived by her as a physiological part of her body when she gives it to others, she is not in any sense having her 'own child'. She is acting instead 'through' another person to extend and continue herself in another form; something she occasionally describes as having a 'child by proxy'. The reconfigurement of her substance from a biological part of herself (her discourse of genes as selfish) into the transformed and shared capabilities and powers of others, is not a transposition that is worked through as the possessive ownership of her genes 'in' her person. Rather, she extends herself in social space as the embodiment of altered time whereby both she, and her 'friend' constitute themselves as persons in the process of social exchange. This is the form of the intercorporealised transfer of anonymised body parts that are, in a sense, no-bodies. Commenting on how the 'child by proxy' is her genetical child, but that she does not want to have a 'genetical' relationship with the child since it is not her 'own', her discourse switches to imagined connections: 'I'm not thinking the reality of what the child will be like, more the image of fantasy', she says. These connections also become narratively evident when

Chapter Five 158 she looks to herself from the perspective of an older woman, commenting from an 'other' time as to just what kind of 'parent' she imagines herself to be. Sketching out these 'images', she goes on to say how her 'relation' to the child will probably shift according to her own life-course, and whether or not she herself will one day become pregnant. By this, she means that she will think about the child differently, and make the child a 'living' and 'real' person by occasionally thinking about him or her in different ways.

When I'm an 80 year old spinster sitting alone by the fire I shall feel comforted by the hope that whatever else I have or haven't achieved in life it may not have been wasted. I won't mind never having seen children or grandchildren because I will know they are out there somewhere, and because they will be in my imagination I will be happy as I shall make them successful, rich, handsome, pretty and be spared the reality!

Odelle is saying how she can keep on making persons as their continuing absences and as continuing relations to her. She not only can keep on imagining these persons as her relations - her children and grandchildren - but she can keep re-making these relations throughout her life-course as the continuing parts of herself. Thus, over time she will construct and reconstruct these body parts as kinds of relations and identities; she will 'know' future generations of children as happy and accomplished persons, since their capabilities flow as extensions of her person, situating herself as a continuing part of their life trajectory. It does not particularly matter to her, then, that she does not know them personally, or see them in actuality as specific and 'present' relations.

If she reproduces herself in and through these abstracted others, this is not because she gives a biological part of herself - even though she, like all donors, obviously does

Chapter Five 159 pass on her genetical characteristics - but because she keeps her genes alive as a continuing sense of who she is: both as the time of her continuing present, and also in relation to the tradition that is her own lived past and background. Though perhaps many may find her comment that she can spare herself the realities of child-rearing a 'selfish' attitude, this would be to miss what it is that Odelle gives and makes with her donation. The body parts that she gives are not bodily parts of herself; rather the parts of herself that she gives are parts of herself that she transforms as renewed time since her 'genes' signify former 'personal' relations. She understands herself to be a continuing 'part' of these relations which she desires to keep going. By making her body parts into gifts of life for others, she manages to make relations with others in a significant way, passing herself on as an active form of absence so as to keep alive times from the past. The connection she makes is not to her genetical child, but to previous generations that she has never seen nor known directly. By managing to donate her eggs as the extrinsic parts of her body, she takes herself 'outside' of her biologically constituted person and integrates herself into some 'other' body. Through her gifts she transforms herself into a medium whereby the past and the future, as the actions of others, continue to pass through her. Substance is shared between bodies but it is not shared because it has been mixed bio-genetically.

Penny: relations as ripple effects

Penny is another donor who talks of somebody else having a child 'through' her. She mentions 'the process of achieving something for somebody else through my ability

Chapter Five 160 to produce' and this particular notion of herself as an active medium turns out to bear upon her ideas of donating as a type of shared exchange between herself and the recipient.

In her early thirties and single, Penny says the donation is like a kind of a 'joint achievement' in which she gives 'my physical abilities' for the 'financial abilities' of others. These 'abilities', however, are activated as the interacting 'parts' of her person rather than as some kind of contractarian arrangement of one person over an other transacting person. She makes this clear when she describes how ova are not the same kind of substance as blood or other organs, because 'to me, donating eggs is a far more restricted donation than donating blood because of the limited productivity of a woman, so it's far more a part of you, it's closer to me'. Penny is connected to what she gives since her donated body parts are contextualised in terms of her potential 'abilities', and these relate to what she can do, and since her gift is part of her 'limited productivity' as a woman, it is 'restricted' and given as a personal part of her because it is already a social relation imbued in time.

Like Odelle, Penny has an idea that she has a social relationship with somebody else since she is giving (and receiving) an enabling capacity through another person. It is, then, in terms of a 'somebody' 'through' whom her actions are able to pass as kinds of mutually transformed social identities, that she conceives of her actions as 'ripple effects'; relations that emanate continuously from her and through others, and others again. She explains how she is financially unable to bring up a child in a comfortable environment:

Chapter Five 161 • . .and age being somewhat against me, I decided it would be a comfort to know that perhaps someone else could....the comfort of knowing there's a chance I may have a child through someone else who can give that child so much more than I could and who will cherish that child so much more due to the circumstances of his or her birth. If I ever do have a child of my own, the knowledge of the joy perhaps given to another woman which then has a ripple effect, touching other members of that family and their friends..that's just great (emphasis added).

Like Odelle, Penny is re-constructing and thus reproducing herself to make a continuous kind of flow from out of her body. Transformed into other unknown persons, her body parts become effective as newly conceived relations of which she remains a still circulating part over time. She extends herself continuously outwards, this being the imagery of her ripple effects that make connections, metaphorically touching others and yielding new sets of reconstituted relations as the social fabric of intercommunity life. Though her biological productivity is finite, she nevertheless manages to recast herself as a productive ability circulating socially in space and time 'through' others. Substance again is being shared, but it is not valued as the matter of a biological substance. Thus the kinds of relations she enacts as the social circulation of her body parts are not reckoned by her as the fixing of ties of 'blood'.

Penny is an example of a donor who makes effective action from out of uncertain knowledges. What she refers to as 'joint achievements' between herself and the recipient are effected in spaces that can be negotiated or kept symbolically open. This seems to relate to the a-genetical circulations that Penny's body parts represent as parts of her person continuously effecting outwards (her discourse of ripple effects). It is, she says, 'just the knowledge, the thought that perhaps somebody else has had a child from my eggs, not that it is my child', that matters. What other women refer

Chapter Five 162 to as the disappointment of not being informed of the outcome of her donation has, for Penny, become embodied as the knowledge of relations that can never be finally circumscribed, settled or fixed. Value is thus created from a sphere of action in which social relations are not entirely compressible into a rigid format or known identity. Penny thus deflects the time of the objectification of being named, transforming the potential of not knowing into a conceptually fresh space. She is an agent because she keeps things open.

Rita: donating adoption

Rita is another donor who extends herself spatially as newly embodied time. Like Odelle and Penny, this becomes significant for the way that she is giving a part of herself to a 'somebody'. In one sense, she is quite like Penny because she transforms kinds of uncertain knowledges into new forms of uncertain knowledges, hoping that her actions will impact as significant 'ripple effects' by making others lives 'better'. Like the kind of extended 'genealogy' that Odelle enacts, the 'gift of life' that Rita creates as new relations, may be seen as the continuation of previous relations in altered form. But this is not simply a matter of reproduction: of making a copy of something that already exists. Persons are extended as new relations because they are re-conceived as the continuation of 'old', and significantly still unfinished relations. In this particular case, Rita's history as an adopted child proves to play a significant part in the unravelling of her account.

Rita explains that the childhood she spent with her adoptive family was a happy one

Chapter Five 163 and that she is thankful she learnt about her origins at an early age, adjusting quickly and without difficulty to this knowledge. Though she has never met her birth mother, she says she has often wondered about her. During our talks she speaks of her warmly, mentioning in particular how hard she thinks it must have been for her as an unmarried woman, to have kept care of her for the first few months of Rita's life. Running through her account, though, is some ambivalence as to the way her mother represents for her an unknown and absent person. Partly this seems to centre on what she knows to be the considerable difficulty of tracing her as a 'somebody' whom she can make into a 'known' relation. She would say such things as: 'I just feel every now and again I would really like to see her. It's not a burning desire to come face to face with her. I'd like to. It doesn't matter. But I'd like to. It's a lot of hard work trying to trace her'. Commenting on what she feels to be the hardest aspect of adoption, she remarks: 'it's the not knowing that gets to you..for the child. It's the not knowing...it's more the not knowing who your parents really were. .it can sometimes be so difficult'.

In Rita's account, the themes of knowledge, unknown relations and anonymity converge as the distant connections of different untraceable strangers. By donating her ova, Rita constructs new relations with her birth mother, getting to know her better through a transformation of the body parts her mother once 'gave' to her. The connections seem to work symbolically at various overlapping levels.

On the one hand, she repeats her birth mother's decision of many years ago when she chooses to give 'over' to another woman a part she reproduces of herself. Though mother and daughter do not give 'like' things of themselves away in the sense of

Chapter Five 164 identical body parts, they do enact similar kinds of relations as productive persons. They both have extended themselves from out of the different substances of their bodies, and it is this that creates between them the interaction of a common substance. 'Through' a recipient who is an untraceable 'stranger', and therefore stands in as the embodiment of her unknown mother, Rita enacts new relations with her mother, transforming the previously untraceable connections of the time of her birth into new kinds of continuities. She reproduces herself in the newly embodied form of her past through the birth she has hopefully enabled for another unknown stranger. Like Odelle and Penny, relations pass 'through' her as she instigates new forms of continuity and change. In this sense, she makes her mother 'alive', enacting her presence through her donation.

• .it must be so hard to give a child up and not know where I was going..! don't know how much information she was given as to what the family was like that I was going to. I'm sure she was given some, but that's like with the egg donating... I am doing the same sort of thing as my birth mother was doing and I am quite happy in one respect that the child, if there was one, would be airight.. .My mother gave me up for what she hoped was a better life and I'm giving a couple my eggs to give them a better life, in the respect they'll have children in it... I've given my eggs to somebody so hopefully their lives will be better...

It seems that one reason she feels a closer affinity to her mother than previously has to do with the way she, as an agent, has been able to replicate and set in motion the kinds of uncertainties that she imagines her mother must once have lived through. Her mother is 'known', though still uncertainly, in the sense that she is transformed into a newly estranged and yet more proximate kind of social relation.

Chapter Five 165 ...I would just like to say to her that everything is fine, that I've had a really good life and find out whether she [mother] had a good life as well.. .and I just feel closer to her now because I know what it would feel like to give children up - not that I have given a child up - but I feel closer to her even though I don't know her - I know her name and that's about it - but I feel closer to her because I have children and I know what she must have gone through to think..that I've got to have a better life without her.. .she couldn't give me the future that she obviously wanted to...

What has not been traceable before, starts to have a form as something that can be known, but only by not being identifiable - precisely by not being known. As with Penny, gaps in certainty are experienced for the fresh openings they create. Rita, for instance, imagines that she can make herself 'like' her mother, resembling her for the way that she too, as the embodiment of distant kinds of connections, will never find out what happens to the part of herself she has given to somebody else.

Meena: pardon and renewal

Meena also continues to make herself by extending her person in another form as embodied vistas of circulation. In her case this takes effect as the associations she makes between donating her ova anonymously, and donating money to temples back home in India so that god will hear her wishes and give her pardon. The donations interlink symbolically for her because they are both ways of extending her person through others as her own and others' collectivised substance. Both actions involve food and cooking; incorporating and making continuous the work of others as particular kinds of relations. In both instances, this work becomes the embodied part of an other 'shared' body, and as with other donors, Meena also thinks she makes herself into a 'better' kind of person.

Chapter Five 166 When she found it took her longer than she hoped to become pregnant, Meena sent money to relatives in India to get pardon for herself, thereby clearing her name. Her gift to a recipient re-enacts the time when she previously gave gifts to god, since she renews parts of herself as certain memories remembering what it was like to want to become pregnant herself. By repeating these actions, she draws upon stocks of knowledge between women, making herself distantly connected with unknown others. This is made more explicit when she explains how the money given to temples is converted into food ceremonies where everyone shares the same substance. What she sends to others to help her create new life gets converted, she says, into the sustenance of many persons. The women and men at the temple will share a part of each other through her when they eat, even though she was not physically there in India, at that time. Yet she considers herself to have been present as a part of their actions: she facilitated their food and they ate with her to help her get pregnant from the food she gave to them. When Meena talks about her role in donating, she describes how she is involved in providing the ingredients for the birth mother's subsequent cooking of the child. This is transposed by her to the joint activity of having shared substances between herself, the recipient and the recipient's partner. She re-enacts the Indian temple scene by giving something of herself for subsequent transformations into new life.

The following are extracts from parts of our conversation. I am asking her what it involves for her to provide the recipient with her ingredients and she tells me a little about how the child is made.

Chapter Five 167 So you said that the ingredients came from you and from another man. And what happens to the ingredients. Do you make them into a meal?

I provide the ingredients, he provides the gas cooker, I suppose.. .and the mum cooks it in a little oven...after nine months..that's when you open the oven up and see the end product. And then you enjoy the baby don't you? It's the end product.

How do you enjoy the end product? When you have a dish you have made with others you enjoy it when you eat it with others. How would you say this is the end product enjoyed? This is something you enjoy once for life, for keeps.. it's for life because when I bake a cake or something like that I'll probably eat it that same day. I mean you've gone to a lot of trouble for that as well - cooking it - but like a baby you can watch it grow, enjoy it learning new things.

Meena imagines the division of conception as the joint productions of herself, the recipient and the recipient's partner. They are each of them acting as agents because they are each of them doing something to get the meal ready. She provides the substance whereby the mother can cook the child, and the recipient's partner sets her transformations in motion by providing the flame of the gas cooker. Her and his actions both represent moments of initiation which the birth mother goes on to transform into the time of her production. As she says later on, the birth mother is not passively cooking the child because she is 'a little oven'. She is not simply some kind of receptacle or container for the fetus's growth. She does not, as Kate mentioned earlier, just simply 'watch[ed} it extend my stomach and then it came out'. The birth mother, Meena says, is the primary worker who makes the most significant contribution towards the putting together of the meal. These thoughts come together as her belief that the child is a meal that is only 'eaten' in the sense that it is enjoyed

Chapter Five 168 for life. It keeps on being eaten, never being finally consumed.

This ties up with her earlier comments about feeling that though 'they're not my eggs...but there will always be a part of me that still thinks they belong to me'. It was suggested in chapter 4 that Meena did not mean to imply a possessive model of ownership over her body parts when she uses the term 'belong'. It is now clearer how Meena models her conception of her gift/body parts on a view of the person other than a western conceived model of the person's natural and innate proprietorship in body substance. Parts of her body do not leave her person because they continue to be socially effective through her: they continue to make relations over time and through space, just like Odelle's, Penny's and Rita's transformations of their body parts represent, in different ways, the activation of different kinds of 'ripple effects'. The child will be enjoyed over time, and this is why he/she is 'for keeps'. From a distance, Meena will enjoy knowing that parts of herself survive elsewhere in newly embodied form, and this is why what she donates 'belongs' partially to her.

I go on to ask her who has done the most work and who has gone to the most trouble in putting the meal together.

I reckon the mum who cooks it has done a lot because she's let her husband fertilise an egg from another woman. She's like given her permission because she might... the baby is going to fertilise in her tummy, but actually she hasn't got any part of it...like a triangle - there's no part of her in that baby. Only her husband's and some other woman's. But she is going to bring that baby up as her own and I think she would give it more love than I probably would have because she was so desperate to have it. I think she plays quite a big part in it as well.

Chapter Five 169 So whose baby is it? You've said that she would bring it up as if it's her own but none of the ingredients came from her?

Yes, exactly.

And the ingredients came from you. So whose baby is it?

Well it would be hers. It would be hers once it's formed. Because she's gone to all that trouble, you know, for it to fertilise in her tummy.

And is there a way in which it is yours as well because you have provided the ingredients?

In a way, yes, but I wouldn't put any claim on it.

So then in what sense is it yours?

I just did the shopping for the ingredients..! provided the main ingredients.

Was this a difficult or long shopping trip?

Yes, it was very. It was quite emotional - especially with all them injections I had...! had to do a lot of thinking.. .whether it was the right thing to do. And what would I feel about it afterwards - and I was told that I could go back but there was no change in my mind. I was adamant that I wanted to do it...

Meena thinks the child only has a relation to her as 'her' child because she went shopping for the ingredients, and because this was a taxing task for her to do. Indirectly, she is saying how she has co-produced the child, but that the actual ingredients she has provided are not the substance whereby she is able to make an enduring connection to the child 'for keeps'. Just like Odelle, Penny and Rita, the

Chapter Five 170 body parts Meena gives become something other than biological substance from her body. When she talks about how she does not 'own' the child, it becomes clearer how her body parts have become the 'parts' that the birth mother is now activating as her own productions.

It is because this meal is never finally consumed, but always enjoyed, that it assumes the form of a collectivised substance. It becomes the partaking of a common kind of body; one that has no recognisable boundaries, and one that cannot be known as the single body of any particular person. Many persons will know, enjoy, relate with the child who embodies the form of many others as the extendible 'ripple effects' of their past actions. This is the conceptual link to time, and to the way in which Meena's body parts will remain connected to her 'for keeps'.

What is kept, though, is neither alienable nor inalienable from her person. This is because what is hers 'for keeps', as it were, is not something that comes back to her as her 'return', but something that is circulating between persons in social space as the previously enacted product of her work. The child, the 'end product', emanates as the performative interactions of others' multiply extending, ongoing relations. Within this flow of relations what has to keep circulating (as persons continually interchangeable parts) can never be finally consumed. This kind of continuity is like the kinds of 'opening spaces' that Penny and Rita make from out of their uncertain knowledges regarding their unknown outcomes.

Meena also makes a kind of opening space for herself through her agency as

Chapter Five 171 somebody non-identifiable. She gives herself a new kind of identity to the extent that these actions make her unknown. Clearing her name again is part of her choice to make herself a 'better' person. By making her body parts into the anonymised extensions of her person, she is also commenting on how she can do something apart from her husband, autonomously from him. Parts of her account mix together the anonymous and the exogamous, with the genetic and ties of blood, so that it is her embodiment of anonymity that is regarded, she intimates, as a culturally transgressive kind of action from her relatives' points of view. She finds a way of gaining independence for herself from her family ties and from her husband, because, as she says, there can be no 'part' of anybody else in these particular gifts. Here she conflates the biological with the non-biological, and what matters to her is that she can make herself not so much into an extension of her husband, but that she acts as an extendible part of herself. As Meena comments, it is significant to her that 'there will be a part of me in them and there won't be any part of my husband in them'. Quite a few women donors make connections like this and some would link this up in metaphorical terms when they comment how the time of donation enabled them to find temporary kinds of spaces or reprieves from intimate physical contact with partners. As a form of symbolically 'turning away' from known relations, this also seems to be a way women make their body parts into mobile extensions of their circulating persons as 'other' separate space and as 'other' time.

Conclusions

In each of the cases just discussed, the women are giving body parts not as a part of

Chapter Five 172 their bodies, but as parts of their persons in the process of transfonnation. Through their donations women thereby become agents, enacting from out of these body parts various kinds of relations. Inasmuch as these relations constitute persons/agents, women are able to make time into the transformed and circulating parts of themselves, extending themselves in social space intersubjectively as extra-bodily forms of social identities. Odelle thinks of her genes not as biological body parts, but as the parts of previously embodied relations that can pass 'through' her as continuing time. She donates a sense of keeping alive her family history and the social significance of her place within it. Penny thinks of herself as donating an ability that passes 'through' her as the finite productivity of her reproductive years. She donates something that she will not be able to do a little later on. Rita makes a part of her body into a kind of replica of her birth mother's previous identity, as she re-enacts what it is like to transfer something that cannot be kept. She donates a way of making somebody else's life better, just like her mother once did for her. Meena thinks of the meal she makes as the food she once gave to others when they ate with her to help her achieve a pregnancy. She donates a kind of sharing that can last for keeps. Her substance becomes a remembering for life, and beyond.

These points suggest how women's practices of anonymity relate to a kind of general economy of circulation in which parts do not belong to specific persons, but become apparent as the multiply detached parts of persons' extensions. In this economy, parts are not owned as person's past productions, but circulate as 'other' time and in 'other' social space, both as the collective extensions of 'someone' and, relatedly, as a type of common substance. This substance is common to a physically absent 'someone'

Chapter Five 173 since it comes to be shared as parts continually in the process of being re-circulated, with these re-circulations making up, in turn, a body of 'no bodies'.

Delia and Fay: spacetimes of renewal The notion of a body of 'no-bodies' is formulated most explicitly by those women who say that it does not matter who receives the 'chances' they make, so long as somebody somewhere benefits from what they do. Women often make analogies to blood and blood donation when they make such statements, so that when they talk about their 'chances' of making conception into something assisted and shared, many of them draw upon the kinds of circulating chances with which they are already familiar in the context of popular discourses of blood transfusion. Jean is typical for the way she describes how her six monthly blood donations keep on 'repaying' a somebody for the 'life' somebody gave many years ago. What she keeps on redonating is a way of remembering how somebody helped to keep her younger brother alive.

Jean: The main reason that made me give blood from when I was eighteen was the fact that my little brother had a blood transfusion because all his insides were twisted, and if somebody hadn't donated that blood my brother would not be alive. So once every six months, for about half an hour I suffer a slight little bit of discomfort but I save somebody's life. Or I help to save somebody's life. And in actual fact what I am doing is repaying for all they've done for my brother. Because he's now still alive. And if it hadn't been for them, he probably wouldn't be. Though you're not repaying the same people. Does that matter? No, no I'm not repaying the same people. I don't know. Who knows - maybe over the years I may be - the chances of that are about a hundred million to

Chapter Five 174 one, but it could be possible. Does it matter to you that there are different people who you are expressing your gratitude to? No, no. For whatever reason they need the blood and again if I don't do it or if I don't go out to donate the blood then they could lose a life like my brother could have done...and there's no reason why they should. If my pint is going to help, then let them have it, there's no reason why not...it's only once every six months and I won't ever stop doing it. I have just decided that because somebody gave their blood to save my brother then I would give my blood to help somebody else. And I guess I've never changed my view on that.

Betty comments on how pregnant women in general can stand in as a figurative substitution for 'somebody' who might be like the person she once helped. Like Fay who spoke of bumping into 'a' recipient on the street who might not be the (same) donor she actually helped, but just 'a' donor that somebody' like herself once helped (chapter 4), Betty is saying how she can bring to mind a donor in general: she can picture 'a' person, but she cannot picture 'the woman'.

Betty: ...My donation...! can't picture the woman, but I can picture a person, but I can't picture a test tube or a petri dish. I can't see. ..with what I did you can almost see the end result. You can't physically see it but just with seeing women who are pregnant...just seeing anybody and you think: maybe, maybe I helped that person.. .not that person, but a person like that. Maybe I helped a person like that. Not that person. But like that... .somebody somewhere.. .just a person...

The way in which substance is circulating as the interchangeable parts of multiple 'someones' is a theme that recurs in many donors' accounts. Women speak in different ways of how they imagine these circulations to be intersubjectively

Chapter Five 175 continuous in social space and time, and one re-occurring image concerns the way that these circulating parts are never finally absorbed as the form of a traceable, knowable person. They parts keep on being constituted and re-constituted as 'fresh lease[s] of life'. But the kind of 'life' being activated here seems to be suggestive of something that is always left over and made into a cultural remainder as incomplete and remaindered time.

Informants seem to be saying that through these circulations, they are making fresh kinds of openings, as well as new kinds of life that are never to be finally closed. Odelle for instance touches upon this when she comments how, though she is never to see her children and grandchildren, she will think about them differently according to her own changing situations over the years, and therefore feels she will continue to live on through them. Delia and Fay are two donors who talk a little more explicitly about how they 'live on' through others as their circulating (body) parts. They both think they make continuous kinds of relations by re-channelling parts of themselves as multiple kinds of self-extensions. They make this theme of openness and incompletion a little clearer when they talk about how their gifts, as their selfextensions, constitute continuing circulations.

Delia and Fay talk about transforming substance into something new. When they remark on how ovulation seems to them something 'wasteful', they do not in the main draw upon notions of substance as something of innate use, as this features, for instance, in medical discourse. Rather, they see their menstrual cycles as something wasteful because they recognise how they can transform these cycles into effective

Chapter Five 176 time for other persons. Delia uses the term 'recycling' as a way of describing how things can keep on being effective 'through' different persons' actions. With the example of her children's rocking horse she shows how she believes the new use of something can make positive differences to what other persons can achieve.

When I found out that they could use me, that they could use my eggs, I was just really chuffed. I just thought: yes, I can do something useful for once - not that I'm not doing anything useful bringing up my children, I'm not saying that - but I just felt special, it's just something really unique. It's not unique when you think about it - the same as most women could have a family - most of them are capable of doing what I do, it's just they don't chose to. I think it's a shame... I was maybe a bit of use that I helped.. .we believe in recycling. We buy recycled paper, we keep all our newspapers separate and our tin cans - we're very much into that. It's the same sort of thing with my car boot sales - I'm just recycling my junk. I think it's a very good idea. .they take on a new lease of life, I think. You've got things that are of no use to you anymore. I bought that little rocking horse from a friend and yet it sat in her room collecting dust - it drives me mad now it's got a terrible squeak to it, but it's made a difference to the kids lives - that's given a whole new... because the kids love it. And yet in my friends house it just sat there. I think it's the same if I were dead, my heart wouldn't be doing me anything but it could give somebody else so much - a whole life, whereas if I'm lying dormant, it's no use to me...my eggs are just absorbed now - nothing happens to them. .You think of all the women that ovulate and nothing comes new, whereas get them out of the womb and they could help people...

'Get them out of the womb and they could help people...'. Delia raises notions of 'use' with regards to how her eggs need not be absorbed invisibly as intrinsic body substance. Made into the exteriorised parts of her person, she acts to prevent 'nothing comes [a]new.

Fay develops the imagery of 'continuous circles' with which to describe how people are vitalised by coming afresh 'onto the horizon', and this she envisions as a space

Chapter Five 177 that is continually expanding as newly enacted social relations. To her mind, people keep making exchanges between 'someones', and in the following passage of her speech one can almost hear the unstoppable and pressing quality attributed to these continuing circulations. The social horizon she imagines is all the more effective as a space and time for replacements, since it has been transformed from out of what she imagines to be the exchange scenario that is her multiply divisible body.

Fay: ...You certainly realise that it's amazing machinery, in the fact that as fast as you remove one bit, another bit appears - particularly with that area. It certainly makes you think very hard about that bit of your body - when you consider what it does. No machinery can do that. Produce something out of nothing. They have to have something to start with. You're basically one large conveyor belt. As fast as something is chopped off the end, somebody else is coming over onto the top, like an escalator almost. As fast as it drops off one end, as soon as somebody gets off at the bottom, somebody else gets on at the top and it goes like a continuous cycle and until the day when it actually stops. ..it was only really since doing this once and now going through it again that it's really struck home the fact that this is how it is, and that as fast as you remove it, another one appears, as fast as you cut your nails, they grow. As fast as you cut your hair, it grows. There's always something there to replace it.....As fast as one donor gives and receives, there's usually another donor on the horizon also waiting for somebody to receive. There will always be people waiting to receive.., the world is made up of people giving and receiving. One company gives and then somebody gives back. And so it goes on ...I am giving eggs, she's receiving them. Hopefully she's going to be giving life to the baby, and in return I'm receiving happiness for the fact that it all works out O.K. It's all a case of giving something really. If somebody gives something, somebody has to take it, and vice versa. She takes an awful lot of risks. I am giving something to her. She takes risks, I basically take home the knowledge that I've done something to help somebody and hopefully she gives life to someone else. So it is always a continuous circle in that respect, not really a conveyor belt..it's always going around...

Like Delia, Fay is also talking in terms of continuing cycles. However, the connections she makes concern the relations that take place as the cycles of gifting and the cycles of bodily growth. Neither take place in or outside of bodies, but as the

Chapter Five 178 time of exteriorised vistas between persons.

What gets broken off or detached from her body is, she says, something that is imagined both as a process, in the sense that the parts are her body's cyclicality, and as an intersubjective process that is 'peopled' by persons. She seems to be describing a notion of a body that is like an escalator whose steps are persons. People come over onto the top and get off at the bottom, and what is interesting about such remarks are her alternations between what is taking place in her body, with what she is doing as an agent who is socially placed in the wider cosmos. When she switches narratively between this interiorly active body and her person as someone involved in 'the world [as] made up of people giving and receiving', the effect rhetorically is to de-stabilise the category of the person as the interior/exterior dualism of the body conceived as an internally bounded unit of one discrete person. Because parts of her body are like persons, and because persons are extendible as though they were like parts of her body, the reproductive potential of her body substance is symbolically equated with the unstoppable growth of continuing exchange relations. In this way the imagery of her body as (re)generative combines with metaphors of the recursivity of escalators and conveyor belts, and these images tie up as the circulatory potential of continually renewable re-circulations: it is as fast as somebody gets off that somebody else gets on; it is as fast as you remove one thing that another thing appears; it is as fast as you cut your nails that they grow; it is as fast as one donor gives and someone receives that another donor will give and somebody else receive. Social transactions are the flows of 'a continuous cycle' in which everything must keep going on. It is these interconnections that make the social relations that take place 'through' the

Chapter Five 179 multiplicity of many and any 'someones'.

At this point her commentary becomes a description of how the body of 'someone', in which she as a donor partakes, is a collective body made up of women's parts. These parts are now pluralised as parts in social circulation, and within this imaginary body, women take on the social status as 'someones' who are persons without bodies: they become things like escalators, conveyor belts and continuous cycles, or else they take form as the ever-growing parts of the person: the unstoppable growths of hair and nails that work to metaphorical effect as the idiom for notions of social extension. As a woman who becomes a 'someone' in her capacity as a person without a body, Fay becomes a ('special') no-body as her body parts are transformed not into objects, but into the continually circulating social relations that comprise the sociality of anonymity: this is made apparent as the time of re-circulations and as the form of one mutual interchangeability:

Fay: It's all a case of giving something really. If somebody gives something, somebody has to take it, and vice versa. She takes an awful lot of risks. I am giving something to her. She takes risks, I basically take home the knowledge that I've done something to help somebody and hopefully she gives life to somebody else. So it is always a continuous circle in that respect, not really a conveyor belt...it's always going around...

Fay's remarks tie up with Nancy's comment earlier when she commented on how giving to a 'somebody' meant that 'I didn't actually think about who they were, what they did... I didn't think about who...'. Women who are making parts of their bodies into the extendible parts of their persons are not thinking about who specifically they

Chapter Five 180 give their gifts to, but rather, they are thinking about how these gifts, as parts of their 'selves' have the power to keep on circulating as kinds of 'ripple effects' and relations between persons.

Penny's notion of 'ripple effects' bears upon Fay's conceptions insofar as her 'body' continually renews itself, so the exchanges taking place between persons are figured by her as transactions/extensions that need to be continually reciprocated. Her vision of 'reciprocity' is not however based on the value of equivalent returns of like units of tangible or material counter-gifts - but on the implicit kinds of knowledges generated through these relations. Like Jean who knows that her actions will keep on saving and extending the life-times of a 'somebody' each time she donates blood, so Fay comments here how she basically takes home the knowledge that she has done something to help somebody. The kind of reciprocity that she imagines she instigates entails a sociality of anonymity in which the constitution of 'cycles of exchange' are relations that are manifest as the continuing extensions of persons, preserved and iransformed at one and the same time.

Conclusions

Contrary to the biological model of the single sexed self and the functional model of human reproduction, women's multiply circulating body parts have been shown to have value as the extensional and transferable parts of persons over time and through space. The ways in which different women's substance becomes enacted as a

Chapter Five 181 remembering for life relates to the way donors transform time as extensions of themselves; namely, how different persons go about constituting themselves as agents apart from their (physicalised) persons. Since donated body parts are not symbolically equal to the biological parts of donors' bodies, and since it is not immediately apparent how such detached body parts acquire value as the extensions of donors' persons, these cases studies have discussed in some detail how persons become the interchangeable productions of other persons. Influenced by Munn's schema of 'intersubjective spacetime' it has been argued that donors make relations with recipients as forms of intersubjective anticipation and remembrance built from out of previous social relations, and that what may be taken as the discursive 'law' of anonymity is the enactment of social relations as socially embodied 'vistas of circulation'.

As discussed earlier, the medical version of the 'donating body' presumed these body parts to be the metonymical extensions of persons: parts of women's bodies (donors) could stand in for the whole of other women's bodies (recipients), and these bodies were seen to be 'matched' together so as to be re-constituted as 'whole' kinds of persons. There was a sense in which ostensibly 'whole' persons appeared to emerge as the sharing of presumed genetical likenesses (see chapters 2 and 4).

The previous case studies, however, serve to illustrate how a so-called 'body' can only stand for an imaginary sense of the 'whole' person, since in each case these donated parts represent not that person herself, but parts of that person as somebody's past and future embodied time. Metonymy is not contained in the part as the substitutive

Chapter Five 182 replacement of innate essence (biological egg as bio-genetic substance); but works rather in the way that the person is carried 'through' as the circulating parts of others' persons. Metonymical parts become here the processes of knowing and connecting to others as the temporalised and spatialised embodiments of women's interactions.

The next chapter starts to draw out what kind of cycles of exchange women make in terms of the kinds of continuing productions recipients activate when they receive what have previously been unknown others' circulating selves/no-bodies.

CHAPTER SIX

Active recipients

Contents

Agency, extension and polite fictions

Relations of visibility

The optics of own Forgetting Conceptive onlookers and spectacles of difference Wendy: the spectacle of race Yvonne: the spectacle of sex The procreative 'body' of the hospital

The work of recipiency Blood-food and continuing lines Women's time Pooling relations: gendered substance as action

Conclusions

Chapter Six 184 Agency, extension and polite fictions

It was mentioned in chapter 2 how reciprocal gift exchange implicitly denotes relations of force, power and domination. In the theoretical literature on exchange, the interpretation of the passing of time between gift and countergift has been instructive to such rationalisations, and has been discussed chiefly with reference to the way that exchange partners are thought to enchain others in a 'shadow of indebtedness' (Gouldner 1965:174) such that the current gift impels future returns or increment. In thematic terms, this has not only set up the analytic structure of the gift as an 'objective mechanism' of 'delayed exchange' (Bourdieu 1977), it has also spurred much literature on the theme of the inferior social status or social subordination of the recipient until the time of the counter-return: Until he has given, the receiver is "obliged", expected to show his gratitude toward his benefactor, or, at least, to have regard for him, to refrain from using against him all weapons he otherwise might, to pull his punches, lest he be accused of ingratitude and stand condemned by "what people say", which is what gives his actions their social meaning (Bourdieu 1977:6).

As already discussed, reciprocity assumes the value of equivalence for the way that gifts are seen to be things that balance themselves out over a course of time, and within this model of normative exchange, providing the 'match' of a reciprocated gift denotes the symbolic restoration of equality and equalisation between gift transactors (Blau 1964; Bourdieu 1977:6-7,195; Leach and Leach 1983; Mauss 1990:65; van Baal 1975:29) 1 . As an analytic construct, however, reciprocity has also served to convey a sense of the precariousness between the desired equalisation of persons, on the one hand, and the building of personal strength, repute, and power, on the other.

Chapter Six 185 This latter theme of inequality has been taken up in the gift literature in terms of the theme of the implicitly 'agonistic' (Beidelman 1989) or competitive quality of giftexchanges, evinced in most dramatic form by the ostentatious destruction of wealth by potlatching Amerindians. As a device whereby relationships and social statuses are measured off, or pitted against each other, gift-giving is seen to engender a structure of the 'self only to the extent that the entity of the person is reflected back to him/herself as the mediation of (others') intersubjective regard (Munn 1992b)2. The source of this tension whereby the possibility of a perfect symmetry (Sahlins 1965) is foreclosed by the activity of continuing to outflank others - this actually lending itself to the very form that is the measure of balance - is in part traceable to Mauss's original insight that gifts are 'polite fictions' (Mauss 1990:3,22). Mauss's argument that social gestures are never ventured completely freely or as only actions of a disinterested kind, supports his view that gifts serve the guise of an apparent voluntarism, enabling the parties to the exchange to mask the formalism, social deceit and constraint that in part motivate these social relations and relationships. Yet as Parry (1986) brings to the fore in his interpretation, Mauss perhaps provides with this a social comment on how western philosophical tradition and theorising has invented the premise that the gift should be something that is disinterested or free. Anthropological conceptualisation of this 'darker' side of gift-giving, though, has been eclipsed by the theoretical centrality generally accorded to the equivalence thesis3.

When Bourdieu made Mauss' gift even more polite by transposing it to the 'sincere' fiction of disinterestedness (1977:171), he referred at the same time to the political operations of 'méconnaissance' or misrecognition. It is as part of his conceptual attack

Chapter Six 186 on the shortcomings of phenomenological accounts of 'naive humanism' and structuralist objectivism, that Bourdieu argues that the construct of reciprocity cannot relate to an objective form of 'delayed exchange', comprised hypothetically as kinds of preregulated and mechanical returns. Reciprocity, he argues, is not some kind of 'inert gap of time' (6), but the performance of intervals of time lived out as social practices; practices, he stresses, that are embedded crucially in the strategic deployment of relations of power and domination: 'Once the possibility is admitted that the 'mechanical law' of the 'cycle of reciprocity' may not apply, the whole logic of practice is transformed' (9).

For Bourdieu, the construct of reciprocity only becomes intelligible in terms of the reciprocal relations through which persons are (subjectively) implicated as particular kinds of agents. What he refers to as the 'fake circulation of fake coin' (1977:6) implicates a system of symbolic exchanges in which one would have to question, he claims, the extent to which agents do, and do not recognise, the power stakes and strategies through which they necessarily become implicated during these exchange transactions.

Beyond claims of 'false consciousness', the theme of misrecognition is a significant one. To begin with, it has suggestive force for the ways in which forms of power may be invested as both the material and psychical embodiments of the person. Bourdieu's view is that misrecognition denotes the way that the fictional nature of gifts tallies with the disinterested gestures of 'ego'. When he then connects the duplicity of symbolic exchange - what he calls 'fake circulation' - with the non-material returns

Chapter Six 187 and expectations that gifts and gift giving harnesses, he perceives of the material gift as transmissively laden with psychical intention. It is because these intentions may not be 'received' and acted upon in ways originally countenanced, that there can be, as he says, nothing 'mechanical' about the exchange. The lapse of time that is the interval, and which he theorises as 'reciprocity', is the condition of possibility for such instances of misrecognition (méconnaissance). However, Bourdieu takes great pains to stress how misrecognition transcends simply the affairs of the individual. Misrecognition is both the systemic offshoot of the discursively reproduced 'universe of the undiscussed' (op cit: 164-171) in which things appear natural and safely familiar, as well as the engendering of the strategic concealments that persons, as agents, halfconsciously negate during the course of social interaction. 'If the system is to work', he says, 'the agents must not be entirely unaware of the truth of their exchanges, which is made explicit in the anthropologist's model, while at the same time they must refuse to know and above all to recognise it' (6).

However, were such misrecognitions to be rendered intelligible as particular practices of power and forms of subjectivity, agents might not appear quite as hoodwinked as Bourdieu would wish us to believe. Then it would not be so much a case of the extent to which transactors do and do not recognise and partake in the power stakes and strategies through which they necessarily become implicated, but rather a case of the way in which agents can and cannot recognise for themselves the kinds of relations they keep on embodying. In a recent critique, Gell (1 992b) supports this view when he argues, citing examples from Melanesian material, that in cases of formal competitive gift exchange, transactors may, in practice, be seen as more self-aware of

Chapter Six 188 the strategic value of their actions and hence more effectively fleshed out as relational persons.

In fairness to Bourdieu, however, one would however have to recognise that he does mention that strategies of deferral constitute the 'deliberate spacing out' of time. He suggests anecdotally how time may be withheld altogether, or else devoted excessively to somebody (op cit:6). What he does not go on to consider, however, are the different kinds of embodied knowledges that these two such strategies may produce. Consequently, what Bourdieu refers to as the 'generative' effects of practice whereby the agent is situated 'within the very movement of their accomplishment' (3) - namely, their actions - is not drawn out. In Bourdieu's account, whether time has been withdrawn or generously extended is collapsed to the homogenous likeness of 'strategy' per Se. Since the denial or extension of time to others becomes the functional equivalent of strategy and strategic action, the reader gains no insight into how temporality might be embodied differentially by persons as versions or forms of the body-in-generation. Nor is the reader any the more knowledgable about the agents' own perceptions of these differences. What thoughts and what actions follow from the deferred expenditure of time; or, if this develops into a recognised pattern of action, what are the shifts in power and for whom? How are the politics of gender relations constituted when 'an inert gap of time' is filled with the strategies and desires of agents who have different claims and social statuses in a particular social context or society?

Though it is by his own admission that symbolic exchanges may misfire - such that

Chapter Six 189 the psychical transmissions embodied by the gift may go awry - Bourdieu does not develop this line of thinking further to ask how and why these deliberate spacings of time are not to be recognised properly as the play of intention. Part of the reason why he does not pursue the material and psychical implications of misrecognition may partly be attributable to the way he presents his working hypotheses as formulations set in the negative. The question of intention is only present as it elides with these partial and eschewed knowledges; and this leaves open the crucial and unfinished interpretation of what misrecognition actually is: what kind of knowledges agents of misrecognition make for themselves and embody.

Turning our attention to the case of anonymously produced and transacted gifts of the body, recipients are women who are clearly in no position to return an equivalent kind of 'matchable' reproductive substance. Nor are they able, at a later date, to initiate any kind of material return precisely because of their invisibilised status encoded so trenchantly as the taboo of anonymity. But are they thereby rendered socially subordinate or relatively powerless? Do recipients necessarily become automatically indebted to (their) donors? Whilst anonymity as taboo clearly necessitates the impossibility of returns, the next two chapters aim to show how the prohibition also provides a cue for the configurement of certain relations that also constitute certain processes of exchange as imaginary intersubjective connections. In this way, it is possible to start to build up certain 'likenesses' between donors and recipients in terms of the relations they make, rather than seeing them as transactors who are notionally equal prior to their exchange (see chapter 2 footnote 7). To start to consider if trajectories of invisibility are exchanged between the women, and what

Chapter Six 190 kind of relations of power such (non)identities might surmise, the first part of this chapter examines how recipients do not receive the same kinds of gifts that donors donate. The crucial point is that the source of recipients' misrecognition is not to be attributed to donors' strategic play. Although recipients receive a different gift to that offered by donors, the second part of the chapter goes on to look at how recipients nonetheless constitute themselves as similar kinds of persons to donors.

Relations of visibility

The optics of own Recipients consistently stress how fortunate or relieved they are that their children 'look' like them. Sometimes, women's entire accounts seem to be structured in terms of how they can make physical similarities between themselves and their offspring seem more 'real' or more obvious than just apparent similarities. Though women know these are not 'authentic' similarities, in the sense that they are not transmitted genetically as their ('own') physiological characteristics, many recipients say that in one regard they think they need to establish connections with their children on account of these perceived likenesses. Partly, their accounts seem to be about imagining what it is that the look of the other is thought to be capable of fathoming as the production of social skin.

This concern with physical resemblance, and with 'their' children looking preferably either 'like' them, or else 'like' their partner, relates partly to the way in which

Chapter Six 191 recipients believe the child can be made (to seem) as though he/she were to have been the outcome of an otherwise 'natural' or non-assisted conception. This is underscored by how women imagine physical resemblances will seem obvious and natural to outsiders. Susie, for instance, comments with relief that her daughter looks just like her husband: 'I must admit - not knowing what the donor looks like but from his pictures and even looking at her now, she's like the spitting image of him...' This kind of sentiment runs throughout very many women's accounts, and it is one which also supports what they hope they, and by implication others, will be able to trace as physical similarities with a present or deceased relation. One very common idiom used by many recipients is the term of 'spitting images'. Though Tess manages to find a spitting image between her daughter and her niece, she talks here about her concern as to how people are able to look at her new-born daughter and at herself. For her, it is as though others' scrutiny could threaten to undermine her feelings of maternal ownership in her child.

Tess: ..now she's been born and she does look very much like my husband anyway. When she was first born she was a replica of my husband and my niece - my sister's daughter is eighteen, but when she was a baby she was just the spitting image of her.. I don't know what the woman [donor] looked like so I don't know whether she resembles the lady, I don't know. But what it was - what we were trying to protect was - when she was born I didn't want people looking at her, and then thinking who does she look like? You know - trying to really, I suppose, get a picture of the woman. Whereas now people say "oh she looks like you, Tess" but it's obvious she doesn't - unless they've really matched us up so well. I didn't want people to come to the hospital to look at her as if she was some kind of . . . . "well? - who is it that she looks like?" that sort of thing. I wonder if she looks like the woman - I wonder what the woman looked like? But it was a case of... "oh my! she is identical to my husband. Oh! she really takes after Mark. Oh! she's really her dad's girl, isn't she!". And then occasionally a few people would say "oh! I can see a bit of you in her" and I would just say "oh yeah?"...I don't look at her [daughter]

Chapter Six 192 now and think: well, I wonder if that woman had that kind of shape face or nose, or - it doesn't really.., we don't even think about it... I mean she's ours...But to outsiders, I didn't want them.. really I suppose, we just wanted to protect her.

Una also tries to establish a 'spitting image' in an attempt to make her child her 'own' from out of others' observable traits.

Una: ...my son is the image of his father. And it's freaky really. And I'm very pleased with that. And people just look at him and say: "gosh!', and I think "yes".. he's also fair - my husband was very fair as a young man. The other freaky thing is - which is so nice for my boy - is that my husband's brother has a jewish wife - and they're half jewish anyway - all of them are - but my husband's people are very fair and jewish, but his wife is very dark, obviously jewish looking, and I'm very dark but not jewish - and both her girls are very fair and very blond and very anglo-saxon looking. And she's as dark as I am.. .so there is a similarity because her blond children and her black hair don't go together, and my black hair and my blond child don't go together...so my little boy has got two first cousins - they are his natural first cousins with the two fathers and two brothers - and my sister is dead so he has nobody belonging to him on my side at all, so his actual blood relatives are exactly the same as him - they're blond and blue eyed, yet their mother is black - like black hair - and dark like I am...and in my head I suppose Ijust think that this could have happened willy nilly, because the amazing thing seems to be the most powerful gene with my husband and his brother is their mother. It's the mother's family that come up. One of his daughters is left-handed, my little boy is left-handed. She has got a bit of a speech delay in one of them, he has a little bit of a speech delay as well, so it's amazing how, say when they are normally conceived, it's his mother and her people that come down as the dominant side with the two brothers' children...! just feel very relieved that when you see the three children together, they all look the same.

Una's account is suggestive partly for the way in which borrowings are seen to be transformed into likenesses that are more 'real' than natural. The child's blond hair and the mother's dark hair can be cross-matched intrafamilially, so that the semblance of a resemblance make both sets of cousins and both sets of parents seem as though

Chapter Six 193 they are the cognatic reproductions of the other. And because in this case the dissimulation is a substitution that can never be traced, the source of difference produces what Una takes to be a 'freaky' kind of reproduction. But most of all, the non-continuity that was the production will, she thinks, not be able to be shown up as the events of a past time. Likeness will have been made as invisibly as it comes to appear naturally.

It is as she recognises that she is not the genetic mother of her child that Una goes on to explain how she could be perceived by others as the embodiment of a 'normal conception'. What Una finds 'freaky' is the unnatural degree to which dissimulation has been enacted, making simulation not just the copy of, but identical to the so-called 'natural' that is being simulated. What is 'freaky' is that these relations appear 'willy nilly'; that which comes to be knowable as a 'like' appearance does so as though it could have been the outcome of a natural(ised) conception. 'Freaky' also portends the double-edged connection of the arbitrary with the monstrosity of the abnormal, and in this sense the desire to appear as if a 'natural' conception has taken place resonates with the fears associated with breaching 'the normal', as well as with a sense that ultimately what has been surpassed, is an original act of (pro)creation. For most recipients, though, it is the thought of not wanting to remember past assistance that touches upon notions of origins and heredity as events to be overcome.

Forgetting

Chapter Six 194 Statements about children looking like others, and significantly, looking like related kin, seem to reveal some of recipients' most deep-seated preoccupations and worries. One such concern is manifest as women's apparent readiness to transform the knowledge of a foregone physical maternity into a relation of genealogical ignorance. This is apparent from the way that recipients seem to be involved in creating relations as persons best thought forgotten. This represents, in part, the transformation of certain relations into new kinds of social ties - from relations of artifice into ones of 'real' connectedness between social mother and child. Yet equally, these ties represent transformations that women take it upon themselves to instigate as 'real' connections because they in part presume they are 'merely' the bodies of partially embodied persons, since they conflate reproductive powers with conceptions of persons as necessarily biologically continuous. Yet in this particular context, conceptions of women's bodies as discontinuous do not emerge discursively as the social symptoms of women's physiological 'ignorance': the source of procreative discontinuity does not reside here as to whether or not the 'facts' of conception have been internalised adequately as ideological dogma by the women concerned. Forms of discontinuity arise, rather, with regards to how women's disavowal of past procreative events 'ignores' other kinds of relations.

It was discussed in chapter 4 how in certain instances donors appear not to recognise the discursive operations of power producing their ostensibly 'easy' and 'natural' bodily productions. This point was subsequently developed to illustrate how it is just at those very moments when women seem to be in discursive abeyance to medical constructions of their persons as donating entities of innate substance, that they were

Chapter Six 195 also in the process of distancing themselves from these same interiorly entrapped bodies by instigating new kinds of social relations (see chapter 4: 'no ties, no commitment...'). What recipients misrecognise and fail to see is how concerns about being genetically usurped as a (biological) 'genetrix', cannot possibly match up with the bio-genetically 'abstinent' gifts donors have been busying themselves making.

Notions of resemblance also serve to show how in one regard recipients make connections in ways that are quite different to the continuing (re)circulations of body parts envisioned by donors. What appears to matter most to recipients is that what someone can see of the child cou'd be invested phantasmatically as the ongoing and continuous productions of the social mother. On the one hand, this relates to the assumption that the kind of reproductions recipients' children embody are not symbolically equivalent to women's self-continuous productions: as women will intimate in various ways, the procreative moments of assisted conception represent some kind of a 'gap' of time (see below 'the procreative 'body' of the hospital'). And the belief that what you can see of the child may be invested as continuing productions, is also related to the assumption that these productions can however be evinced in the living form of the child, since he/she is thought to represent a material form of the embodiment of parent-child relations.

Since women are stressing here how notions of genetical substance as property may be framed as claims about transmission, and are using a discourse of physical resemblance as the idiom with which to describe ties of common biological identity, there are some parallels between the relations of visibility that recipients think they

Chapter Six 196 enact, and the clinical procedures that transform women into potentially matchable parts. Like the clinical practices of matching whereby donors were made into more or less similar kinds of metonymically equivalent part-persons (chapter 2), recipients go on to make from out of these anonymised body parts certain relations of visibility. These anonymised parts are taken as the basis for establishing future ties - a common substance - to their offspring. Acting as the embodiment of a 'match', they are able to imagine that they can symbolically void the genetic-gestational hiatus of discontinuous and differentiated productions assumed by a biological model of reproduction. This is because the equivalences produced from out of the pseudogenetical discourse of 'matching' come to assume value in terms of recipients' imaginary simulations of a 'natural' reproduction. In this way, recipients overlook the inventiveness (cf: Strathern 1988) of women's gifts when they imagine not only that donors give their body parts as their genetical substances, but also that donors think of themselves as kinds of (biological) mothers of this substance, suppressing or quietly entertaining the hope of establishing subsequent relationships.

But as was highlighted in the previous chapters, donors narratively de-contextualise and re-contextualise the nature of the substance they donate, and their accounts are significant precisely for the way they depart from notions of reproductive substance as bio-genetic, as well as from notions of a person's essentialised proprietorship in (their) body parts. Earlier it was shown how many women desired relations of 'no ties' and 'no commitment', with many women going so far as to say not only that the ova not only did not come from their body, but were not to be thought of as ova at all: this was the point regarding women's references to their detached parts as simply

Chapter Six 197 'chicken's eggs or just a couple of 'bundle of cells'.

Like Tess, Val also entertains the idea of persons looking in at her and her daughter from an exogenous site. Yet rather than just pretend that physical resemblances delete the past presence of the donor, Una reminds herself that whilst others might be able to see physical 'continuities' as a kind of social insignia of consanguineal connectedness, she knows these resemblances are not quite 'real': 'There's this third person that none of us know about really. We don't know what she looks like...'. She goes on to describe an optics of spectatorship around her hospital bed:

Val: • . .When people were coming in and friends and family were saying all about how she looks just like her dad, and then someone said: "I can see a bit of mum there" and I thought: "well, no - you can't". In my mind, you're aware of people around you, you've got so many people around your bed and they're all looking at the baby and they're all saying all these things which is why we didn't want it known 'cos we wanted to protect her. I didn't want people looking at her thinking: does she look like that other lady that none of us know about. I didn't want that, I didn't want them sort of really peering at her.. whereas I thought if you just be natural and just see what happens. And you're aware of people saying that she's just like your dad and "oh no - I can see a bit of Una there" and I can remember laying there thinking "well actually, no you can't". There's this third person that none of us know about really. We don't know what she looks like...

Yet a quite consistent feature of recipients' narratives is their preference not to make use of substance from a woman they know, whether this be from a relative or a friend. Many women point out how their knowledge that they could identify a specific donor is something that would disturb their productive processes of making the child into what they term as their 'own'. They say for instance how knowing the identity of the

Chapter Six 198 donor would mean they would always be reminded of them when they would look at the child. They also say how others, especially the biological mother, would always point out the physical differences between the social mother and offspring, that as already mentioned women feel they must strive to conceal.

Susie: ...I wouldn't want my sister's or sister in laws eggs. It's too close to home...they knew that it was their eggs and no doubt our parents would do. And they wouldn't look at her now and say: "oh yes, she's Susie's daughter". They'd say: "oh yes, doesn't she look like Susie's sister in law. She's got her eyes and nose". And I think then she's not my daughter. She's too much involved with the other genes. Whereas we don't know the donor and I carried her for nine months and bought her up and she's just totally my daughter. I don't think of her any different. Whereas if I had her and I could see my little sister in her, or my sister in law, I would think: "oh yes, she does look like her". So I think it's just too close to home (emphasis added).

What these examples show is how the modelling of kinship takes place as the effects of matching: that is, as likenesses which can be elicited from the surface of the skin because they have been produced as the social mother's knowledge of her consanguineal discontinuity. This is worked out equivocally as uncertainties - as the half-known, indeterminate form of different kinships: these are the recipient/social mother's reckoning of relations of visibility as kinds of continuities shaped from a bilateral and patrilineal kinship frame, both of which tend towards isolating the donor socially as the excluded genetrix.

Chapter Six 199 Conceptive onlookers and spectacles of difference

With the feeling that persons are 'peering' as Va! put it, there is a sense in which others take on the imaginary status of conceptive onlookers: of persons who are able to watch relations as a 'spectacle' of difference. In part, the visibility of the spectacle is the apprehension that the recipient and her child will be shown up as the unembodied hiatus of 'lack' between mother and child: that these kinds of nonrelations can sit as something disparate on the skins of mother and child. Yet persons, as onlookers, are being envisioned here in very general terms as kinds of 'someones': as the collective capacity of many. It is not just the immediate persons around Tess and Val's hospital bedsides who can apparently see what does not 'match', it is the many imaginary someones who are evoked as a cohesive force making up the rest of society. Thus, matching becomes the practice whereby 'ownership' of a person can be made to be known, but only as the transposition of relations of visibility to the surface of the skin. What is matched, however, is not only already delimited by the field of vision.

The practice of matching is not only performed on the basis of what the eye can see; it is, even more critically delimited by what it is imagined the eye can fathom of past actions. Persons who 'peer' are not simply onlookers who regard the surface of the skin as the conduit for genetical transmissions. Rather, what makes the spectacle into a bounded performance are the embodied pasts of prior actions - actions that are also imagined to be ones of a specifically sexualised kind. The next section looks at some of the ways in which those who 'peer' are felt by recipients to have been

Chapter Six 200 persons in some way invisibly present during pre-conceptive moments. Many women seem to be saying that it is as if these onlookers could see 'through' the semblance of their likenesses and in part, the 'spectacle' inheres in the imagined sexualisation of another's procreative past. What it is that other people can critically 'look in' on, it is believed, is the post-performative embodiment of another person's procreative acts. What sits on the skin - as the relations of visibility - is a mirage of such performances. In some cases, women seem to suggest that the mother's body is almost one brandished as the historicity of its sexuality, which in turn underscores the assumption that the genetic and the gestational are implicitly sexualised as the naturalised sites of women's (re)productive work, growth and energies.

Wendy: the spectacle of race

In the following extracts, Wendy and Yvonne imagine other persons as outsiders looking in at them as a spectacle of potentially unembodied and discontinuous difference. Wendy illustrates this when she talks about how she could not have given birth to a different race child, though she can see herself adopting a child of colour. The way she formulates this difference bears implicitly upon her conception of body parts as the genetical substance of physical characteristics.

Wendy: I could have adopted one.. obviously if that had come about, the anonymity in the family and friends wouldn't have been able to have happened because again, it would have been my husband obviously., because it would have been his sperm that would have fertilised the egg, but obviously it would have had to have been right out in the open because you couldn't obviously try and turn.. .that that was yours because it would have been another colour,

Chapter Six 201 nationality - whatever. So obviously everything would have had to have been upfront...It wouldn't have worried me having a child of a different nationality 'cos we would have adopted that - but I think that's rather how I would have done it. I don't know whether I could have carried and delivered a child of a different nationality. She goes on to say that she doubts whether she could have bonded with such a child:

because obviously it would have been very plain that it wouldn't have been it could never have been mine. Whereas with this, I mean there's no reason why she couldn't have been mine, so I bonded, as I say, right from the beginning she was - I was expecting a baby and it was my baby. There was no question that it wasn't my baby. If I was carrying another nationality, especially if it was a nationality which was quite obvious that it was - some aren't so obvious - there was no way I could have gone along thinking that yes, it would have been my baby ... I'd either been playing around because it wouldn't have been my husband's - they would have been thinking - it if was a different nationality - or it can't be mine, you know. I mean one thing would have to go. I mean it would have either been mine and it wouldn't be my husband's, or as though there would have always been this...you know, even anybody you meet in the street. Whereas to have adopted one, you could have just said: "oh yes, we've adopted a baby", and that's the finish of it.

Wendy states the exact opposite to the kinds of thoughts of some of the donors discussed in chapter 4, since she entertains here the idea that a child that does not originate from her flesh and blood, as it were, could not possibly be embodied as a subsequent part of her 'bodily' person. As she says, it would have been 'plain' for others to see, not simply that the child is not her 'own', but that the child could not originally have been genetically continuous with her. It was shown in chapters 4 and 5 that women who donate, however, do not say that a child originates from their 'flesh and blood'; as a donated part of their persons they choose not to embody offspring 'biologically' related to them.

It would seem the difference partly has to do with how Wendy's conception of a 'different nationality' is something that she assumes would adversely affect the

Chapter Six 202 process of parturitional growth because, as she implies, non-consanguineal transmission is symbolically conflated as the sexual transgression of previous conjugal infidelities and other recipients also express similar reservations when they say such things as 'people would think I'd been unfaithful to my husband'. In this instance, Wendy's usage of the past perfect tense 'she couldn't have been mine' connotes not just her preconception of natural rights in persons, but also how ownership is deemed to be a relation established as the sexualisation that is the child's genesis. Future relations with 'her' child are in this way governed by how she can pass off parts of her body in terms of the anticipation of others' notionally confirming looks. She wants others to look towards them as the embodiment of 'matched' kinds of mother-child pairing.

Yet in the midst of this conflation, Wendy also says how a different race child need not be 'protected' by anonymity. Because such a child could not be considered as authentically 'hers', 'everything could be upfront'. This way of opening up 'spectacles' as the acknowledged and visibilised kinds of connections (between parent and child), is quite at odds with the hidden kind of 'adoption' Rita felt she donated when she made an extension of herself 'through' the enactment of imaginary past relations with her birth mother. Rita was able to make her body parts into new relations by enacting parts of what she imagined had been her mother's past. She reembodied what she took to have once been her mother's dilemma, handing over something that was like the action her mother committed when she gave up her daughter for adoption. Moreover, Rita made these connections through the circulations she generated when she made herself into an anonymised 'someone'. Wendy, though,

Chapter Six 203 is not thinking about parts of bodies as potential or past relations but about how her whole person carries with it the performances of past sexual acts which cannot be detached from her body.

Yvonne: the spectacle of sex

Yvonne is also concerned with how body parts serve to maintain sexually circumscribed relations, and like the account given by Wendy, hers is structured in terms of preserving certain continuities. She makes some interesting remarks with regards to how a 'match', envisioned as a seamless kind of continuity between donors and recipients, does not necessarily dispel assumptions of difference or discontinuity. Yvonne describes her relationship to the donor in terms of the 'work' that they do 'together', referring to this as a type of 'teamwork', or 'partnership'. What is exchanged between them is defined by her as a specifically female transaction in which the emotional knowledges of a mutually shared 'hope' appear to set up relations of exchange between them. She uses her knowledge about processes of synchronisation between donors and recipients to describe these relations, imagining how their respective bodies symbolically join 'on the same level' in space and time once they have been suitably 'prepared'. What she goes on to refer to as the 'one-toone' exchange between them is conceptualised as an interchange that is so seamless, so 'matched', that it is almost dissimulated into a form of non-exchange that could not, or need not, have taken place. It is in this particular context that Yvonne stresses how she acts to 'take over' from the donor and create a 'continuing line'.

Chapter Six 204 In Passage 1 below, Yvonne is concerned with resolving what she imagines to be a procreative 'gap' between herself and her partner. The second passage taken from a later part of her speech underscores not only how parts need to be transformed into genetical relations of continuity, but also conveys how parts of a person's sexuality are thought to be transmissively extended and circulating symbolically as that person's past actions. Though her conceptions are framed in terms of substance as bio-genetic, Yvonne unwittingly outlines how body parts can be transacted as a person's actions.

Yvonne: Passage 1

he's [husband] just donating his sperm and he thinks he's got no connections with the donor, whereas I feel I have because she's passing on to me part of her which I've taken over. So I think the females have got more of a relationship to what the husband and donor have got.... I'm not saying that my husband didn't play any part in it at all because obviously he did. But I think with the woman, I mean it's a woman's egg, she's actually giving it to me and she's only crossing it with the sperm. But she's actually passing her own egg onto the other female. So I think it's more of a personal relationship between two women than it is with the donor and the male. She's actually passing it to me in the process of being fertilised with the sperm, so I think it's more of a one-to- one. With the husband just sort of like stepping in in the middle and that's it really.

...she's preparing her body to give to you what you're preparing your body for. You're both preparing your body in a way that she's going to.. it sort of feels like her body is going to become pregnant with all the eggs that are building up in her, and my womb lining is getting thicker from the drugs and the hormones, that you are both going through the same process really, I think.. .Your body must feel roughly on the same level, I would think.., because you're both meeting to that point. You're both aiming for that one point and that's it... I think you're both sharing hope really.. And one just takes over

Chapter Six 205 from where the other one has left off...! think there's just a little gap where the partner of the recipient fertilises the eggs. Not directly, but the gynaecologist or whatever. They do it for you. But I think that's just that little gap there so that it goes to them without being fertilised and it comes to me fertilised. That is just a little step, if you see what I mean. And who steps into that little gap?

The hospital, because they take the sperm.

And would you say that your husband also fills that little gap, or would it just be the hospital?

I would say it's both really. Without my husband the eggs couldn't get fertilised, but without the hospital the sperm couldn't fertilise the egg.

And though there is this gap, you continue over from the donor?

Oh yes, the only difference being is that they're fertilised now. That is the only difference. Other than that it is the same, it's a continuing line...

Passage 2

No. I wouldn't have accepted eggs from a lesbian. It's nothing against lesbians really. Because I think each to their own ... but I think like a lesbian woman donating her eggs to me is not right to me. I'm not saying that the donor would say - making a play for you - obviously it's all anonymous, but you think like a lesbian sort of might maybe get a kink out of it maybe in a roundabout way. I just don't know how their minds work so.. that's one way I might look at it, they just sort of get a funny kink out of it. Do you know what I mean sort of thing? It's just the way I feel that they like being with other women sexually so maybe they might think that way. You know, doing it that way... because... because if you're a lesbian you're really having sex not that you're having sex donating eggs, but you're really involved with women and not really... and in that aspect you can't have a baby anyway, so why donate eggs when you can't have a family because you're sexually involved with women.

Chapter Six 206 The key to Yvonne's commentary turns on the way in which substance can be imagined as detached body parts that circulate as the metonymical extensions of 'whole' persons. To the making of a relational likeness, Yvonne can be seen to add another dimension. Body parts, she imagines, are not only parts that stand in for persons, they are parts that stand in for the potentially sexualised capacities and actions that are these persons. Donors and recipients' partners make, she implies, potentially cross-transferable relations since they enact a mythical spectacle of sex in this 'gap' through the form of their transacting body parts. For Yvonne, it is this 'gap' as a particular conceptive space and time that represents not only the nature of her discontinuous productions, but the productions she must go on to convert into the imagined connection of a 'continuing line'. One way she manages to do this is by stressing how it is that the women together make continuities between them: they are somehow 'on the same level' and constitute themselves as 'like' in the sense that they are a remaindered part of a (hetero)sexual model of exchange. This very same likeness, as the resemblance of time, is also the moment for 'forgetting' and cancelling out the donor and her past actions4.

The procreative 'body' of the hospital

One way of getting women to talk some more about these difficult issues was to find out how 'gaps' in space and time came to be imagined as kinds of discontinuities. I would usually broach the subject by asking recipients to recall their experiences of waiting in the hospital on the day scheduled for embryo transfer. In connection with this quite a lot of material was gathered on the subject of how women thought about

Chapter Six 207 cross-corporeal exchanges as transferable actions taking place within the containing 'body' of the hospital.

Zoe, for instance, is concerned with the relative spatial positionings of women's and men's bodies, and she establishes a sense of space as bounded in terms of the building she is in, as well as in terms of how her body relates spatially to that of the donor's within this space.

Zoe: ...like the day of the operation, like with the last lady. There's a funny feeling I got. Because we were there on the day she was having her operation. Obviously you don't meet her because she's even on a different level; you're in one part of the hospital and she's in another part. But there's just something in your mind. You know, she's in that building, do you know what I mean? And it was a strange feeling to know that we were all in that building together but we were never going to meet, and it's quite a strange feeling that, you know, that we were all part of it together.. .that she's there and she was doing it for... She didn't know she was doing it for me, obviously. But I thought she's lying there and she's just giving these eggs away and within sort of the next day they're going to be part of me. It's a strange feeling to put into words.

In several senses it seems to be significant to Zoe that she is within the same space as the donor when 'her' eggs are removed. In a certain sense Zoe thinks of the hospital as a place that contains their respective bodies. It encloses them safely in the presumed efficacy of a procreative setting, conducing a sense of anticipated togetherness which for her is a 'funny' and 'strange' feeling because it represents a kind of unification, imagined in terms of a simulated kind of sexualised performance. The connection is in part analogous to the way 'freakish' copying worked for Una

Chapter Six 208 where the context to establishing a physical resemblance was a natural conception that could have happened 'willy nilly' - an unlikely and almost too perfect, and thus 'freakish' simulation of dissimulation. Val's account, as mentioned earlier, contains the surprise and relief that she could not be made into a spectacle of difference: that the non-continuous did not show 'up' as a breach of connectedness. What Zoe finds 'funny' and 'strange' is the disjunction between two orders of imaginary knowledges: on the one hand, these are the imaginary connections she makes as relations from out of the temporal and spatial compressions that bring all three parties to the donation 'in that building together' - somehow making her feel as though 'we were all part of it together'. This seems to be countered and supported by the knowledge that 'we were never going to meet', so that it is in this context as the relation of a distant connection that Zoe takes these past actions, of which she and her body is necessarily composed, and makes them ones that are 'going to be part of me'. What yokes these different knowledges together is a mythicalised conception of enactments of conception as the time that takes place within the greater procreative 'body' of the hospital. It would seem that some 'other' kind of space of body-time is being invented now as the metaphorical form of 'other' enclosures, 'other' containments and significantly that this space stands in metaphorically for other 'human' bodies and social relations. Although she and her partner have been conceptively apart, they nonetheless can imagine themselves to have been procreatively together. Partly, they achieve this by setting about making the knowledge that they have been in the same hospital 'together'. Their 'jointness' is something that is established metaphorically as a spatial connection that brings them together during the donor's donating time, and like Yvonne, Zoe is able to make from out of these past actions, the beginnings of a

Chapter Six 209 continuity, of 'taking over'. The donor is, as she says, 'lying there' one day, only to be an action/part that will be 'part of me' the next day.

Other women hone in on the actual moments of embryo transfer, describing the procedure of uterine transfer as processes they realise they can see. The knowledge that embryos are 'going in' to their bodies makes the past moments of fertilisation seem somehow more 'real' to them. Transmission becomes something that can be seen to be performed, something of which the recipient becomes a part. Zeta talks about the moments of transfer, comparing those treatment attempts when she was able to watch the embryos passing in to her body with times when this had not been possible.

Zeta: • . .when you have it done for embryo transfer they normally put a little screen up and you get to see the embryos before they're put back. But on that day I had the first go, the television screen wasn't in the room. So we never got to see them. So that first go I didn't sort of really... I knew they went in but I didn't see them so that was...! didn't really know much about that. The second go I didn't know much about because I was under anaesthetic, so I didn't actually see them going in. But as regards of all the goes - the third go I felt. Because we were watching it on the screen. We saw them on the screen before they went in. And I felt "that's it". I can see what they're doing this time and I know that they're going in. Not that I doubt that the others went in, but you just don't see them. Because my husband said to me: "we are going to see them this time, we are going to say that we definitely want to see them". Because I think psychologically, you know that when you've seen them on the screen you know that they're going in. And we did see them so that made me feel happier. Like I say, I didn't even think of the donor that time, it was just thinking that I've seen them going in and I know they're in there this time (emphasis added).

The 'conceptive' moment is not embodied here as knowledge of what the eye can see as social skin. The 'spectacle' is rather one of averting difference 'pre-conceptively' by positioning the body as an interiorised space taking in movement, distinguishing

Chapter Six 210 inside from outside in terms of how the woman's body serves as this natural marker. Even before others will be able to 'peer' as critical onlookers, Zeta suggests how she prefers to oversee the embryos being drawn into her body, these transfers counting as more 'real', and somehow as more a 'part' of her.

Yasmin makes the connection to seeing and 'owning' body parts a little more explicitly. What she can see going in to her body is something that can become a part of her as 'hers' because she knows these parts are her 'inside'.

Yasmin: And did you think differently when you saw them as opposed to when you just heard about them as eggs that you would be receiving in the future? Yes. Yes I did. I felt closer to them... I felt that they were mine and I felt that it was happening because you saw it... Other times when they've just gone, they tell you when you're ready, you're prepared and then they say: "right we're just going to collect the eggs and put them in the little tube". Then they implant them and then they say: "right we'll just wait now". And then they check that the tube is empty, that they are not still in there. And then you get the all clear: "yes, they've gone". So you know they're inside you, but you haven't seen anything. Whereas when you have seen them on the screen, you see them drawing into the catheter tube, so you know that they are there and now they're in that tube, and I just feel so close to them when it's happening (emphasis added).

The free circulations of parts that flow between 'someones' as relations that are never seen, though known intimately as 'ripple effects', (see Penny, chapter 5) are here 'received' as the anonymised parts that enter Yasmin's 'own' specific body. Notions of natural rights in the person are starting to cohere once again with the time of interiorisation which also represents the time of putting the physicalised body back together as the edifying assemblage of different and fractured parts: namely, parts that

Chapter Six 211 a priori rest upon a conception of the body as a naturally bounded space between interiorised and exteriorised persons.

Just as it was shown how donors' narratives came to be articulated from moments of apparent contradictions, so the same may be said for the multi-textured accounts given by many recipients. In the case of donors, it is possible to say generally that as a group of women talking about their experiences, the main ambiguities turn on how donated substance is at once something non-genetical, though at times this is narrated as a residual discourse of the genetical. Odelle (chapter 5), for instance, draws upon a notion of 'selfish genes' at the same time as she talks about having a 'child by proxy': this is her idiom for extending her genes as previous relations 'through' other and imaginary relations in time. In the case of recipients, women's equivocal positions also become apparent as certain rhetorical shifts of emphases. These vacillate between both wanting to forget and remember the assistances they feel so grateful to have received. The next section starts to draw out some of these ambiguities, noting how moments of disavowal and forgetting coalesce as moments of gratitude and remembering: recipients make their children their 'own' not just by forgetting donors and establishing forms of (genetical) discontinuity. They also make memories as the time of agency and as their (own) enactments of continuity. They make their children parts of themselves: their actions becoming the substance of these relations.

Chapter Six 212 The work of recipiency

Metaphors of growth, nurturance and nourishment are predominant images informing recipients' accounts. Certain blood imagery unfolds narratively as a complex set of shifting associations with blood conceptualised as a valuable source of nourishment and supplied as a kind of women's 'lifeforce' or 'lifeline' and creating relatedness in terms of the feeding relationship.

Blood-food and continuing lines

The productive nature of blood is also a metaphor of growth, with forms of growth and the circulations of blood taking place as the interiorised relations of the mother's embodied gestation-work.

Yvonne: ...we knew the eggs were being fertilised and it wasn't your egg. It was somebody else's and I think at that time, yes, she was passing on to me an egg. It wasn't a being, it wasn't a baby or anything. It was just this little tiny spec and that was it. But the more the egg grew into a foetus and a baby, the more it became you and less of the donor. The more you go into your pregnancy, I personally found it got less and less to do with the donor and more and more to do with me taking over... Because from then on, it was my body and it was up to me to carry the pregnancy through as much as I can. But it was me that was definitely taking it over. Yes, probably from that point, I think. It was then: "right: it's up to me now. And away you go"...it is really the mother that gives you life, gives you birth - gives birth to you rather, and feeds you, everything inside her. And when I was carrying her, I felt she was totally mine for the next nine months - nobody else could have a look in.. .1 feel like I am her.. .far be it from genetic mother.. .but I carried her and gave her oxygen, and fed her in the blood food in me. I wouldn't let another woman carry the baby even though it was my husband's genes and then hand the baby over... In me the child is growing and you feel it.

Chapter Six 213 Yvonne makes the connection between growth as an interiorised relation and forms of socialised exclusivity when she comments on how nobody else can have a 'look in' on her production. Removing productions from sight, making growth hidden, connects to the theme of the agent as distinguishable through relations of separation and detachment5 . Some women describe how this relationship of feeding is activated by the movement of blood, where food-substance takes on value as a capacity circulating between bodies not yet detached from each other.

Winifred:

...it's my body that's given her life and it's my blood that's going to be going around the baby's system, so apart from that tiny little beginning. Otherwise it's completely us... apart from that tiny little beginning, she is ours... it's my blood that's running through her veins. It's my body that nurtured her for nine months. Apart from that tiny tiny little cell to begin with... really the only part of you in that child would be your blood stream and whatever influence you have on it once it was born. Winifred sees blood as the mother's 'stream' that is 'going around the baby's system' and 'running through her veins'. Tess and Val also comment on processes of feeding as relations recipients need to activate.

Tess:

...there was a chance, and albeit it wouldn't be my egg, but it would be my baby because I would be the one to feed it and nourish it and deliver it. And so without me it wouldn't be there really... Without my husband and without me, my daughter wouldn't be here anyway because she would have just been...well, that month's cycle basically, non existent.

Chapter Six 214 Vat:

...all that it is is an egg to start with. It will be growing inside you, won't it...! don't even sort of think: 'well, I wonder what it's going to be like? Would it resemble me? Because I'm sure in some respects it's got to resemble you, hasn't it. If it's been inside you and grown inside you, then that's what's been happening.

But women who use this kind of imagery are not deploying Euro-American constructs of kinship. They are not saying that they can trace their blood via a common ascendant or through certain relatives, in the sense that notions of blood 'in the veins' are suggestive of a common blood pertaining to a particular heredity. The blood the women refer to is not envisaged as constitutive of a biogenetic relationship or of a biogenetic fact of nature. When they deploy from out of existing folk beliefs the familiar sentiments of 'being of the same flesh and blood', they do so, it would seem, only because they have no other available idiom at hand with which to describe the kinds of ties they imagine they are in the process of discreetly forging: a blood which is all about volition and choice, and with nothing 'objective' about it6.

Women 's time

A few women would talk about relatedness by drawing on processes of gestation and growth as forms of work by explaining how they were actively participating in the relation they were making. Describing the birth of her son, it is the painful actions and sheer incredible achievement of getting, as Una puts it, 'a melon out of a straw' that play on her mind for many years. Her decision that her son should not participate in dangerous sport relates to the way she does not want to feel she once put her life on

Chapter Six 215 the line needlessly. Her protectionism stems partly from her desire to preserve her past achievement as child-bearer.

Una: ...I don't want my son to play rugby. I haven't gone through all that anguish and whatever just to have his head knocked off, or his neck fractured, or his nose broken by some thugs kicking a bloody ball round the playing field. And at one level I feel that very strongly. That women are very protective of their children because it's the woman who's had to...it's an obvious statement...but they've actually laid their life on the line to have this child. Basically they've put themselves at risk. From pregnancy, from day one, right up to adulthood. You're just very protective.

Vera also starts to feel responsible for her children well before they are born. She talks about making her children 'hers' in terms of the decisions and choices she has to make upon finding out she is carrying triplets from her sister's donated eggs. This is all the more difficult for her since she is already mother to a young handicapped son who requires her constant attention.

Vera: you wonder yourself what you are going to think when the babies are born. Are you going to feel as if they are your own or is this sort of knowledge that you have that they're not... is this going to overwhelm any feeling that you would have had for the babies? Which it hasn't... And I feel that we have this inner knowledge that you've done this. And this has happened. And it's like the facts are there that you can't actually believe it. Going through that pregnancy with triplets. Because you know you're pregnant so early on and you get so big so early on, and I felt as though it went on forever. And because I went for all these diagnostic scans at the hospital. I was up there four times and each time they tried to get me to have amniocentesis or something else. And I had to make all these decisions totally by myself because my husband was saying: "whatever you decide, I'll back you. The decision is yours". And I talked about it with Julia [sister] and she was terrified there was going to be something wrong with the babies. Which we all were to a certain extent. But having gone through all that trauma myself really... I thought it was totally my decision whether I had amnio. And even

Chapter Six 216 if they did find something wrong with one of them; would you then terminate one and try and keep the other two, or risk losing the whole three? All this was going on. It was just so stressful from the point of view of the baby. Not because of where they came from or anything like that. Just because of the baby, that I felt that they were mine, totally mine because I was responsible even well before they were born...

Vera has to take on conflicting advice from the hospital and from relatives, and she has to deal through the time of gestation with her continual doubts and fears about the consequences of selective reduction therapy. All these are embodied by her as her productions, as forms of agency, and constitute the traumas of thinking loss, risks and wondering about the prospect of rearing children with congenital complications. Carrying difficult decisions as well as potential lives, the children embody parts of her and are made her 'own' because of what she has chosen to do, 'not because of where they came from or anything like that. Just because of the baby, that I felt that they were mine, totally mine because I was responsible even well before they were born'.

When Yasmin refers to one of the twins she miscarried, she also establishes relatedness to her child by drawing upon the likenesses of shared kinds of inter-uterine life.

Yasmin: ..and I also kept the picture of her twin, and then I've got another picture of her with the scar of the twin when the twin had gone so that I can show her. I just keep them for her really. I was always very interested in the chances because my mother had a miscarriage before me and I always used to sit as a child and think: "I just think I might not have been around if she... if that one had progressed". So I kept the picture of the one that got away for Charlotte so she can think the same in a way. That that was the one that might have been me, but wasn't

Chapter Six 217 Mother and daughter both seem to have been the arbitrary consequences of others failed conceptions, making resemblance something that can be established between them as the common survival of 'like' kinds of chances. They become one another's substance in the sense that they share a common time as previously arbitrary growths. Partly it is the precarious nature of inter-uterine existence that Yasmin imagines as the source for constructing knowledges of common origins between them: she hopes that her daughter 'can think the same in a way' since both their respective mothers miscarried life.

Other women suggest how they have enacted forms of continuity by way of other metaphors.

Yvonne: It's like a cycle really. I have a daughter who maybe she chooses wants to have a family of her own, and she has a daughter, and that daughter will carry on. So it's like a cycle on the female side of things. Male.. well, fair enough, play their part but women actually carry the child for nine months and feed it. I think it's a cycle within the women. No disrespect to the males at all. But they're just there to fertilise the eggs. Whereas the woman does most of the work (emphasis added).

Do you trace this cycle back to your mother and to her mother?

I think so, because you normally remember your grandparents. Granddad as well. But I think it's always the mother that comes in the forefront. I was always closest to my father.. but at the end of the day it was my mother that gives birth and goes through everything.. .1 mean the doctor is there to help the donor as much as me, but at the end of the day I think it was down to the two of us to make this work. As much as the doctors and gynaecologists have to make it work. But I think it was down to us to make it work both ends. For her to get the ripe eggs and for me to carry it through...

Chapter Six 218 Yvonne points out the specifically female transmission of women's intergenerational work of reproduction. This 'work' is imagined to be 'carried through' as kinds of female-maternal genealogies that establish interlinkages as non-biological kinds of 'cycles' between women. Later on, when talking about the possibility of donating her (frozen) embryos to other recipients, Yvonne reiterates this imagery of the 'continuing line', stressing continuity as kinds of social productions made between persons: it's the same gift - it's just going down the line like a conveyor belt really it goes from one down to the other...It wouldn't be a person or people because I don't think you could class it as living - it's the giving that is the conveyor belt.

Ulrike articulates another kind of specifically female transmission when she imagines how she would not be able to embody a different sex child as part of herself. She thinks that giving birth to a son could jeopardise the kinds of extensions she could make as a mother, and somehow this also impacts on how she imagines the donor as a continuous person in time whose body passes 'through' her. Such associations are suggestive for the way women are imagined as relational persons and certainly in terms of making relations from out the body parts she receives, Ulrike seems to imagine parts of persons as though they are analogues of anticipated relations and extensions. It is as if she is more able to convert female affiliations into more female affiliations, thereby preserving herself as a series of actions extendible through space and time. Ulrike: .1 think I understand women better than I understand men. I think if it was

Chapter Six 219 a boy, it would be very much my husband's son. I must admit whenever I imagine myself with a baby I always want it to be a girl. It wouldn't be any problem at all if it was a son but the idea of the donor sort of carrying forward, I can't see it. Because the donor is a woman I can't transpose that onto a son because I can't see how a part of a woman can go into a son.

The above examples serve to show how women, in different ways, conceive of forms of personal continuity in terms of decisions and actions they take. According to them, the semblance of 'lines' of continuity between generations takes effect not simply as a measure of a lineal descent reckoning pursued through the transmission of innate body substance, but because of the ways they actively make and seek significant relationships with others in various and indeterminate ways - these reflecting the vicissitudes of their own experiences, backgrounds and previous relations.

To appreciate more fully the varying nature of these continuities, and how they are constructed as trans-personal identifications extending in time and space, the next section considers how one recipient differentiates male and female reproductive substance as the outcome of actions that make particular relations between persons.

Pooling relations: gendered substance as action

Yasmin's account of how reproductive substance circulates as parts of persons and as their different kinds of agentic productions is presented predominantly in terms of her metaphorisation of 'the pool'. Since her discourse elaborates the pooi as a collectivised, albeit imaginary, social space whereby persons make relations with others, her ideas offer a key departure from the medical construct of the 'clinical' donor pooi, which was shown in chapter 2 to function as a regulatory mechanism for

Chapter Six 220 the maintenance of persons as singularised and separated non-relations.

Much of Yasmin's rhetoric concerns the way that the donor pooi can be activated as different kinds of social spaces, and this follows on from her subdivision of the generic 'pool' into the different kinds of action taking place in the egg pool, donor pool, and recipient pool, as these form alternative kinds of spaces to the non-pool designated by the sperm bank. For instance, women are figured as agents in the sense that they set up different kinds of intersubjective relations in these spaces: ideally, she thinks, they create 'an atmosphere' of benefit to each other, 'working' to promote a sense of 'equality' for the collective sociality of the pool.

Though the pool, as she says, may be full of people that you might not actually choose as your friends, this is circumstantial since 'you are all trying to achieve the same thing'; and though 'pool-women' are anonymised as the relational parts of each others' persons, she implies that they can still be imagined as relations who are 'in the same boat together'. When she mentions how women are implicitly 'like' one another because they each are persons who should wait equal times for their respective treatments, there is a sense in which women are also imagined as the body of 'one person'. This normative vision of the pool as a space for equitable kinds of allocations between persons seems also to link up to the way she thinks pool members all share the capacity to 'mill about' as the form of interchangeable circulations of one another:

• .a sperm bank is literally a bank of sperm. There isn't any such thing as an egg pool because you can't freeze. When I talk about an egg pool, it's not an

Chapter Six 221 egg pooi. It's a donor pooi where there are all these women milling about going to donate eggs. They haven't done it yet because it can't be kept. But they will do it. It's not like having a load of sperm in a vat. It's different...the men are not there, but the women are.

What she considers as the different, or 'greater' 'motivations' of a woman donor, are actions that cannot be kept indefinitely as 'stock': the work that makes women's actions into intersubjective relations are 'motivations' in the sense that they are (i) the social extensions of the person carried forward spatiotemporally and (ii) they are the equivalent of work and emotion that cannot stagnate like a 'load of sperm in a vat'. As both the extension of their person, and the agency of intersubjective exchange between women, these kinds of relations of exchange need to be passed on in order that they can be transmitted effectively as continuing relations. This was the thrust of Yvonne's ideas concerning the 'tradition', as it were, of women's reproductive work which she identified rather idiosyncratically as 'a cycle within the women' (see above: 'the spectacle of sex'). It was also a major thematic component of Fay's (chapter 5) corporeal imagery of processes of growth as a microcosm of social exchange constituted from out of the pluralised body of internal escalators incessantly 'going around'.

Yasmin is also saying that women's work, as gendered substance, has to keep circulating on account of how a span of time between the acts of giving and receiving, represent an interval which could transform the nature of the act 'given'. It is not the eggs she needs to think about, she says, but rather 'the woman who at some stage in the past put them [the eggs] there'. The former production that is the donor's agency, is a production that cannot be preserved unless it is circulating in time as a part of the

Chapter Six 222 person. Thus what is important for her is her ability to transform the substance she receives into her actions; and to do this she needs to be implicated, in some kind of way, in the time that was the donor's agency.

Because I can more easily see the motivation in donating eggs because there's a somebody there behind the screen doing it for you at that time. It just means more to me. If somebody said to me: "here's six eggs. We've just taken them out of egg bank A", it would be different. Because it would seem so divorced from the act of giving. I think that must be the point. It's just that the span is so wide from the act of giving - and that must be a bit similar to sperm donation... Whereas in our case there is a very close relationship to me because it is all happening on the same day...whereas with a semen specimen there isn't that close contact at all. You just go along and pick a type and go for it from there.

With this she seems to be suggesting that the retention of substance as a deferred transfer between donor and recipient has value because it denotes an interval of elapsed time. And critically, this is time that could change the nature of the actions/substance already given. This view, however, is not one that is founded on the view that the psychical intentions of the donor have gone awry. These are not, for instance, the symbolic kinds of circulations produced from the 'fake circulation of fake coin' (Bourdieu 1977). Delayed exchange is not equivalent to the symbolic misrecognitions or misfirings of certain strategies in which gifts (and counter-gifts) comprise time as the strategies of ranked difference. The kinds of 'motivations' that she refers to are not premised on forms of power that are enacted as hierarchical relations and in this regard, the figure of a recipient is not seen as somebody who is situated as socially inferior to the donor.

Anticipating herself as a prospective recipient, Yasmin activates the 'gap' that is the

Chapter Six 223 time of transfer of somebody as the ongoing agency of another's productions. This takes the form of acknowledging the gift as a set of social relations that must not be left to become inert. In this sense the gap of time that represents an interval between them are their different agencies.

In the first place, these kinds of transformations are offset by the circulations that she imagines constitutes male-produced substances. In this imaginary space of pooled relations, 'male' produced actions/productions are tantamount to the non-circulation of the person, and these productions can only be transformed symbolically into the retentiveness of that person's (biological) substance. Sperm, unlike eggs, can be transformed into objects because the 'gift' in these cases retains no productive traces of the person: it therefore can be 'picked' out and kept as 'stock' substances for accumulation 'in a vat'. Thus the economy of exchange by which male-produced substance gains its value, is quite different to the mutual 'trading' taking place in a pool filled with persons, symbolised as body parts, who assume value in terms of what they do when they 'mill about'.

This kind of 'male' substance becomes equivalent to retention and the non-circulation designated by the space of 'banks' and where the figure of 'persons' are absent. Men are literally absent, literally 'apart' from their donations, she thinks, because their gifts do not embody the extension of their persons. As donors, men are not affectively present ('It's different...the men are not there, but the women are'), and therefore seem unable to create or occupy a social space equivalent to the time of circulation. This is because of the way nothing of themselves is being extended, and it is in these terms

Chapter Six 224 that she comes to articulate her discourse that the 'motivation' of a sperm donor's 'production', is 'different' to the kinds of motivations made by women.

I think that the motivation and reason why a woman is helping me is different in some ways from the motivation of a man who would be helping Stephen [husband] - because when you give a sperm specimen, you just give it to a bank and it really is a pool effectively - really and truly a pooi. Whereas in our case there is a very close relationship to me because it is all happening on the same day. I mean your donor is giving to you on the same day that your husband is producing a semen specimen and two days later you are going to have the transfers - so it's all very close in that respect, whereas with a semen specimen there isn't that close contact at all - you just go along and pick a type and go for it from there (emphasis added).

Whilst men may be seen to be equated symbolically with substance, non-extension, retention and absence, and therefore give a detached part of a physiological body, women come to assume value as persons because of firstly their social circulations in space and time, and secondly because they are intimately absent through their anonymised extensions. Whereas it does not matter which particular substance a woman would receive from a sperm bank, since all the 'stock' is there to be similarly 'picked' out, women donors are nonetheless persons who are envisaged as persons transformable into kinds of 'known' relations7.

Conclusions

The views of recipients making up this study are difficult to categorise neatly. This is because of the partial and often contradictory nature of their multiple discourses. On the one hand, women seem to endorse their anonymised identities, seeing

Chapter Six 225 sanctioned concealments as a security against unwanted intrusions such as questions/comments about the conceptive origins of their children. At these points women could be identified as supporting a genetical model of reproduction, and indeed adopted the medical model of 'the donating body' in which the procedures of clinical matching not only favour the positioning of women as mutually faceless, but also privilege the intrinsic status of biology. In this context it was the question of what their children would look like that dominated their accounts, and it was in part through the similarity of physical appearance - relations of visibility - that recipients felt confident they could assert the social identities of their children as their 'own'. In this sense recipients 'misrecognise' the spirit of assistance and fail to receive the same body parts gifted to them by donors.

Straining against this view and actually countering its most basic assumptions, women also express how what they took to be their 'ownership' in the person of their children was not something that rested on a proprietorial principle of the bio-genetical as irreducibly natural substance. Instead, they envisaged connections in terms of the cultural 'work' that they saw themselves as producing through the multiple recognitions, resemblances, decisions that they, as agents, would proceed to make. Thus, many women can be seen to take the procreational idiom of identities of 'flesh and blood' further when they go on to imagine how their blood constitutes productive flows that circulate independently of biological ties of descent and inheritance.

It was argued that women act as transformative agents when they make new time, such that the 'division' between the genetic and the gestational based on a model of

Chapter Six 226 the fragmentation of roles, does not refer simply to the partibility of the body as parts/substances of the body circulating between persons, but crucially to the divisibility of roles and processes as transferable kinds of actions, identities and identifications between differently extendible and differently relational persons. Yasmin, for instance, becomes an agent because of the way that her actions relate to the way that other women's and men's donated actions/productions represent the metaphorically extended parts of others in their capacity as previously acting persons. This is quite different to Gouldner's conception of the generalised norm of reciprocity entailing the duty of obligation based on persons' past behaviour: 'we owe others certain things because of what they have previously done for us, because of the history of previous interaction we have had with them' (1960:171). Thus, many of the women comprising this study may be regarded as agents, not just simply because they act for themselves, but importantly because they act on behalf of, or out of concern for others. In this regard, the elapse of time between donor and recipient is a significant feature of the exchange processes since the forms of power enacted as these reproductive exchanges do not unfold as relations of domination and subordination between recipient and donor.

Yasmin's narrative on the appropriate placements of differently produced substances showed how value is the outcome of the kinds of relations that are being made and transferred as the detachable and circulating parts of persons. Her ideas about circulation and retention, based on the analogies she sets up between the constructs of the person and the pool on the one hand, and the constructs of (biological) substance and the (sperm) bank on the other, provide a commentary on how value is

Chapter Six 227 the outcome of the kinds of relations that are being made and transferred as the detachable and circulating parts of persons protean identities. Her concern with circulation and with women 'milling about' can be seen, in this sense, as premised on notions of how circulations of the self become the transformations of previous (persons') actions/productions.

Thus, it is not only because recipients cannot be expected to initiate a return that they are neither subordinated nor socially inferior to donors in any symbolic sense. Critically, it is because recipients make their own versions of themselves as 'reproductive' persons independently of the 'biological' substance of (missing) eggs. They thereby assume 'equal' kinds of identities to the productive agencies analysed previously as the making of donors' social relations.

1. Though for a view of the recipient as active, see Strathern (1992:177,179180;1988). 2. Beidelman (1989) points out how for Homeric Greeks, exchange is inseparable from personhood. To activate sentiments of honour, shame and rivalry, one needs an audience. As Annette Weiner puts it: 'The central contradiction, which I suggest has implications for a general theory of exchange, is that exchange mediates the opposition between the self and others, while simultaneously it reenforces the very same opposition' (Weiner 1976:212-13). 3. Though see Josephides (1985) and Bourdieu (1977). With regards to the ethnographic context of the social relations of the Kewan peoples of Papua New Guinea, Josephides argues that gifts produce the conditions of possibility whereby women's productive labour, in the form of pig rearing, can be converted into relations of inequality between women and their male kin. The important point of her analysis is that though equality and reciprocity appear to function as the dominant precepts characterising the practice of Kewan gift exchange, these transactions are, according to the author, just an ideological smoke-screen masking the 'real' advantages men could exercise over women. As Strathern (1988) has pointed out, what is at issue with this line of thinking is the conceptual rendition of the notion of exploitation, and whether a western-derived model of alienation can provide an adequate conceptual and

Chapter Six 228 explanatory framework for the production of these kinds of relational inequalities. 4. See the discussion in Ragoné (1994:123-128) on the bonds of closeness fostered between surrogates and adoptive mothers whereby they 'merge' strategically 'into one'. Their intimacy is constructed from out of the mutual desire to distance what is regarded as the implicitly sexualised figure of the surrogate, from the 'lingering connotations of adultery and illegitimacy' (128). 5. On the theme of growth as hidden and interior, see Strathern (1988: chapter 9).

6. Contra Schneider (1968) and the view that relatives by blood, as derived from the order of nature, represent permanent and immutable ties, since the involuntary character of blood - as the 'objective' basis of these ties - forecloses the possibility of choosing who one's relatives are (1968:37). 7. Perhaps akin to the collective nature of the Sambian semen pooi which Herdt describes as the male ability to tap into 'the semen contained in bodies of all men living within neighbouring hamlets' (1984a: 192).

CHAPTER SEVEN

Circulating no-bodies: a case study of redonation

Contents

Redonation and 'spare' embryos

Recipients and 'vistas of circulation': Yasmin: one person: many women Winfred: passing on second-hand gifts Thea: invisible bonds and unbounded kinship

Conclusions

Chapter Seven 230 The ideas discussed in the last chapter may be seen as part of women's rather less consciously articulated ideas and thoughts on personal continuity. This chapter focuses specifically on how recipients may make kinds of symbolic transformations of themselves when they act to pass on substance already donated to them. In such cases, recipients are giving 'life' to other recipients in the form of their 'redonations'. But just what kind of 'gifts' and what kind(s) of 'life' are activated as these productions?

The first point to consider is the altered nature of the substance given, since embryo donation by recipient depends upon what medico-legal discourse refer to as 'spare' or 'frozen' embryos being left over from a particular woman's treatment attempt. What, then, do women perceive to be the source of the difference between ova and embryos, and how do they formulate the symbolic value of male added substance (cf: Gallagher 1987)? The second and related point concerns the question of what kind of social relations these redonated gifts may be said to represent. Given that recipients give nothing corporeally of themselves, what 'of' the person do these gifts now carry?

Redonation and 'spare' embryos

According to the Warnock Report the donation of embryos is 'probably the least satisfactory form of donation' (Warnock 1984:40) because 'neither of the nurturing parents has contributed genetically to the child' (ibid). However, on the basis of the findings so far presented by this study, how valid are such grounds of contestation?'.

Chapter Seven 231 As already mentioned, recipients may still have, following the successful birth of child(ren), a number of fertilised embryos left over from former treatments. When women decide they no longer wish to have these stored for their subsequent transfer, they may consent to their donation to other recipients - referred to here as the practice of 'redonation'. Other possibilities include consenting to their use for medical research and experimentation, or to their so-called 'humane' disposal.

The possibility of redonating embryos to other recipients is one that is downplayed by practitioners, and it is notable that in this context the discourse of 'gifts of life' is dropped abruptly. Usually clinicians will present cryopreservation techniques as an option entailing diminished 'chances' of success (with the concept of 'chance' conflated here both with the activation of life and with statistical probability) and increased 'risk'. It is stressed how 'frozen' embryos are less likely than fresh embryos to survive the freeze/thaw cycle, or that they are more likely to fail to implant, with pregnancy rates statistically lower than those following fresh embryo transfer. It has been estimated that since the first pre-frozen baby was delivered in 1985, there are currently in the UK at least 40-50,000 'spare' embryos in frozen storage (pers. comm, Peter Brinsden), of which about 3,000 are classified as 'orphan' embryos because their so-called 'owners' cannot be traced (Fletcher 1996), despite the suggestion by the Warnock Report that legally there should be no right of ownership in human embryos (Warnock 1984:10.11).

The scope of this section aims to contribute to existing debates on the ethical and legal complexities in terms of showing how the opportunity for redonation needs

Chapter Seven 232 to be evaluated as a practice of exchange taking place between recipients, and, as such, how the practice of redonation sets up certain kinds of social relations despite the imposition of anonymity. This has implications in terms of the policy concerns currently under review, regarding for instance, the fate of 'spare' embryos, and whether or not the legally stipulated maximum of five years storage time should be extended beyond the current expiry date of 31 July 1996 (see HFEA 1990: section 14; HFEA 1994a:section 3.1)2. It is argued here that practitioners and policy makers have viewed the entity of 'the embryo' in a very specific way as purely a bio-genetic substance, and that by considering how 'the embryo' represents far more than this in cultural terms, the nature of the debates, and the terms of reference through which they are conducted, require reformulation.

Before these kinds of policy questions can be asked, let alone answers hazarded, it is the views of women who agree to give and receive such redonated substance that are tantamount. This is especially so since unlike donors who have no knowledge of the 'outcomes' of their actions (see chapter 4), medical discourse in this particular context is quick to impress upon recipients the responsibility of the 'outcome' they have 'produced'. However, such outcomes, and women's knowledge of them, are the contingent productions of the clinical treatment procedures and in this regard, women as recipients with 'spares' are quite powerless to control the exact nature of their 'outcomes': they cannot stipulate in advance, for instance, how many embryos they ideally would like to receive from one single treatment attempt. It is important to stress how these are outcomes that do not endorse women as socially invested agents, but rather implicate women in taking decisions over forms of life of which they

Chapter Seven 233 clearly have no prior choice. In this regard, each donation may be seen not only as yielding the hope of 'chances' - of 'new life' - but also as the constant indeterminacy of knowing exactly what kinds of 'chances' these donations are; that is, how extensive potential is (cf: Ahmed 1995).

As entities held in storage, frozen embryos are suspended in time because they cease to circulate; their allocatory potential being directed specifically to one particular, 'fixed' recipient. The technology of cryopreservation also introduces a system of the advance ownership of substance in which value is not the outcome of intersubjective relations, since women are now envisioned to have prior rights in the 'completed' embryos that wait for them. As one woman put it, the frozen embryos are earmarked for her subsequent use, the clinic sometimes referring to this as the recipient's personal 'stock'. Thus a recipient who is fortunate enough to receive multiple units of ova that survive as embryos is able to by-pass re-admission to the 'queue' (see chapter 2) because she has her own potential reserve of 'chances'.

Yet it was not infrequent for the number of originally collected ova to decrease in number after their fertilisation. Ten ova may for instance end up as seven embryos. Conversion to embryo-form also involves a different counting system to the counting out of ova, this entailing a different principle of divisibility and notably a re-evaluation of the number of one. Seven embryos would no longer be numerically ordered as two batches made up of one set of three embryos and one set of four embryos (compare chapter 2, fig. 3). Once substance becomes claimable as the 'personal' property of a particular recipient, and once body parts are no longer able to be allocated as a

Chapter Seven 234 simultaneous span of multiple recipients - as in the case of 'earmarked' embryos - the entity of the number one regains value as a number in its own right. If all seven embryos de-thaw successfully (this representing yet another contingency), these would be broken down into three units of 3,3,1. The former unit of four ova would bifurcate into a 3 and a 1, making the physical matter of each embryo countable as a single unit. A 'chance' would now become conceivable as directly linked to the physical boundedness of the reconstituted ova as an embryo - substance then becoming conceivable as a 'whole' because the addition of sperm to ovum constitutes in medical rhetoric a type of 'completion' (cf: Martin 1991).

Many women interviewed expressed the view that it would be difficult to know what to do with 'spares'. Many had not thought through the scenario in depth, wanting first and foremost to achieve a successful live birth before being troubled by such thoughts. To a certain extent, the prospect of giving 'spare' embryos for some women represented the burden of a choice they would rather not have to make. But to a great extent this is because in the mainstream discourse on assisted reproduction such embryos are presented as simply genetical substances. Significantly, it was generally those women who had given the prospect of 'spare' embryos the most thought who were willing to discuss their ideas on redonation, however hypothetical, and who did so also in ways which deviated selectively from purely geneticist assumptions.

The following discussion tries to look at how the category of the human embryo is not just the encompassment of the genitor and genetrix as two bio-genetic substances brought together, but how, contrary to the possessive model outlined above, embryos

Chapter Seven 235 for redonation connote the further time and spatial trajectories or 'pathways' of still exteriorised substance: that is, the ways in which embryos remain as time yet to be put back into the still symbolically 'open' body of an other recipient. How such substance passes 'through' persons as their plural 'parts', and how these parts travel in space as circulating investments between different persons, are some of the concerns guiding the following case studies.

Recipients and 'vistas of circulation':

Yasmin: one person, many women4 When Yasmin redonates her embryos, she partially assumes the identity of the egg donor who donated to her. Though she transposes herself into the figure of a previously donating woman, this is not because she makes an imaginary 'return' gift to this same person. She partially embodies the person of her donor as 'a' donating woman in the sense that she acts like her donor did for her.

Her speech however vacillates between genetical and non-genetical registers because she also knows she is not quite 'like' her donor, even though she is doing something 'like' her. She partly assumes her donor's invisibilised identity by conceiving of her as someone who 'fades out of the picture'. And it is as the time of her (donor's) absence, that Yasmin transforms herself temporarily into a person with her own genetic ova/embryos who is capable of acting as a donor:

Chapter Seven 236 In some ways, I personally probably wouldn't think of donor A in a way. In fact oddly enough I would probably see them as if they were mine - my embryos. In the sense that they were actually mine, and that I was giving something genetically away of me; which I wouldn't be.

Though her donation creates value because she wants to produce the same outcomes as her donor intended for her, she thinks this cannot be achieved as her extension through the form of her body parts - because nothing has been personalised by her from her own body. Yet when she says that neither her, nor her husband, have done 'anything special', at least two different versions of 'the donating body' overlap. Though she has not produced the gift as her own 'work', she also knows that she has 'given': Because we haven't had to do anything. We haven't had to do anything special for the recipient - not like my donor had to do something special for me. And she continues: Obviously I wouldn't have gone through the pain and the actual physical process of actually having to have them removed, but it would still be the same thing in principle (emphasis added).

In one sense the redonated embryo is not imagined primarily as a bio-genetical entity since her partner's genetical contribution to the ovum/egg is also not considered as anything 'special'. Framed within the terms of her schema of gendered substance as the kinds of productions people make and namely as the work of agents (chapter 6), this is transposed to the association that although her husband 'adds' the substance of sperm in his capacity as genitor, he does not make an actual production. His procreative part in the redonated embryo makes him symbolically equivalent to the notional figure of a sperm donor.

Chapter Seven 237 On the other hand, since 'it would still be the same thing in principle', she is not able, for instance, to leave her embryos as unused 'stock', but would have to keep having them transferred until none were left. And in this way, the form of her agency is equivalent to the form of the circulations characterising the donor's actions. To leave her embryos as entities for indefinite storage are actions that constitute value - not simply because she does not activate the 'life' these substances potentially represent but because not to act becomes symbolically equal to a kind of retention that would hypothetically re-transform such embryo-substance into 'stock' objects. Seen as a set of actions, 'she', that is, her body part as action, becomes 'like' male-produced substance, in the sense that what she would do would be equally as effective as a man donor's gift: her person would be transformed into sperm as the 'male'-produced production that is that gendered substance.

But for Yasmin, these past relations, as the partial embodiment of 'a' donor, are not known by her as a 'continuing line'. Though relations need to be kept flowing, they do not merge as the added together extensions of discrete persons. Perhaps this is also why she thinks of the donor as somebody who 'fades out of the picture'. Though others' productions can be incorporated by her as these persons' past actions, and as her future actions, these relations do not link up as an abstracted 'whole', in the sense that what may be taken as the extensions of multiple persons are not assimilated as extensions within a wider social collectivity. To imagine, for instance, of the connections extending between donor to recipient and to successive recipient as a continuing line of 'between' relations, represents, for her, 'too big a chain, too long a chain'.

Chapter Seven 238 No it wouldn't be difficult to part with them [embryos] because it would be a bit like what the donors say now - like we'd be giving a cell, or we'd be giving two cells. It's just the same principle. She doesn't want her eggs, we didn't need the embryos. So you would be like your donor except that what you would be donating are more cells of something? Yes, the donor who helped me would have faded out of the picture, it's like it's too big a chain, too long a chain really if she stayed in the picture. For instance recipient C [to whom Yasmin redonates] might think about donor A [Yasmin's donor] - because if you think about it that's really where her opportunity has come from. But I don't know - she may just think about us as donor B because it's genetically from us under our control that she is receiving. So the social spaces of the different pools that transformed women 'milling about' into pooled relations, and women who were simultaneously imaginable as relations 'all in the same boat together', (Yasmin, chapter 6) are not spaces that she transposes into an enduring format: into time that could be socially recognisable as culturally visible achievements. Though persons can be added to the 'general pool' to set up a system of more equitable relations (in practice, a fairer distribution of treatments), this seems to be operationalised as a temporary kind of vision with relations not getting reproduced on a larger scale.

Winifred: making second-hand gifts

Like Yasmin, Winifred also makes symbolic 'returns' to the donor, but again these are not simply the outcome of debts still owed. Though her account does not unfold as the metaphorical imagery of pooled relations, notions of persons as parts circulating between persons, and notions of the agent as a person situated socially in relation to others and in relation to parts whose value is always under transformation, still emerge

Chapter Seven 239 as a predominant theme.

Like Yasmin, she uses idioms that can be analysed for the way they double up as vacillations between biological attributes on the one hand, and personal capabilities on the other. Whilst much of her rhetoric on substance can be seen as bio-genetically informed; most obviously with regards to ties of blood as the cognatic relations made from her husband's sperm, these 'reproductions' coexist alongside another set of associations. It is the way these figure as slippages between the different productions of differently conceptualised 'bodies' which may be seen to underscore the tensions of a seemingly inconsistent account.

On the one hand, for example, she regards donor children as genetically 'fifty per cent' her husband's substance, with the subsequent births of donor-children imagined as 'same mix' siblings. Yet interwoven within this are strands of reasoning that regard substance in other than purely genetical terms. One set of associations stemming from these rhetorical shifts is her reference to herself as a 'dudd light bulb': not only does this belie her sense of social inadequacy at her status as a childless woman, it evolves from out of her self-description as an 'incomplete' person. Since she also mentions how she can be 'switched off', this particular metaphor is perhaps an association residual from the clinical discourse of pituitary down regulation discussed in chapter 2. When she implicitly invokes the imagery of her body/person as a kind of interlinking electronic circuit that only requires the 'spark' of a (genetic) ovum/egg to set off all other functions, she also equates this 'spark' with the donor's capability to assist her: it is the person of the donor who stands in as a capability symbolically

Chapter Seven 240 're-connecting' her:

So when a donor donates her eggs, what do you think she's passing on to you? That extra ingredient..you're body has got the rest, it's just that one crucial ingredient that's missing. Just that spark of life., that first little spark. That vital spark of life....everything else is there, it's just that tiny little missing something to connect everything up.

The 'extra ingredient' (cf: Meena, chapter 5) doubles up as the donor's capability, and as the originary 'root' of initiating (new) actions, she embodies the source of new life:

That's the root of it because without that B and C [the first and second recipients from donor A] wouldn't happen. It's the cell she's given in the first place, the egg...it's back to the spark, that's the root of everything...nothing would happen without that spark for me (emphasis added). And these associations resonate also with the conflation she makes of the 'root' as the symbolic transformation of a 'natural' birthright into a 'social' right. By drawing on the metaphor of herself and others as kinds of roots, she reworks parallels with what she sees as, first, her inability to activate her choice to mother and, second, the removal of her 'female' origins and 'birthright'. Yet it is in terms of anticipating how she could exercise the choice to redonate, that she imagines herself as symbolically 'reconnected'.

It is through the newly productive 'circuitry' of her body as a cultural medium for others' social relations that Winifred transforms herself into a 'woman' imagined as 'complete'. By redonating, she notes how 'in a funny sort of way a little bit of my

Chapter Seven 241 original rights as a female have come back to me'. Yet she is no longer a 'woman' constituted as a set of biological attributes, since the 'connection' is made from the way in which the embryos are thought to be passing through her person as the form of her agency. She 'reconnects' up as the time of intervening actions, not simply because the 'spark' has been provided by the ('reconnecting') donor. As with Yasmin, the power to make these reconnections are the affective productions and transformations that she instigates as an agent, so that she too is able to make new 'life' independently of physicalised contributions from her 'natural' (donating) body:

..I've just really agreed for it to be used further along with my husband...there's nothing of me in it. It's just purely I've got the choice of whether to say it's thrown away or give it to somebody else who can use it.

Her conceptions of use are not about the cultural applications of intrinsic matter as inherent value as was shown to be the case with the medicalised version of 'the donating body' as innate biological substance (chapter 4). And though she has used the same thing to her 'best advantage' it is, as she says, not 'used up'. Because she keeps in mind how others could benefit from something that might possibly assist them, she describes how the value that determines notions of usefulness is implicated in actual or envisioned sets of relations:

It's like a second hand's gift...You've used it to your best advantage. You've had all you want from that but it's not used up. It's not spent - therefore it's still of use, of help, of significance to somebody else (emphasis added).

In contrast to notions of embryos as 'spare' and otherwise wasteful, Winifred's

Chapter Seven 242 redonated 'gift' consists of the decision she has made not to activate for herself the 'chances' of life these embryos potentially represent. Her agency takes the form of redirecting chances to others; and it is because of the way she chooses to extend herself through this substance, that she also makes herself into other and multiply activated subjectivities. She enacts the transformation of her '(birth)right', and the double effecting of new chances from old chances:

.so actually it gives me some right as a person.. .So I can choose whether it does or it doesn't get used. So in a funny sort of way a little bit of my original rights as a female have come back to me. It makes me feel I'm part of things; I have a choice again, I had it removed before.. it goes some of the way towards making me feel not so incomplete, not such a failure.

If relations travel back to her to make her feel she is a 'part of things', this does not take the form of an increment, but is the form of the agent's traces of relational enablement: she receives something supplementary, but not because she maximises gains to fulfil her own self-interest. She is not the embodiment of the self-interested individual who, as with the Malinowskian legacy of reciprocity, represents the individual pragmatic 'actor'. What comes back to her symbolically, as her return, does so because what is being given from multiple and unknown social locations, are relations that flow without persons' prior ownership in these relations as circulating parts of persons.

Yet Winifred's social identities - transposed to the metaphorical form that are these circulating emotions - flow as different social relations to Yasmin's imagined self circulations. This is because Winifred sees these aspects of her person as circulations that can be transmitted as part of a 'chain' of ties. The symbolic 'return' of her

Chapter Seven 243 'original' rights as an imaginary 'whole' person, that is, as a notionally 'completed' 'female', involve her positioning the donor as an elevated or privileged kind of figure (but not somebody wielding disproportionate power) who is somehow socially accessible - in an imaginary sense - within some kind of larger social landscape. It is against this social backdrop that circulating parts/agents can be arranged in their extended form, so that for Winifred, the donor is imagined not simply as a person to be replaced, nor as somebody who 'fades out', as suggested by Yasmin. Winifred instead seems to 'retain' a connection to the donor as a series of capabilities that are imagined, and vaguely perceived by her, as the emotions of extendible persons. It is these that become a part of her body and that she transforms into a child as the substance of her flesh.

Thea: invisible bonds and unbounded kinship

Like Winifred, Thea makes a series of equivocal statements about female substance. For instance, her remarks that:

...it's a piece of them they're giving away really. Even though it's only an egg, but it is a piece of them really.. .the egg is a little piece of life.. .although I know it's not given away, they're just losing a period... And: egg donors are giving a little bit of themselves away.. .eggs are a personal thing, it's more personal.. .eggs refer to a person...I've got something of hers. I've got something that belongs to her. So I've got a part of her really..

are statements that need to be contextualised for the way she regards what is

Chapter Seven 244 'personal' in terms of the way substance has been given. The 'part of' the donor that she receives is not simply a part of the donor's body, but a part of what 'her' donor, as agent, has produced. So that what is valued as 'personal' are the relations women exchange as the circulating emotions of each others' persons. She starts to formulate this in vague terms as a kind of 'kinship', commenting on 'invisible bonds' that 'you can't quite put your finger on', mentioning how she feels 'so close' to other donors and recipient(s): 'I think she's thinking of me even though she doesn't know me and I'm thinking of her even though I don't know her...it's a personal relationship to me...' At such points in her narrative, she seems to be saying similar sorts of things to some donors when they comment on the 'telepathic bonds', 'links' and 'planes' of emotion that pass between donor and recipient as 'synchronised' kinds of bodies.

However, these 'kinships' seem in Thea's case to be connective productions that collapse narratively into the physiological basis of bio-genetical substance.

And what do you feel you're connected by? The egg. Right. And does the egg change or does it always stay the same? As it travels from the first donor on to you and then from you to the next woman, does it change in any way? It changes at B when David [husband] puts his part in. But it's the egg that connects us.

That she cannot explicitly say that besides, or in addition to the egg's reproductive value, this substance is the metaphorical extension of others' circulating emotions, relates to the way that she has difficulty in finding an appropriate language for

Chapter Seven 245 formulating how the kind of 'ownership' she exercises over such redonated embryos, is not a genetical one.

In contrast to Yasmin and Winifred, Thea imagines relations as the circulations of multiply flowing parts of persons. When she incorporates others persons as aspects of their identities, she does not make a symbolic 'return' to the donor, but moves onwards temporally to make connections with other recipients.

As with Winifred, the figure of the donor 'disappears' to some extent, though she is not cancelled out as somebody who is forgotten or replaced altogether. But it is not the debt of 'return' from which she symbolically cuts off as she turns towards future recipients; since as a redonating recipient, she also seems to combine the social identities of both (previous) donors: her donor and herself as subsequent donor, as well as the recipient as the projection of herself as a previous recipient.

Do you have any bonds or links to the person you would be passing the embryos on to? I suppose really, yes. I suppose in a way I become a donor and I would think like I wonder about the donor who helped me and what she thinks - what ever came of that? What happens to the first donor when you yourself become a donor? What happens to A? A disappears. Do you become A? I would still be B, but I'd be thinking more of...I suppose A would still be there in the background. She'd be there subconsciously and I would be thinking:"I wonder what ever came of that?" I suppose really I do become a donor so when I pass the embryo to C, I think I become A. But I think about

Chapter Seven 246 her, about C, as myself really - being a recipient. How does she feel? Does she feel the same as me? Because I've been a recipient as well..she would be more on my wavelength, she'd understand more how I felt. She'd know what it's like, she would just know how I feel.

This ability to create multiple flows of relations between persons suggests how firstly her efficacy as an agent is not dependent on directing herself towards particular relations and particular gains, and secondly that the substitutions making the gift exchangeable as circulations between notional 'someones' set up generalised kinds of extensions.

Yet it is hard to know exactly what kind of collective order she might have in mind with these notions of generalised repayments/circulations (cf: donors on blood, for example, Jean in chapter 5). Part of the 'kinship' she describes seems to be derived from the non-specificity of these ties. This may be seen as another form of exchange taking place between donors and recipients: that is, just like the donors who emphasise how their 'gifts' entail relations of 'no commitment' and 'no ties' (chapter 4), one form by which these relations of exchange become 'known', is in terms of the value created from mutually lived knowledges of uncertainty. As Thea says:

Perhaps she has donated for one reason and somebody else has donated for another reason, but it's like a type of kinship really. They know what it's like to donate and we know what it's like to receive, so in a way, it's sort of...there's a knowing between us, between all the donors and all the recipients.

These knowledges of not-knowing seem to be part of the impossibility to make concrete or tangible kinds of connections. Rather like Odelle, Penny, Rita, and Meena

Chapter Seven 247 (chapter 5), Thea is intimating that the ties she creates as the 'knowing between us' are made from relations that cannot be traced. One way, then, in which donors and recipients seem alike, is in terms of how they make themselves into agents as anonymised relations. Through these relations women enact multiple forms of subjectivity; making continuity by making transformations and in the process creating distant connections (between the most known unknowns).

Conclusions

The fact that recipients give nothing corporeally of themselves is shown to be irrelevant to the task of defining 'what' these gifts make/the relations they constitute. Even though donors and recipients give different kinds of bodily substances when they make their respective donations to recipients, they still give/make the same things. This confirms the earlier finding from chapters 4 and 5 that although donors give parts of their bodies to recipients, these parts do not come from their bodies. In showing how recipients give nothing corporeally of themselves when they redonate embryos, the significant difference is that there is no difference between donors and recipients.

Firstly, recipients give similar kinds of gifts to the gifts that were given to them by donors in the sense that recipients acting as donors intend to pass on similar kinds of 'chances' for success. However, these are not quite the same kinds of gifts as the gifts previously given to them by donors, since recipients have not had to produce anything of their bodies in order to facilitate the passage of assisted 'chances'. Whilst donors

Chapter Seven 248 actively produce a part of themselves in the form of detachable body parts, recipients who redonate clearly cannot produce the embryo they make transferable as a 'like' physicalised part of their body. Though their gift is not transferred as a physical part of their bodies, they do however still come from their persons. This is because just like donors' gifts, the parts of their persons that they decide to pass on, are 'parts' of their social identities that they have produced. These productions are evident from the way recipients actively choose and consent to make new gifts from out of previouslygiven gifts. As Winifred says, these are 'second-hand' gifts: in both the symbolic and the literal sense, these are passed on through a second person and onto another as forms of potential self-other renewal: what is intersubjective is not the return but the action.

Women's gifts, as the circulating parts of 'someone', cannot be anticipated as equivalent things/power relations that the transactor 'extracts' (cf: Strathern 1988), since there is no necessary direction or path along which these circulating emotions/social relations apparently flow. In addition, the symbolic form by which returns are made to 'originary' donors, is not principally debt-related. Since relations flow simultaneously between persons, in these cases there is no inert gap or interval of time by which to mark out the phenomenon of 'delayed exchange'.

Following on from this, the sense in which recipients see themselves as 'donors' relates to the kinds of actions they have performed. The 'parts' they produce are the social performances in which they make themselves into socially significant agents. They are 'like' donors because they too have acted to create certain kinds of

Chapter Seven 249 'relations' (distanced connections): relations that enable and facilitate others.

So although anonymised women are not directing themselves to specific others, they are nonetheless able to act as social agents. This is one key difference to the agency framing the 'partible' persons analysed by Marilyn Strathern, and the 'external agent' described by Nancy Munn - both of which are framed centrally on a model of externalisation and reciprocal relations (for example, the Gawan notion of 'skwayobwa') where the stress is placed on the significance of acquiring a particular kula shell, or effecting a specific transaction. There is a point of resemblance with regards to how the gift is an intersubjective process that tries to form a specific kind of relation between the minds (nano) of actors (Munn 1992) in the sense that the 'relations of assistance' given here, are premised on the specific kind of relation of hoping that one's actions will enhance another person's well being: what is specific is the choice to extend the chances/gifts of life. But, overall, the distinction must be that the multi-directional flows set up through the generalised exchange of anonymity, defies the dyadic and conceptual schema of opening or closing gifts as developed for instance with the kula circulation of 'mwals' and 'veiguns' between reciprocally related exchange partners. In conclusion then, the case studies discussed illustrate some ways in which the entity of the embryo, like unfertilised and still free-circulating ova, initiates a continuous and multiple set of relations apart from a proprietorial model of individual possession.

1. Embryo donation has also been referred to a form of 'pre-natal adoption' (Warnock, 1984; see also Page 1990:60), arguably as a concessionary attempt to gauge some kind of continuity from out of perceived discontinuities. This view retreats however to form of biological essentialism with the argument that there is 'the advantage over normal

Chapter Seven 250 adoption that the couple share the experience of pregnancy and childbirth, and. ..the mother and child experience bonding during pregnancy' (Warnock 1984). 2. HFEA (1995d) proposes that the normal storage period for embryos should remain at 5 years, but that for social or medical reasons there should be the possibility at the end of 5 years to extend the storage period up to 10 years with consent specifically renewed by the couple. 3. If there was no conception after two attempts at transplantation with the two batches of three unit embryos, the one outstanding embryo represents an equal possibility of an attempt, even though 'attempt' in this context hardly resonates with the same probability of 'chance'. In other words, dealing with embryos involves a different economy to ova since value is scaled down to make a single entity consistent with a single chance. 4. As elsewhere, I am particularly indebted to Strathern's work on partibility which provides the inspiration for the argument in this section.

CHAPTER EIGHT

What is the substance of anonymity?

Contents

Paradoxes of value

Anonymity and circulation (II):

The value of regeneration (i): ovarian tissue and the life-giving death

The value of regeneration (ii): the symbolism of Melanesian mortuary exchange

The value of regeneration (iii): the symbolism of relations of anonymous exchange

Transilience

Conclusions

Chapter Eight 252 'But so long as the gift passes out of sight it cannot be manipulated by one man or one pair of gift partners. When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith' Lewis Hyde (1983:16; emphasis added)

Paradoxes of value

Igor Kopytoff has recently questioned how the technologies that enable inter-corporeal transfers of human body parts between persons may lead to a re-conceptualisation of the relationship between the category of the person and that of the body part or human attribute. He suggests: 'the question is whether this will increase the permeability of the boundary between the world of things and that of people, or whether the boundary will be replaced by recourse to new definitions but itself remain as rigid as before' (1986:87).

Kopytoff sees the question of the re-ordering of these 'person'/'thing' boundaries as symptomatic of what he refers to as 'paradoxes of value' (ibid:82). According to him, these paradoxes refer to values that fall inbetween the two economies of 'singularisation': the individuation of persons in their capacity as non-exchangeable, incomparable and unique identities, and 'commoditisation': the exchangeability of things between distinct though interlinked exchange spheres. The author is of the opinion that an empirical and conceptual appreciation of these paradoxes would illuminate the way in which 'one breaks the rules by moving between spheres that are supposed to be insulated from each other, how one converts what is formally unconvertible, how one masks these actions and with whose connivance, and, not

Chapter Eight 253 least, how the spheres are reorganised and things shuffled between them in the course of a society's history' (ibid:88).

The previous chapters have pointed to certain paradoxes by illustrating how the circulation of women's reproductive body parts unfolds in terms of what Herdt (1984:168) calls 'a special language, a kind of symbolic discourse for signifying the value and identities of persons, groups....'. Given the view that the theme of relatedness between donors and recipients of 'shared' bodily substance in western societies is one that is played down culturally (see Abrahams 1990:140), it would seem inopportune not to ask: in just what sense is such substance 'shared'? It is in the spirit of Herdt's observations that body substances are not to be conceptualised as ontological essences, but as things that have 'a value beyond themselves for extending one's personhood - that is, existence - beyond the present' (op cit:202) that I attempt to answer this question in terms of how certain paradoxes of value conform to the 'substance of anonymity'. In this chapter, the paradoxes are partially resolved by means of further critical scrutiny of the notion of extension.

Anonymity and circulation (II):

The value of regeneration (i): ovarian tissue and the life-giving death

'It is in the nature of human beings to intervene to try to shape their world'. Thus claims a recent report on some of the legal, scientific, social and moral implications

Chapter Eight 254 of using ovarian tissue from adults, cadavers or aborted foetuses in the context of assisted reproduction (HFEA 1994c:2). After issuing a public consultation paper and inviting comments from the general public and professional bodies, the Report was to conclude that only tissue from live donors would be acceptable for the treatment of female infertility. The use of tissue from each of the three categories - living women, cadavers from girls or women who have died, and fetuses - was, however, to be permissable in the case of embryo research'. Together with contemporaneous media debate (Laurance 1994; Mihill 1994; Waterhouse 1994; The Guardian 1994; The Sunday Times 1994), these documents, far from asserting women's agency as cultural reproducers, provide a record as to how the British public think they make 'imaginable' (cf: Strathern 1992a:3) to themselves the possibility of assisting the commencement of life outside of human bodies (see for example Appleyard 1994; Hope 1994; Read 1994). But more specifically, if less consciously, they also point to the potential for intervening to shape new life from the dead as the ongoing reorderings of old sets of social relations.

From an anthropological perspective, one might well note an implicit link at work here. The possibility of persons acting, as the report claims, to shape new life, suggests an ethnographic curiosity inasmuch as nobody was talking about reproduction in this context as the regeneration of persons. Yet the ways in which the re-shaping of social relations might amount to distinctive acts of social intervention, and to particular moments of human agency in terms of the continuous remaking of persons and relations over time, is perhaps best viewed as a subject that could not find its way into the dominant terms constituting public debate. This omission lies, in part, with

Chapter Eight 255 the prevalent concern of tracing generations through a form of continuity provided by a model of lineal descent, and relatedly, to the perception of aspects of assisted reproductive practices as the violation of a lineal sequencing of time. Both of these points falter however by virtue of the conceptual misperception (illustrated in chapters 4-7) that bio-genetic substance necessarily presupposes a kinship tie between the persons concerned.

In the case of transplanting ovarian tissue from aborted fetuses, a key objection has centred on the perception that the child's mother would not only have died before the child would have been conceived, but that 'she' herself would never actually have lived. In this sense, the notion of 'skipping' a generation is seen to be tantamount to the paradox of 'breaking a natural law of biology'. Section 21 of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority Public Consultation Document states:

A potential difficulty might be thought to be that a generation of human development would be skipped if fetal ovarian tissue were used in infertility treatment. Ovarian tissue or eggs from an aborted fetus have not been subjected to the pressures which govern survival and normal development to adulthood. This raises questions about the degree of risk of abnormality, at present unquantifiable, in embryos produced using such tissue. This might be seen as breaking a natural law of biology (HFEA 1994b:6).

The kind of intervention that human beings might be making in the shaping and reshaping of their world, is then highly ironic: on the one hand, they might be seen to be assisting in the breaking of 'a natural law of biology' - even if it was felt to be necessary to stress this rhetorically with the supplementary scaremongering of risks of congenital abnormalities. Whilst on the other, it is ostensibly part of the very 'nature' of human beings to make interventions: to enact forms of social agency.

Chapter Eight 256 Crucially in all of this, however, the notion of 'skipping' a generation can be seen to depend foremost on having already equated (see Hall 1994; Donegan and Ezard 1994) the value of the entity of the fetus with that of the category of the mother. According to this logic, the presumption of what constitutes the boundaries of the natural and the unnatural rests on the way that the figure of the mother, the fetus, comes to be defined as an assumed presence whose identity is to be known, or else is to be logically surmised, in terms of the establishment of links premised on genetical continuity. In other words, the equation of the aborted fetus with mother pertains to a way of thinking organised around the privileging of an ideology of biogenetic kinship. Thus, a generation is deemed to have been skipped because 'mother' breaks the rule of lineal descent reckoning, and, in so doing transforms bio-genetic substance into something that can be neither enduring nor immutable (Schneider

1968).

Implicitly,

'she', as the anomalous fetus/mother hybrid, comes to represent the act of converting the blood tie into the disparity of the missing link, namely that which both uncomfortably connects and disconnects mother and offspring from each other.

Could however the rationale of these assumptions be evaluated differently from the perspective of exchange relations, such that the notion of a 'good' death be symbolisable as a 'handing over of a vitality which can then be recycled' (Bloch and Parry 1982:17)?

The value of regeneration (ii): The symbolism of Melanesian mortuary exchange

A large body of Melanesian and Oceanic ethnography explores the symbolic linkages

Chapter Eight 257 between images of birth, death and rebirth, portraying indigenous conceptions of the creation of social bonds in terms of local procreational idioms. The symbolic dimensions of fertility or conceptions of life-generating potency are regarded as important details of this literature (Whitehead 1987). Seen as cycles of exchange regulated by cycles of death, a key instancing of this regenerative reproduction of persons are the mortuary transactions marking the rites of the dead (Battaglia 1990; Damon and Wagner 1989; de Coppet 1981; Foster 1990; Humphreys and King 1981; Weiner 1980). A consistent feature in these accounts concerns the way in which the deceased person is thought to be 'taken apart' and reconstituted in new form during and after these transactions. The so-called biological death of a person is seen to entail a redistribution of aspects of the deceased that are then deemed to reside subsequently in others (Weiner 1995:135) such that 'the social person of the deceased (the aspect of a person that participates in the personae of others) is not diminished but expanded to the Limits of his or her social circle' (Wagner 1989:267; emphasis added). In this way the belief that death brings with it the separation and release of valuable resources for use in new productive contexts (Battaglia 1990:60) is enacted ritually in terms of the cultural attention paid to the deceased as the embodiment of and the time of reordering new sets of social relations.

One aspect of this belief system has been identified as the analytic theme of commemoration or memory. Memory is that which is definable as intersubjective knowledge (Battaglia 1992,1993; Munn 1986:60-67); a 'productive' kind of forgetting where being 'held in mind' is tantamount to remaining symbolically vital through others' actions (Battaglia 1990:12, 198). The related notion that the person remains

Chapter Eight 258 an ongoing social context or trajectory, thereby transmuting the effects of loss, decay, deterioration and degeneration, relates to the value of death as a mechanism for the long-term regeneration of society as the legitimation of an enduring socio-political order (Hertz 1960). It also relates to the belief in regeneration as the simultaneous denial and mastery over the arbitrary nature of biological death and individual distinction (Bloch and Parry 1982).

The way in which the local ideology of reproduction and regeneration is elaborated in terms of a complex folk theory of procreation, and the way in which this also underscores representations of personhood, is evident from F.J.P. Poole's analysis (1984) of social continuity among the Bimin-Kuskusmin of the West Sepik interior of Papua new Guinea. The key symbols of this ideology are the enduring substances of bone, bone marrow and finiik spirit. Poole describes how much ritual attention is paid to bones as bodily structures during life and to ancestral relics after death, such that a cycle of social and cosmological regeneration underscores the way that male substance is conceived as continuing as the symbolic transformation of clan finiik spirit. Death is conceptualised as a (re)birth into a socially bounded collectivity of ancestors and this ancestral collectivity is thought to connect the living and the dead as both a source of the living and yet to be born. By perpetuating attributes embodied by ancestors who remain within the social and moral universe of their descendants, finiik spirits of the dead pass on into clan collectivities and are able to animate the fetuses of unborn clan members by re-embedding their substance within them.

Significantly, the relevance of regenerative processes of social life for a reproductive

Chapter Eight 259 model of 'replacement' is stressed by Annette Weiner as part of her conceptual critique of 'the tenacious anthropological belief in the inherent nature of the norm of reciprocity' (Weiner 1992:149-50). Reciprocal exchanges are, she claims, 'only the pawns on the chessboard of culture preserving inalienable possessions and fending off attempts by others to claim them' (Weiner 1992:xi). Reworking Malinowski's material on Trobriand exchange relations, Weiner draws attention to the ways in which reciprocal performances between transactors are sets of relations that need to be contextualised more broadly as part of the larger social system (Weiner 1976,1980). As a social collectivity of persons and social relations, 'society' is identified as a 'reproductive' system governed by the cyclical transmissions and regenerations of persons, relationships and objects, each mutually bounded by and constituted through the other. But these transmissions, as kinds recirculations, do not simply happen by themselves. Matrilineal and patrilineal relationships must be made to flow as the exigencies of a system that itself needs to be 'fed' as the multiple processes of continuing exchange: '...the transaction must be understood as an aspect of the larger reproductive system in which the accumulation, circulation, and replacement of elements of value, along with the buildup and replacement of individuals, only occurs through constant attention, nurturance, and "feeding" (Weiner 1980: 80;cf: Chapter 6, 'blood-food and continuing lines').

'Norms of reciprocity' therefore are not premised on individual or group relationships as 'ego-centred linkages' (Weiner 1980: 82; see also MacCormack 1976), but give way to non-lineal transactional processes of 'embedding' wealth and value in multiple others over time. A key instance concerns the inter-generational reclamations made

Chapter Eight 260 by a deceased person's kin in the case of data resources, where data refers to the complex of identities connected by matrilineal blood and to plots of land, hamlet sites or other transmissible objects such as body and house decorations, names, dances, distinctions of rank. Objects and land given to a deceased member of another data must be reclaimed by members of the original data, or else risk being lost permanently to them. Dependent on the nature of the item being reclaimed, male or female valuables will be offered as replacements, and will thereby effect some measure of power over other individuals when they take these objects out of the course of others' prospective exchanges. And since these reclamations are likely to bear upon the resources of individuals who had nothing to do with the initial transaction many years or even decades ago, a field of relations between mutually implicated nonkin is set up as a regenerative network for the processing of social continuity.

For the 'Are 'Are society of Malaita in the Solomon Islands, it is the 'everlasting work of mourning' (de Coppet 198 1:179) which, as it were, 'feeds' the society and simultaneously is the substance of the 'Are 'Are person. What are taken as the key processes of the social management of death create both the foundations for normative social order in the society and are reflected in the internal composition of 'the person' as living substance made up from the three different elements of the 'body' (rape), the 'breath' (manomano) and the 'image' (nunu). This mutual interdependence of the social order in the power of the corporeal element and vice versa, means that 'the society ['Are 'Are] builds up its own character of permanence through the repeated dissolution into the ritual and exchange process of the main elements composing each

Chapter Eight 261 individual' (de Coppet 198 1:176).

This 'rituology of death' (ibid) for the sanctioning of peaceful social relations is sketched in by the author according to how the labour of mourning work takes on different dimensions vis-à-vis the status of the deceased: that is, whether somebody has been murdered by the living, for instance by avenging ancestors, or whether death is an affliction by personal ancestors. The crucial point in these descriptions is that the category of 'murdered persons' (ráramua) and persons 'killed' by their 'ancestors' (hi'ona) are to be 'reconstituted' as different kinds of regenerative agents on account of the different symbolic transformations ('work') that they and their mourners will effect.

In the former case, the replacement of 'breath' of an unavenged murder victim requires the exchange of someone else's life or the 'return' of a corpse from an opposing party, subsequently recompensed by 'blood-money'. The unavenged person's breath circulates symbolically as a social part of that person until it has been 'covered' with the 'breath' of a new victim. In the case of death by ancestor, however, it is not a matter of salvaging 'breath' but of transforming successfully the 'image' part of the deceased person into the sanctioning power of an ancestor. The 'image' is cultivated over time through the constant flow of 'mourning work' carried out over several years, facilitated in part by an appointed 'grave-digger' who produces a great number of pigs, coconuts and taros for distribution between his group and the dead person's family at a subsequent funeral feast. It is now as the transformation of the deceased person's body parts as circulating food that these two ceremonial groups

Chapter Eight 262 exchange piles of cooked food amongst themselves, with the three main components of the piles displaying the 'body' (the taros and the coconuts), the 'breath' (the pork) and the 'image' (the money on top of the piles) as the 'reconstituted' form of the deceased. But the 'image' of the dead person can only be completed as a part of previously sanctioned ancestors. It is by means of the long-term exchange of money between the groups that the 'image' enters ancestral life thereby cancelling out (in idiomatic terms taking the symbolic form of eating or leaving to rot) the 'images' of earlier ancestors and regenerating death as the life of new 'bodies' and new 'breaths'. In this way, the 'Are 'Are ensure that the complete dead person's 'image' is constituted out of pieces of money whose origins are the 'images' of other ancestors that have been displayed at one time or another at previous feasts. What this system shows, then, is how the circulation of the dead is achieved by the continual transformative replacements of parts of the person which become the simultaneous constitution of the person as a 'self-feeding process where nothing is ever lost' (de Coppet 1981:192).

The theme of loss guides Mosko's suggestion that Bush Mekeo kin of the Central Province of New Guinea 'mix' and 'unmix' their bloods as symbolic kinds of 'conceptions' and 'de-conceptions' during marriage and mortuary feast exchanges. Analysing the indigeneous conflict between endogamy and exogamy, Mosko argues that Bush Mekeo social structure is reproduced over time by various 'manipulations' of blood identities whereby 'new social personae are literally begun' (Mosko 1983:29). Metaphorical connections between the indigenous notions of body (kuma) and clan are traced in terms of the processes of respectively 'opening' and 'closing'

Chapter Eight 263 the mutually constituted boundaries of each. In this way affinal reproduction between cognates, engendered by the procreative 'mixing' of bloods, is re-iterated mimetically at the structural level by the periodic de-conception that is the clan body's blood. Significantly, the opportunity for these new mixings are seen to depend on the temporary and fictitious abrogation of 'one and the same blood' identities that all parties know to be a 'lie' (bifonga). Bilateral kin who share the 'same' blood are thus 'manipulated' (ifa kekapaisa) into non-relatives of 'different blood' so they can marry in accordance with the rules of exogamy. Upon death however, bilateral kin are 'manipulated' into non-relatives and therefore assume the status of potential affines. Symbolically, the meat or culinary bloods that feast-givers endow to feast-receivers during these mortuary exchanges, stand for the bloods of those women who were incorporated into the clans of the feast-givers at the procreation of the deceased and deceased's parents. Thus, 'de-conceiving' these bloods is symbolically equivalent to clans purging themselves of the 'foreign' blood by which the very conception of their respective members was originally possible (see also Strathern 1992a:76-87). In this account of the homologies between body-clan reproductions, the value of what is 'replaced' (cf: Weiner 1980) is constituted as the reclamations of bloods that were once 'lost' in previous generations of procreation. It is this possibility of 'undoing' relationships and redistributing persons over time as the aesthetic of regenerative reclamation, which is seen to keep local social life orderly and continuous.

This exogamous impetus of the Bush Mekeo to purge themselves of 'foreign' blood by which, however, the conception of their respective clan members was originally in practice possible, resonates with recipient[s] interest in transforming (through their

Chapter Eight 264 'work') the third party exchange of genetically non-related material into a relationship of continuity such that the child women nurture with their gestational blood, may come into being. If one source of continuity between our implicit links lies with the power of 'manipulation', then it is as important to see the shoots of difference as it is to see the tips of tentative likeness. The following sections draw out some comparative and contrastive bases to show how although no pseudo-procreative folk model of female-to-female imagery conspicuously informs either donors' transmissions or the mainstream accounts of assisted conception in the UK, the a-genetic nature characterising Melanesian notions of reproduction converges with the way that the notion of the regeneration of persons as sets of relations implicitly structures the accounts of many donors' narratives.

The value of regeneration (iii): The symbolism of relations of anonymous exchange

In the British context, the notion of the regeneration of persons is seen to take the form of renewing relations as the aesthetic of free-circulating and untraceable sets of identities. Crucially these identities are synonymous with social relations because they pass 'through' persons. Contrary to the Melanesian agents described by Strathern who are to be identified by others in terms of the specific relations they set up (1991a:198,210-211; 1992c:178-181,186-87), the agency of this group of women is made known as the necessarily untraceable embodiments of continuous vistas of circulation. What circulates spatio-temporally is the value of someone's actions as these are transmuted successively into new relations that can only be made apparent

Chapter Eight 265 as the intersubjective relations that are someone else's actions. Thus, what circulates in regenerative form are the traces of interchangeable and multiple non-identities as these come to be substantiated by anonymised persons and as various nonparticularised sets of relations. Nonetheless, the social entity of the person of donors is renewed over time. However, like the Melanesian reproductions outlined above, it is not the genetic transmission of a unique set of characteristics whereby persons know themselves to have been reproduced.

Penny, for example, assumes the form of social regeneration when she conceives of the relations she makes from out of her body parts as extensional kinds of continuing 'ripple effects'. Through her agency, she keeps making from out of herself (as a 'someone') new and expanding relations. A similar sense of continuity pervades Meena's account. Meena partly embodies the form of regeneration for the way that the child she 'cooks' is a meal that can only be eaten symbolically in the sense that it is a production enjoyed for life. It keeps on being eaten; an identity it is impossible ever finally to consume. This relation is additionally an action that has been made from the substance of nurturance and support that she remembers as the feeding relations she previously enjoyed at the home temples in India. In Odelle's case, it is also the perception of making new sets of relations from out of old ones that preempts the theme of regeneration. As In Mosko's account of Bush Mekeo kin relations, Odelle's donated body part is 'manipulated' by her to create what she calls a 'fictitious friendship' between herself and the recipient. Emanating from her identity as an untraceable and un-named agent, it is as the ties of circulating substance that Odelle is able to anticipate an ongoing connectedness between a genealogical tradition

Chapter Eight 266 that she identifies as her past and inheritance, and herself as an active mode of intersubjective (sell) extension. She is aware that her 'fiction', the gift of her genes 'by proxy', does not connect her in a significant way to an entity describable as 'her' genetical child, but rather to previous and future generations of her family that she has never seen nor is ever to know directly.

The way that substance is shared as the common tie of anonymity, that is, as relations to be exchanged and 'handed down' between various persons, is also apparent in Rita's account. Rita regenerates herself as the gift of a 'better

life", making anew the

event of her unknown birth mother's adoption of herself through the extensional form that is her anonymised donation and 'self' transformation. Though theirs is not a genealogy of traceable relations, the women informing her narrative connect up as the mediated relations of each other. But the kind of 'kinship' they reproduce is one that floats free from the fixed parameters of internally consistent units, such as 'the family'.

What was broached earlier as women's unisexual capacities for creation and defined somewhat tentatively as the 'parthenogenetic' element (chapter 5), is in fact more accurately rendered in terms of the regenerative potential of women to make replacements and cover over forms of perceived 'loss'. Yet because the substance of anonymity is empirically manifest precisely as the conspicuous lack of a procreative idiom for the actions of female to female transmissions - because western forms of societal organisation are not reflected in the microcosm of the person - women may be heard to pollute sporadically their discourse on the establishment of intercommunity

Chapter Eight 267 life with the local idiom of 'waste'.

Delia and Fay, for instance, draw upon the recycling and 'continuous cycles' their body parts can effect in terms of the idiom of averting what they regard as their otherwise wasteful menstruations. Chapter five, however, sought to show how underlying such a conception is a notion of the person as somebody capable of remaking and extending relations with others through actions (the 'person') that prevent nothing coming anew. Delia and Fay were both quite clearly holding others 'in mind' (cf: Strathern 1988) when they acted to transform 'old' substance into the new ties of anonymity. Thus, recourse to a language of waste is symptomatic of the absence of a readily available significatory order for detailing the substance of extensional persons, this in turn principally the result of how assumptions viz. proprietorial persons are embedded in mainstream discourse.

But the significance of a nonprocreative register finds another outlet. The aforementioned digression from the substance of ova to that of cadavers and aborted fetuses is not a tangential development, but rather one conceptually integral to the present focus. It is an analytic move designed to serve the critical purpose of setting up an exemplary framework whereby the symbolically regenerative recyclings of life and death, that is the medium of anonymity, may be graphically outlined. It was mentioned earlier how a key objection to the transplantation to living recipients of ovarian tissue from aborted fetuses or cadavers centred on the perception that the child's mother would not only have died before the child would have been conceived, but that 'she' herself would never actually have lived. However, once the underlying

Chapter Eight 268 fear of 'skipping a generation' is filtered through the multidirectional flows that circumscribe social relations as the regenerative substance of vistas of circulation, evident here in both donors and recipients testimonies (chapters 5 and 7), the related adjunct of 'a natural law of biology' ceases to pull any discursive force. If what the Melanesian material serves to illustrate is how, upon the event of death, the possibilities for undoing and 'deconceiving' persons by means of newly reordering old sets of relationships also defies a purely biological construction of the individual 2, and if recipients of live donation do not know who the genetic mother of their child is, nor wish to have any actual relationship with or connection to the donor (see chapters 6 and 7), who incidentally does not herself regard the donated ova as biological substance (see chapter 4), then in terms of what precisely does the difference inhere that makes receiving an ova from a dead woman or from aborted fetuses - as opposed to receiving ova from living women - objectionable? Why is it ostensibly part of the 'natural' order in western society to keep these substances out of a field of exchange?

Though de Coppet's and Weiner's analyses both see the conversion of loss as a positive resource and are concerned with the temporal aspect of a regenerative logic, de Coppet obviates the need for a theory of social agency by stressing the inevitability by which 'chains [of transformation] are not so much invented as rather blindly and faithfully followed' (de Coppet 198 1:201). Weiner too leaves unanswered the question of what kinds of persons are capable of enacting processes of regeneration, partly because she pursues her own 'paradox' that veers her analysis, however subtle, more towards an overreliance on structural causality than on a micropolitics of human agency. In her most recent writing (1992), Weiner identifies what she calls the

Chapter Eight 269 'universal paradox' of 'keeping while giving' and her exposition provides an interesting backdrop for the present discussion precisely because it offers an example of the aesthetic of regeneration in the face of non-circulation. Drawing upon Weiner's analysis, we are enabled to ask how the aspects of social life that permit the author to sketch out a non-circulatory model of regeneration, mirror the British scenario of prohibiting from circulation the exchange of cadaver and aborted fetus tissue as the occasion of the life-giving death.

For Weiner, the 'paradox' consists in the way that specific products come to be endowed with such high value that they cannot be relinquished for purposes of social circulation. Nonetheless these products accrue value as symbolic power. Keeping inalienable possessions out of exchange, these objects become 'symbolic repositories of genealogies and historical events' that can be identified with 'a particular series of owners through time' (1992:33). Weiner's point is that the 'ownership' of inalienable possessions makes the fundamental feature of exchange what she calls 'the authentication of difference' rather than the balance of equivalence. Inalienable for the way they are constitutive of group identity, such so-called 'cosmologically authenticated' objects are kept inside a restricted group and denote a source of hierarchy, so that what is not exchanged 'circulates' as symbolic media only in the strictly qualified sense that owners are sought out by other 'players' (43). These latter perceive the former as powerful, and therefore hope to alter the balance of political hierarchy by capturing such 'inalienable' possessions. By keeping on the one hand the oldest and rarest wealth objects imbued with mana spirit, while giving at the same time less valuable goods as replacement gifts, attention is drawn paradoxically to those

Chapter Eight 270 non-exchangeable objects that validate the owner's authority. Thus, Polynesian chiefs give away items while preserving their most precious heirlooms and their gifts are replacements that demarcate what they keep.

By analogy, it might be argued that tissue from aborted fetuses or cadavers represent an unique or singular source of material, simply too valuable to be surrendered for social circulation (cf: Kopytoff 1986). Obviously, the views of cadavers and aborted fetuses cannot themselves be researched, and the question of the logic of the difference that makes receiving ova from a dead woman or from aborted fetuses objectionable, is perhaps one that is best turned around so as to address the difference between live donation and cadaver donation in terms of the value of actions of relational persons/agents. For the issue is not one of determining the 'innate' properties of ova, cadavers, and aborted fetuses as the respective substances of selfowning persons whose body parts may or may not serve the functional purpose of providing regenerative potential. Just as it was shown earlier how Yasmin (chapter 7) thinks of different bodily substance as the different circulatory capacities of different persons' productions, and how in her capacity as a recipient, it is not the ova themselves that preoccupy her, but 'the woman who at some stage in the past put them [the ova] there [in the pool]', so it is arguable in these cases that the altogether different issue is that of conceiving how the value of regeneration consists of the kinds of social relations that the mobilisations or 'manipulation' of such circulating parts set up between persons. This means being conceptually open to reflecting upon how pre-consenting adults may make new social relations from out of themselves as the activation (that is, the 'substance' of anonymity) of postmortem self

Chapter Eight 271 transformations.

Although Weiner's insistence on the universal and enduring nature of inalienable possessions stems from a critique of 'a Western construct of linear sequences basically concerned with discrete acts of giving and receiving' (Weiner 1980:71), actually the central paradox informing her account turns on the way that the construct of inalienability 'feeds', as it were, a view of the self as discrete, unitary and inviolable. James Weiner makes the point deftly: 'But why do these selves care whether such objects become alienated if the integrity of the self is not affected by their loss?' (Weiner 1995:133; see also Howell 1989). Thus, because persons in Weiner's account are still founded on the axiomatic rubric of self-ownership and the view that they are rightfully the originary owners of their products, the constitution of power and difference through the accumulation and non-circulation of 'wealth' is something that hangs conceptually free from the way in which persons are able to make extensions of themselves in terms of how they could differentiate themselves as temporalised acts these non-exchanges symbolically set up.

It is not then the case, as Rosi Braidotti suggests in a commentary on the nature of discourses of 'bio-power', that the boundaries between life and death collapse imperceptibly because of a 'freezing out of time'(1989: 153). Rather it is the case that life and death comprise each other's imaginative counterparts because of the social agent's capacity to initiate the multiple dispersals of 'self' that she or he engenders as the play of time. The perception, then, that the child's mother would not only have died before the child would have been conceived, and that 'she' herself would never

Chapter Eight 272 actually have lived, is not to be seen as necessarily symptomatic of the violation of time. Generations are not necessarily pregiven as sequences of relations that can be 'skipped'. For indeed, it is precisely 'the nature of human beings to intervene to try to shape their world' (HFEA 1994c:2) when they express the desire to transact and displace themselves as the redistributive potential of 'many' persons. When we go back to Titmuss's (1970) study on anonymous blood donation (chapter two), we find that the form for such multiplicity is again corroborated by some of his respondents. Significantly, they too describe their donations in terms of the entity of a nonpossessive 'someone'.

Someone in my family may one day need blood. I would like to think that someone will be there then, so I give mine knowing that some unknown person will be eternally grateful (married woman, aged 28, no children, industrial chemist, 13 donations). I have a motorbike and someday I may need blood to help me, so why shouldn't I give mine to help someone who may have had an accident? (married man, aged 50, two children, waterman textiles, 4 donations) My son was killed on the road, he was a blood donor and I knew they did their best to save him and because I know he would be pleased I am carrying on as long as I can to help someone I hope (married woman, aged 63, four children, 19 donations) (Titmuss 1970:229, emphasis added).

Such statements are not the straightforwardly rational calculations of anticipated mutual gains based on a model of reciprocal exchange, but are rather a way of imagining how significant social ties and relations can be made from out of the substance of persons who do not necessarily have to be known as actual presences to each other - either as the effect of specific relations or as pre-existing sets of relationships. The form of substance is the exchange itself. In people's imaginations, ova seem to resonate as a circulatory vista that seems just like blood (see Jones 1994).

Chapter Eight 273 In the light of this we may be inclined to ask what kinds of persons could be suggestive of the metaphor of 'one' person whilst also containing 'many' others? (cf: Gillison 1980; Strathern 1991a: Wagner l99l). Contrary to Weiner, this ethnographic material has drawn inspiration from the way in which instances of non-reciprocity have not equated with moments of non-circulation. Yet this insight has produced what is for both myself and my informants the source of our mutually descriptive dilemma. This is so because both sets of narrative 'voices' have been equally dogged by the textual imprecision that has informed our descriptions of gifts as relations that are 'neither inalienable nor forgettable' (see chapter 4)

Transilience

Instead of thinking of a centralised ego from which things radiate outwards and to which things/relations are impelled to return, we may imagine modes of transilience whereby the category of 'the person' becomes socially prominent for the relations of support it traverses. A notion of persons as 'transilient' ' draws upon the elements of extension, dispersal, circulation and multidirectional flows that have preoccupied the previous chapters. Transilience sets up an altogether different rationale of identity to the property assumptions underscoring the notions of alienability and inalienability because it anticipates a disinvestment of the ego. Lyotard's 'libidinal' economy makes a passing reference to the project of refining ourselves to become 'sufficiently anonymous conducting bodies' (1993:258), as it also notably presages a critique of the bounded individual as 'the closed voluminous body' coterminous with ego and

Chapter Eight 274 property, though problematically the circulations Lyotard envisages still equate anonymity with forms of passivity.

For donors, transilience takes the form of making 'scaffolds', or of wanting to help 'busloads of women'. The common dynamic is the desire to stretch oneself out as a relation - in this case as the action of producing multiple body parts for many women. For recipients, transilience takes the form of the multidirectional identifications that are forged by receiving and giving which do not accord with discrete acts of giving and receiving' (Weiner 1980:71). One might see an analogy between the spreading of oneself as a continuous flow of 'ripple effects' and the men that Herdt tells us are able to keep themselves strong 'by having their sperm safely contained in many boys, who are likened to a sort of magical string of semen depositories for one's substance, spread throughout society' (Herdt 1984a: 192, emphasis added).

A notion of traversing across persons as transilient kinds of relations is evident from Battaglia's (1990) depiction of working 'sabsabarl'. For the Sabarl Islanders making up part of the East Calvados Chain to the far south east of mainland Papua New Guinea, the organisation of body parts into constructive relations of support (labe) and dynamic complementarity (gaba) mirror the physical constitution and potential for the fetus/person to grow. This relates to how it is important for the Sabarl to maintain an ideal internalised balance between bone (laba) and flesh (gaba) substances through 'dry-lean' (kevekeve) and 'greasy-sweet' (posa) food consumption (38,41,46) such that male and female substance may be manipulated to obviate distinctions of sex between men and women. Accordingly, persons are embodied by the generic and, incidentally,

Chapter Eight 275 invisible substance of hinona: the partible, extra-bodily life force that animates a person as the generative future of others (53-54,71).

Of course, the discussion so far is skewed analytically inasmuch as it has completely overlooked the fact that the internal constitution of the Melanesian person is not analogous to that of the Western person. On this point Strathern writes of how the Melanesian person is a microcosm of societal forms of organisation such that: 'external relations have the same effect as internal ones. In short, to imagine the person in this manner means that no switch of perspective between persons and relations is required in order to 'see' social relations' (Strathern 1992a: 100). This concordance of perspective was apparent in de Coppet's analysis of the person made up from 'body', 'breath' and 'image'; the same components that make up the piles of exchanged food as the 'reconstituted' form of the deceased at the mortuary feasts. It was also evident in Mosko's analysis of the homologies between the respective 'openings' and 'closings' of women's bodies and patrilineal clans.

Strathern's conception of Melanesian agents shows how one is enabled to act and thus capable of 'making' an action because of the way that a 'person' stands for a 'locus of relationships'. And in the sense that persons capabilities reveal the social relations of which they are composed, social relations reveal the persons they produce (Strathern 1988:173). Further, every relation contains within it or anticipates (as its 'capacity') its own outcome which is the previous relationship in a transformed state (1988:241) so that actions are the substitution of one relationship by another. For the Hageners, argues Strathern, power does not equal exerting control over others, but

Chapter Eight 276 refers to the drawing out of internal capacities, and to the way that the effect of interaction on the inner person comes to be registered on the body. Thus, the category of the body is thought of as registering the effects of others' motivations and intentions because it is composed of the specific historical actions of others (Strathern 1988:132).

But are 'western' bodies really so different? When Yasmin (chapter 7) draws upon the notion of the 'pooi' she envisions a kind of collective space of persons 'milling about' who are constituted as a microcosm of social relations. The pooi is 'one body' - the container of many persons - and it is activated as the outcome of the kinds of relations that are made and transferred as the detachable and circulating parts of persons. The imagery of Fay's (chapter 5) person as a body constituted of internal escalators 'going around' is another instance of the agent activated as a microcosm of social relations of exchange. As the container of several persons' actions, her multiply divisible body is the recursivity of continuous cycles that the internalised steps - that double up as the bodies of agents - activate. As her account narratively straddles her interiorly active body and her person as someone involved in 'the world [as] made up of people giving and receiving', there is absolutely no switch of perspective between what is internal and external since social relations are 'seen' for the way that the body is composed of the (historical) actions of others.

Though seemingly proximate to the figure of the Melanesian agent, these examples of the ways in which parts of persons can be activated as agents do not provide a perfect reflection of the person as the embodied form of societal organisation at large.

Chapter Eight 277 These agents cannot be said to carry all of 'society' inside them, nevertheless they do, as modes of transilience, have social relations integral to them. Speculating on whether we may be witnessing an era governed by 'the end of the body', Martin (1992, 1994) advances the argument that under a regime of 'flexible accumulation' the internally plural body of late capitalism is made up of body parts invested with agency. In terms if the present study, transilience dislocates the theme of exteriorisation which can now be seen to have served simply as a provisional conceptual tool of the study's introductory set-up.

Conclusions

It was asked at the outset of this chapter how substance is 'shared' between persons. The foregoing analysis has argued that the substance of anonymity is comprised of a certain sociality that takes the form of the social regeneration of persons. Rather than viewing the social circulations of intercorporealised body parts as an 'infringe[ment] [of] the dead' (see Palmer 1994), or as a form of 'essence rape' (see chapter 1), I have argued that substance is creative of new sets of relationships over time that are identifiable as women's respective embodiments of temporalised 'vistas of circulation'. Though regeneration in this particular context does not find an expressive outlet as the ritualistic performance of exchange ceremonies and cannot be said to function as the mainstay for legitimating the social order, certain similarities with Melanesian forms of non-genetic reproduction have been noted. This was seen to centre on women's abilities to socialise themselves as agents by making themselves into a source of

Chapter Eight 278 potential recurrent fertility. Recalling findings from previous chapters, it was shown how in the process of such transformations women do not stress they have a unique and unrepeatable biography, and thus what may be taken as the relative contingency and denigration of constructs of biological identity are shown to find an analytical parallel in the current possibilities that assisted conception presents for the rechannelling of relations. By bringing life and death together as the potential meeting point of different cultures, such '(re)mobilisations' of substance are shown to be valid as the aesthetic of the social expansion of the person - both in the sense of moving beyond the trajectory of individuals' own lifetime as well as beyond persons' identifiable presence. Finally, the notion of 'transilience' has been introduced to denote a non-possessive model of personhood in which relations are integral to agents, and also to indicate the manner in which persons' bodies need not be necessarily fixed as a physical source of identity.

1. An amendment to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill proposed by Dame Jill Knight has now passed into law banning the use of fetal ova, or embryos derived from fetal ova, in fertility treatment. 2. Consider also how in some Melanesian societies the fertility and procreative capacity of the deceased are continued in the living through postmortem transformations of the substance by ritual anthopopagy. Female substance may be transformed into male substance by men and vice versa. See Gillison 1980; Lindenbaum 1987; Strathern 1982. 3. Writing on the unstructured nature of 'someone', Burridge (1979:47) comments that '...a person should abandon self-realisation through the fulfilment of dyadic relations.. .interact with all in ways that indicate that each is contained in all and all in each'. 4. Transilient is defined as: 'extending across from one point of support to another': see The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, 4th edition, 1951.

CHAPTER NINE

Conclusions

Contents

Research methodology and theoretical development

Main findings and conceptual insights

Chapter Nine 280 Research methodology and theoretical development

One possible source of contextual distortion of the research has been its reliance on data gathered from the extreme detailing of case studies. I have tried to avoid the pitfalls of representing the exceptional for the usual, first by placing women's voices against a much wider frame that has looked to certain aspects of the institutional politics of assisted conception treatments. Foremost to mind, are the implications of presupposing (parts of) persons may be exchanged as anonymous sets of identities, and of the way such identities are marshalled as the aggregate sum of the social entity of 'personhood', for instance in terms of notions of 'matching' donor to recipient as a relation of like with like (Chapter 2). Second, as the interviews from which the case studies have been drawn took their own course, I was able to feel my way towards certain common, or at least, faintly identifiable themes. It soon became apparent that these required working out as much for the way they structured women's underlying concerns, as for the way they made themselves known through their obvious rhetorical variations and seeming incongruencies. Though the research comprises a relatively small sample size of forty women, divided into two sub-sets of twenty donors and twenty recipients, and may thus be deemed by certain judgement as lacking the generative power to elicit broad-based empirical generalisations, I am confident that the accounts of the informants presented here remain 'representative', and therefore valid, precisely because the methodological approach displays an inbuilt bias towards the integrity of difference.

One significant source of difference, for instance, is traced throughout the central

Chapter Nine 281 ethnographic chapters in terms of the ambivalent, sometimes contradictory content of women's discourse. Organising what appear as the inchoate and messy formulations of women's 'inner thoughts" presents a methodological and conceptual challenge insofar as what may be taken as the processual constitution of multiple subjectivities is charted here through the relations women imagine they act to forge. Since there is no pre-existing conceptual model of the universe of the imagination as social agent from which one could draw initial inspiration, I chose to exploit these rhetorical contradictions by magnifying the source of their ambivalence. This was done not in the spirit of confounding such contradictions - of erasing their traces from out of the awkward folds of disparate data - but rather in the hope of incorporating women's felt uncertainties and lapses into rhetorical vagueness as the poignant markers suggestive of women's powers as agents in the social world. From these pointers, I hoped to be able slowly to build up what was resistant to speech as the ('absent') evidence of a kind of meta-language that departed from, as well as challenged the conventional assumptions of mainstream legal and medical discourses. Necessarily, this has entailed paying close attention to each informants style of discourse (see Fiumara 1990), and it was by threading together the different idioms with which each of the women would stress what had been experientially significant to themselves, as well as being sensitive to the non-articulated 'speech' of silence, that the thematic distillation of these discourses - in the form of extensively quoted case studies - came to take on the shape of empirically 'representative' and conceptually meaningful articulations. At the same time, women's incipient formulations on this controversial and sensitive subject area were shown to be likely to veer towards partiality and confusion, so that the probability of being able to hear a syntax of non-biology was in all likelihood

Chapter Nine 282 something that could reasonably be expected to get inextricably caught up in conventional notions of genetics, such as the plight of 'selfish' genes (chapter 5). Thus, it is partly as an exercise in alternative signification that women's speech and their identities as anonymous agents have been detailed; this being not because the methodological design of the research set out with the aim of either proving or refuting the existence of certain 'facts', but because the conceptual rationale of the research has been fundamentally that of earnest exploration. My position, then, has been to work as much with informants - giving them voice through extensive citation - as it has been to work against them - distancing myself from their statements and showing how certain of their conceptions may originate in misperceptions (chapter 6) though contra Bourdieu (1977), not for want of a thwarted social agency. The same position has marked my relation to the exploration of the construct of anonymity, which has been central to my indulgence in choosing to stay conceptually close to the participatory, active, and what I take as essentially extrinsic world of the imagination. Summarising the study's main findings, I turn now to extrapolate the consistent contradiction of the discourse of anonymity as this has been shown to inform the 'new' reproductive context of invisibilised exchange.

Findings and conceptual insights

The ethnographic chapters showed first how although donors give parts of their bodies to recipients, these parts do not come from their bodies. Second, it raised the further paradox that recipients do not receive the same body parts that donors donate. Both

Chapter Nine 283 points are seen to contrast the 'matching' model of equivalence endorsed by clinics, and underpinning the norm of reciprocity, which assumes that 'whole' persons, as the sum of their disparate parts, signify a fixed, ascertainable value prior to the act of exchange (chapter 2). By placing women's invisibilised identities at the centre of the analysis as embryonic kinds of non-identities, however, and by exploring how these kinds of identities surface as certain kinds of knowledges, it was shown, contrariwise, how a part of a person may assume the mutable value of an agent as part of the very process of exchange. This was analysed in terms of the kinds of relations taking place as the imagined circulatory flows over time, and through social space, between 'irrelated' or non-related persons.

Breaking down these two points further, we arrive at a set of preliminary generalisations. Obviously it is analytically cumbersome and conceptually flat to keep referring generically to 'women who donate....' and 'women who receive....' as though the categories of donors on the one hand, and recipients on the other, could ever signify an uncontested or resolute kind of internal coherence unto themselves. Nonetheless, I have forced the distinction throughout this study in order to start to schematise how the views of women, though differently expressed, arrange themselves into a discernable pattern of congruence.

First, and quite counterintuitively, donated reproductive substance is not conceptualised by donors as a bio-genetic substance. This has surprising repercussions as to how donors think about what kind of 'gift' it is they are giving. For instance, donors agreed unanimously that they had no maternal right over the product of their

Chapter Nine 284 donation. Perhaps an even more counterintuitive finding is their insistence that they do not wish to have any kind of maternal relation to such offspring, nor to establish any kind of contact or tie with the child. This is not to be confused with the way many women did wonder whether their donated ova would help to establish a successful pregnancy and birth, usually asking clinic staff several times whether they could be informed about the outcome of their acts. Yet it was precisely these kinds of ruminations that subsequently opened up how women's concern about the welfare of any child they helped to produce was not something they envisaged in possessive terms, that is, as the embodiment of a relation to their 'own' child. Though clinicians would often appeal to the much-quoted scenario of children turning up on donors' houses' doorsteps in twenty or so years time in a quest to find out the identity of their birth mother, as a valid reason for preserving the principle of anonymity, several donors turn such projections around when they say that they would not want to know specific details about a particular child, nor would they seek to play an active part in the child's upbringing. Nancy sums up many women's sentiments when she exclaims how '..out of pure curiosity it would be nice to perhaps know what the outcome was, but not for any other reason. You're not going to go knocking on somebody else's door in twenty years time. But just to actually know what the outcome was.. .and you must naturally wonder what has happened, what has been the outcome? And I can't really see the point; there must be a way of anonymously giving some sort of details, some sort of outcome from that...! know I felt very negative not being able to follow it through'.

Second, recipients also wanted to preserve physical distance between themselves and

Chapter Nine 285 donors, and though sincerely grateful to donors for their unique help, they remained dogged by the fear of a perceived threat of donors' rival claim to parenting. In this sense, they do not receive the same kind of gifts that donors offer to them.

Third, looking at donation as a system of exchange between donors and recipients, both sets of women are seen to be engaged in active forms of non-biological reproduction and self-extension. Both take responsibility for their procreative choices and their engagement in making life as cultural producers and reproducers, seeing the 'assisted' nature of conception as something they can do and achieve. If recipients transform the donated ova they receive their into substance of their 'own', they do so in terms of symbolic relationships of nurturance. If donors derive satisfaction from the gifts they produce, they do so in terms of the transformations they symbolically and subconsciously effect of the self as an extendible 'mode of transiience' (chapter 8): they are dispersed persons embodied as the multiple proliferations of 'other' selves, encompassing the power to produce multiple ova in the condensed time frame of one menstrual cycle. Thus, what is exchanged between donors and recipients are their respective acts of agency: the relations they both enable and make as 'like' forms of social continuity, rather than the fixed and particular biological capacities of reproductively 'healthy' or 'ill' bodies, however such categorisations normatively be determined.

The fourth point demonstrates this last point well. What is seen by donors essentially as the non-biological aspect of their donation is further vindicated by the redonations carried out by recipients when they choose to recirculate 'spare' embryos to other

Chapter Nine 286 recipients as a token gesture of reproducing a similar kind of 'gift' to that facilitated originally by 'their' donors (chapter 7). Returning, then, to the two central paradoxical tenets introducing these findings, it is as the appearance of multiple bodies circulating in the gift that the various social agencies of persons go about making themselves known. In analytical terms, the exact status of these multiple bodies returns us to the question posed experimentally at the outset of the research regarding the recombinations by which the constructs of gifts, bodies and anonymity appear to coalesce (chapter 1). I argue that this question is now partially answerable by recourse to a logic of non-biological reproduction that turns on what has been identified as the regenerative sociality of anonymity.

Though women favour the assumption of identities of anonymity, they construct from out of their mutual non-identities imagined kinds of social relations whereby they envisage relations of non-relations as kinds of free, non-obligatory, and 'un-binding' familiarities (chapter 4: 'distant connections'). This takes shape as a new kind of laterally dispersed kinship between pseudo-strangers, something almost inaudibly articulated, though almost definitely quite pressingly imagined. Thus Cheal's notion of 'intimacy at a distance' (1988:39) is a major inspirational source of the research, but his related observation that the 'complete failure to reciprocate is rare, and its incidence is notable only where social ties are breaking down' (1988:59: emphasis added), is rejected out of hand.

First, though these gifts are not reciprocated, the absence of return does not instantiate an a-social, precarious 'sidedness' leading to the break down or severance of

Chapter Nine 287 interpersonal relations. The notion of reciprocity as 'the most immediate form of integrating the opposition between self and others' (Levi-Strauss, 1964:84) is then one that clearly needs to be overhauled analytically by the intersubjectivity that is the nonreciprocity of anonymity. As the discursive form of non-reciprocity, anonymity can be seen to be 'making' both persons and social relations as much as it allegedly prohibits the forging of these very relations. Second, non-reciprocity, in this context, does not procure an indebtedness that either can, nor in any normative sense, should be cancelled by the recipient. Third, and relatedly, this removal of indebtedness from the exchange equation means the recipient is not ranked as somebody of a socially inferior status to the donor. Nonetheless, though the gifts featuring in this study do not rank persons according to the relative social standing of donors and recipients, women may however be said to be ranked in two subsidiary ways. On the one hand, it is only women of the same exchange order or categorical designation who are ranked. Thus, recipients are ranked amongst themselves and not in relation to donors. And additionally, recipients are ranked only in the covert sense that their spatio-temporal hierarchisation locates them, in their regard, as the apparently equal co-competitors for the receipt of ova (see chapter 2). One might say that the power of hierarchisation seeps into a seemingly equal system of distribution. Having worked through this reciprocity/anonymity dualism, one is now in a better position to spell out the 'consistent contradiction' that underpins these findings.

On the one hand, anonymity enforces the rule of taboo, separating persons as though they can be predetermined as the value of discrete and bounded social entities. This view is founded on the presumption of the human reproduction of biological persons

Chapter Nine 288 standing in a relation of inalienability to their own person, and it rests on the premise that persons are constituted as the self-possessing owners of their bodies. According to this view, the non-fragmentation of the body as multiple parts safeguards what many feminist commentators, amongst others, have chosen to refer to as the primacy of bodily 'integrity'. Therefore, persons involved in the intercorporeal exchange of others' reproductive body parts ostensibly need to be transformed into anonymised sets of identities in order to preserve a sense of their unique proprietary integrity. It is this kind of reasoning which leads Rosi Braidotti, for instance, to suggest that developments in new reproductive technologies worryingly cause the time of generational difference to dissolve. Noting that 'the era of "bodies without organs" is primarily the era that has pushed time out of the bodily picture: bio-power has more to do with the denial of death than with the mastery of life' (1989:153), Braidotti assumes that parts of persons represent the fixed and predetermined value of a necessarily total bodily self: ('..all organs are equal in helping achieve the aim. Thus, in the NRT, the uterus of one woman is worth that of the other, of any other. A uterus is a uterus is a uterus..') (1989:156: emphasis added). But at the very same time as the discourse of anonymity harnesses just precisely this possessive model to its own normative and legislative ends, it is also the condition for the social circulations of extensional persons who are able to emanate modes of transilience from their persons. In this particular instance, this has been shown to occur in the context of the social regeneration of the cross-transferable parts/identities of agents which, crucially, presumes a non-proprietary model of the non-biologically constructed person. With Leenhardt (1979) we may concur that the body is not the source of individual identity, but in its multiple form, just a temporary locus.

Chapter Nine 289 In bringing to a head the question of what the 'substance' of anonymity consists of, I pulled together some of the strands of the 'value' of regeneration. This was done by working through some of the 'implicit links' connecting Melanesian conceptions of mortuary exchange and social continuity at the systemic level of social organisation, with the 'reproduction' of life that donors and recipients make exchangeable in their capacity as relational persons, or, agents, at the intersubjective level (chapter 8). These strands may be identified in terms of the following interrelated features.

First, reproduction is transformed from a biological event into a socially constructed process (cf: Sexton 1982), and the Western conviction that a woman's sexuality and her role in reproduction make her into a property that must be exchanged and controlled by men, is found to be empirically wanting. Second, this transformation entails the rethinking of notions of personhood, family and kinship - a rethinking broached here through a critical questioning of the validity of the concepts of alienability/inalienability as working parameters for conventional definitions of (gift) exchange. The argument has been that these notions simply entrench views of a possessive self which are not congruent with the forms of self extension and nonownership that the research outlines.

To sum up: I have argued that anonymity is a form of sociality governed in the context of assisted conception by the value of regeneration. It is not substance that is regenerated, but relations between persons sentient as 'someones' who circulate as sets of identities and social ties through the 'manipulations' or, more accurately, the transilience that such persons, as agents, embody. Thus, the issue of bringing into

Chapter Nine 290 social circulation the body parts from dead women, whether these be as cadavers organs or as ova from aborted fetuses, to the bodies of live women as a form of infertility treatment, sets up a kind of regenerative sociality rather than a 'perversion of science' (Palmer 1994) and obscenities of 'womb robbing' (Mihill 1994; Raymond 1994; Rowland 1993). For it is the case that somebody at some (former) time has chosen to make from out of themselves the flow of a continuing relationality: the mother whose fetus is aborted must want to give such consent, or else the newly transplanted cadaver organ originates from a donor who carried a card stipulating this very wish. Thus, it is possible to trace how through the enactment of identities of nonidentity death may be transformed into new life. Just as Melanesian 'mortuary feasting becomes the central point of collective social ritual, its entailed expansion of the individual into a generalised social significance becomes the point of origin of society' (Wagner 1989:267, emphasis added), so the regeneration of persons through assisted conception as new sets of social relations is the symbolic reordering of persons and of society. The regenerative substance of genetic material - as opposed to the non-renewable organs of heart, kidney, blood and so on - as pluralised relations and visions of extension, embody the idiom of the expansion and creation of multiple persons: death and life are the regenerative coupling of multiple sets of relations.

Finally, we can see how the enforcement of anonymity as a discourse of prohibition or taboo is misfounded since it represents the denial of the idealised and 'fictitious' manipulations of social relations. By reframing exchange through the 'faces' of invisibility and by showing how these faces constitute an imaginary order of circulating relations, I have pointed, however, to the central paradox that is the

Chapter Nine 291 sociality of anonymity. The related critique of reciprocity attacks the core of Mauss's thesis on the gift, but ironically the non-identities of anonymity as a form of the consubstantial (cf: Pitt-Rivers 1973), is seen to make a final 'return' to Mauss's intimations regarding the (re)emergence of a 'group morality' in advanced capitalist society (Mauss 1990:68). Whether or not this may be thought of as a 'salutary revolution' (ibia') remains for others to debate.

1. N.B: 'anthropologists have generally found that actors with too much psychological plumbing are hard to handle methodologically' (Ortner 1984:151).

292 APPENDICES

1. Interviewees: Donors

2. Interviewees: Recipients

3. Donor Information Form

4. Egg Donation Questionnaire

5. Treatment Procedure

1 293 The identities of donors and recipients have been kept anonymous, and the following names of informants taking part in the research are purely fictional.

Interviewees: Donors

Alice, 21/7/93; 27/7/93 Betty, 9/3/93 Cathy, 15/6/93 Delia, 29/3/93; 13/4/93 Emma, 7/6/93; 21/6/93 Fay, 3/6/93; 9/8/93 Gill, 8/6/93 Holly, 16/6/93 Ivy, 5/7/93 Jean, 3 1/3/93; 28/4/93 Kate, 8/3/93 Lucy, 3/8/93 Meena, 1/3/93 Nancy, 16/3/93 Odelle, 22/6/93 Penny, 12/6/93 Rita, 4/3/93

TOTAL: 17 women (85 per cent of sample group)

2 Interviewees: Recipients

Susie, 2/8/93 Tess, 23/7/93 Una, 8/12/93 Va!, 14/3/94 Wendy, 28/3/94 Yvonne, 7/2/94 Zoe, 1/10/93 Zeta, 11/3/94 Yasmin, 13/11/93 Winifred, 13/8/93 Vera, 16/11/93 Ulrike, 3 1/7/93 Thea, 18/11/93

TOTAL: 13 women (65 per cent of sample group)

294



'3

295

Human Fertilisatlon & Embryology Authority

HFEA Register (91)4

CONFIDENTIAL DONOR INFORMATION FORM

(Top copy to be returned to the HFEA within one week of the date this donor's gametes are first used or first supplied for use in treatment by a licensed centre.) Please insert numbers or tick boxes as appropriate 1. HFEA centre ref. numben I I I I 1 3. Full name of donor:

I I I

2. Donor's clinic reference numbec

SRNAME

III

FORENAME

I I I I i I I i I i I

t

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OThER FORENAMES

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Maiden name or anyother I name(s) by which she/he ls/ hasbeenknown:I

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Female U

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8. Any donation at othercentres YES

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I

Dateofb4rth:I

Black other, describe

L.J

Pakistani

Li

Any other, describe

1(11

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Brown Ught

Li

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Red

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Hazel

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Blonde

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Li Li

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14. Skin Light Colour Medium

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Green

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NO L_J

Chinese

13. Hair Black Colour Brown Dark

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YEAR

II

I

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Other,describel

II

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Blue

uorsm

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10. Weight(kgs)

Li Li Li IIIIIIIIIi

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Indian

Black Caribbean

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15.Occuç,ation

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TICK

NO

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11. Ethnic group:

16.interests

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I I I I 1 I I I I

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14.

6. Own children: YES DAY

12. Eye Colour

I

CK

7. Date gametes of this donor first used or first supplied for use in treatment

9. Height (m) L...J.

I

DAy

Li

5. Sex: Male

iii

TITLE

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Completion of this section is optional foi the donor but must be brought to his or her attention. 17. The space below Is provided for you to give a brief description of yourself as a person. This should be something which could be passed on to any child born as a result of your help. It may also be seen by the parents.

I

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296 EGG DONATION QUESTIONNAIRE

THIS IS A QUESTIONNAIRE FOR WOMEN WHO HAVE DONATED THEIR EGGS.

PLEASE READ THE ATTACHED LETTER BEFORE FILLING IN THE QUESTIONNAIRE.

YOU WILL REMAIN TOTALLY ANONYMOUS AND ALL INFORMATION WILL BE TREATED IN THE STRICTEST OF CONFIDENCE AND WILL ONLY BE SEEN BY ME.

298 2.

Do you have a child/children of your own? NO

YES

It

3.

U

At the time of donating your eggs, were you: SINGLE

MARRIED

LIVING WITH SOMEONE



OTHER. PLEASE SPECIFY:

At the time of donating your eggs, do you consider you were: in a 'stable relationship'? NO

YES

3. Could you say what made you decide to go ahead with donating your eggs?

4.

What does the word donation mean to you?

2

300 8.

How did you feel emotionally about donating your eggs? Could you describe what sorts of emotions you experienced?

9.

Did the way that you felt affect your decision to donate? If yes, please say how.

10. Did you expect you would feel this way before you donated your eggs?

11. Do you think there are certain emotions that may be quite specific to the experience of donating your eggs? If yes, could you please describe what these might be.

12. Have you gained anything yourself emotionally or materially by donating your eggs? YES

NO II

If

11

II

If yes, what have you gained? If no, did you hope to gain something that you haven't? Please say what?

4

302 14. Does it follow that the more of yourself you have donated, the more you have actually given? For instance, if somebody has donated eggs on more than one occasion, would you consider they have donated more of themselves than someone who has donated once? NO

YES H

H

II

II

If yes, please comment why. If no, please comment why not.

15. The legal number of children from one donor is ten. How do you feel about this? Do you think there should be an upper limit to the number of children somebody can have and why?

16. Do you think that eggs are a defining part of being a woman and having a sexual identity? NO

YES

H

H

If yes, in what way? If no, why not?

6

II

304

IF YOU HAVE DONATED YOUR EGGS ANONYMOUSLY TO AN UNKNOWN RECIPIENT, PLEASE ANSWER QUESTION 20.

IF YOU RAVE DONATED YOUR EGGS TO A FRIEND OR RELATIVE, PLEASE ANSWER QUESTION 21.

IF YOU HAVE DONATED YOUR EGGS TO BOTH SOMEBODY YOU KNOW AND TO AN UNKNOWN RECIPIENT, PLEASE ANSWER BOTH QUESTIONS.

20. IF YOU HAVE DONATED YOUR EGGS ANONYMOUSLY: Can you say whether it mattered to you to know how your eggs have been used? For instance, would you feel the same way about donating your eggs for research as to donating to somebody awaiting treatment, or would you be equally willing to donate for both purposes?

8

306 Have you ever wondered about who will be receiving your eggs? Do you have an ideal as to what this woman would be like? Could you briefly describe what this ideal is.

What sort of relationship, if any, would you ideally like to have with the recipient if things would be left up to you?

Would you be more interested to have a relationship with the recipient if she became pregnant with one of your donated eggs? NO

YES II

H

II

If yes, why? If no, why not?

10

U

308 Why did you want to donate your eggs to this woman?

Would you still have been willing to donate to somebody that you did not know? YES

NO

I I

I I

If yes, why? If no, why not?

Did you and the woman you donated to experience similar sorts of emotions during the time leading up to your donation? YES

NO

I Ii

I 0

What affect did this have on you and have things changed since you have donated your eggs to her?

NOW GO ON TO QUESTION 22

12

310 25. Are there any circumstances which could arise that would make you feel responsible for a child born from your donation? NO

YES

II

p

II

If yes, in what sense would you feel responsible? If no, do you wish never to have any responsibility whatsoever for the child?

26. If you were given the choice, would you like to be involved in the parenting of a child born from your donation, and to what extent would you like to be involved?

27. Since donating your eggs, has it made you think about becoming pregnant yourself? If yes, did you expect tn have these thoughts before you donated?

14

312 31. After answering these questions, do you think: (a) this has been a waste of your time? YES NO II

I!

II

It

II

Ii

ii

H

(b) it has made you think more about the issues surrounding egg donation? YES NO H

It

(C) some questions were not asked that should have been asked? YES NO It

ii

If yes, please give examples of the sorts of questions/areas you think it would be important to consider.

Thank you very much for completing this questionnaire. I hope it has not taken up too much of your time. Your contribution is invaluable so as to help other women who might be thinking about egg donation. If you feel that you could talk with me about your experiences, again in the strictest of confidence, then please suggest how I might best contact you to arrange a convenient time and place for us to meet. You would not have to come to the London School of Economics, and any first name, real or fictional would be fine. I am willing to take part in an informal discussion about egg donation. YES

NO

I suggest you contact me by:

PLEASE NOW RETURN THE QUESTIONNAIRE TO ME IN THE STANPED ADDRESSED ENVELOPE PROVIDED WITH THE QUESTIONNAIRE. 16

5. 313 Treatment Procedure

Ova donation entails an extensive medical therapy of complex drug regimes, surgery and anaesthesia, the nature of which is often downplayed in the standard medical accounts produced by clinics or pharmaceutical drug companies (see for example Sampson 1993). The following description is only a basic outline of the main treatment procedure for donors and recipients'.

Ova that are donated need to be combined with the sperm of the genetic father in a process known as in-vitro fertilisation or IVF (in-vitro meaning in glass, as opposed to in-vivo, in the body). As usually only one ovum becomes fully mature in a woman's monthly cycle, part of the aim of IVF treatments, besides the actual technique of extra-corporeal fertilisation, is the artificial induction of an extra growth of ova. Practitioners explain this to be in the interests of women since the greater the number of mature ova removed from the body, the greater the likelihood of a successful fertilisation, and hence of establishing a pregnancy. One way that medics convey to women their understandings of the production of such growth is by recourse to explanations which emphasise how the (donating) body both overrides and mimicks the course of 'nature'.

Donors

On the assumption that a donor's natural cycle is normally 28 days, beginning on day 21 of the preceding menstrual cycle women commence a 10-14 day course of

314 BuserelinlSuprefact, to be sniffed at regular intervals each day. This drug suppresses the production of the reproductive hormones FSH (follicle stimulating hormone) and LH (luteinising hormone) that are triggered by the pituitary gland at the base of the brain and which stimulate the ovaries to develop follicles. Medics refer to this course of sniffing as the 'switching off' of women's 'spontaneous ovulation', or else to pituitary 'down-regulation' (see Brinsden 1992; Davies 1992; Lewis 1992).

Following this donors are injected for ten days with concentrated amounts of oestrogen and progesterone (for example Pergonal/Humagon, colloquially termed 'fertility injections') so as to promote rapid ovarian follicular growth. During this time the rate of ovarian follicular growth is monitored by ultrasound scans (at least one on day 12 of the donating cycle) and by the analysis of oestrogen levels in blood samples.

Information leaflets given to donors inform them of the possible side effects of the medication: hot flushes, weight gain and the possibility of developing ovarian cysts or ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS) as a result of the over-swelling of a large number of matured ova. Symptoms may include nausea, vomiting, pain, abdominal swelling and shortness of breath. For the minority of women who do suffer OHSS, urgent hospitalisation is necessary.

Between 24-38 hours after the last Pergonal injection, a final intramuscular injection of human chorionic gonadotrophin (Profasi) is administered which mimics the expected onset of the surge of luteinising hormone. By first 'switching off' and then

315 controlling very precisely the superovulatory phase of 'hyperstimulation', the collection of the ova (known also as egg retrieval) can be timed to coincide just before they would be released 'spontaneously' from the ovaries. Between 34-36 hours after the Profasi injection, the ova are removed surgically either by ultrasound guided aspiration or by laparoscopic retrieval.

In cases of transvaginal or transabdominal ultrasound-directed recovery, the ova are collected by passing an ultrasound probe (required for the visualising of the ovaries) through the patient's vagina or abdominal wall and then through the bladder to the ovary. The ova are collected by an attached aspiration needle.

Retrieval by laparoscopy entails making an incision just below the woman's navel into which a telescope is passed for visualisation of the pelvic organs. Another incision is made into which a probe is inserted in order to 'clamp' the ovaries whilst the ova are collected with the egg aspiration needle inserted from a third incision.

After the ova have been collected, they are incubated for a short time before the sperm from the recipient's partner is added. There follows a further incubation period in the clinic laboratory of 24-48 hours during which time fertilisation should hopefully take place. The resulting fertilised ova, referred to as zygote, ('pre-embryo') or embryo dependent on the stage of development and time at which they are re-implanted - are then transferred to the recipient according to the method best suited to her particular medical requirements. To ensure that any remaining ovarian follicles subside and to maintain their reproductive systems in a 'suppressed' condition so as to prevent

316 unwanted conceptions, donors continue taking the Buserelin sniff post-operatively until the time of their next menstrual cycle, theoretically 14 days after the operation.

Recipients

Recipients must also undergo treatment to 'prepare' their bodies. Women whose ovaries do not function 'spontaneously' (that is, they are already 'switched off') need to have their bodies 'switched on' by so-called 'exogenous hormone therapy'. In such cases the form of medical intervention turns on the way that recipients bodies need to be synchronised with that of their 'matched' donor.

Each recipient's body needs to follow as closely as possible the speed at which the ovarian follicles are becoming active and mature inside the superovulated body of their donor. Based on the prior mimicking of the physiological phases of ovulation with hormone supplements, recipients' ovaries are stimulated to react as though fertilisation has taken place. Doses of progesterone ensure that the lining of the recipient's womb grows thicker in anticipation for the zygote/embryo transfer, and implantation of the embryo to the uterine wall.

Alternatively, a recipient who has regular menstrual cycles ('normal ovarian function') may receive donated eggs if her 'spontaneous' cycle can be intermitted. A luteinising hormone releasing hormone (LHRH) analogue will desensitize the pituitary prior to hormone replacement and then the recipient will follow much the same regime as the donor with regards to being 'switched off'.

317 Those recipients who achieve pregnancy are administered increased levels of hormone replacements so as to mimic the rise in oestrogen and progesterone that would occur spontaneously after implantation. This is usually continued for 3-4 months until the placenta continues to support the pregnancy.

Embryo Transfers

Though there are different methods of transfer, there are just two basic forms of transfer: embryos that are 'fresh' and those that are 'frozen'.

Fresh transfers involve the immediate transfer of the zygote (the fertilised egg and sperm) and are medically preferable to frozen transfers because they have a much higher success rate of implantation. Developed from cryopreservation technology, frozen transfers involve a freeze-thaw process for embryos that cannot be transferred immediately. This may be because the recipient has 'spares' left over from one treatment cycle (see chapter 7).

The transfers of frozen embryos is also used when it has not been possible to achieve a synchronised transfer between the donor and the recipient. This might occur because ova have been donated unexpectedly, that is, not from a 'volunteer donor' who has been 'prepared' - according to the processes described above - but from patients undergoing IVF or GIFF who have produced more ova than they need for their own treatment, and have consented to 'donate' them for the treatment of others. In such cases the recipient's body will not have been prepared temporally so that the donated

318 ova will need to be fertilised with the recipient's partner's frozen sperm and resulting embryos will need to be frozen for later transfer. Or else it may also happen that the recipient's endometrium begins to shed unexpectedly at the proposed time of transfer and the exchange needs to be delayed.

Over the years different methods of embryo transfer have been developed. GIFT: Gamete intra-fallopian transfer is similar to IVF except that the ova and sperm are not mixed together outside the woman's body but are injected into one or both of the recipient's Fallopian tubes. As the procedure is closer to the 'natural' events of fertilisation and pregnancy (the embryos travel along the fallopian tube in the normal way to reach the uterus after 4-5 days), it has a higher success rate than IVF which involves embryo transfer (ET) to the uterus.

ZIFT: Zygote intra-fallopian transfer involves the transfer of fertilised ova (zygotes) prior to cell division into the fallopian tubes.

TET: Tubal embryo transfer involves the same medical procedure as ZIFT, except that the embryos are transferred at a more advanced stage, usually 2-3 days after fertilisation. 1. For a bibliographic overview and description of individual technologies and procedures, see Birke et a! 1990; Cirasole and Seager 1987.

319 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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337 REPORTS

The Council for Science and Society's Working Party Report 1984: Human Procreation. Ethical Aspects of the New Techniques, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Department of Health and Social Security 1984: Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology, London: HMSO. Cmnd 9314. Department of Health 1992: Human Fertilisation and Embryology (Disclosure of Information) Bill. Notes on Clauses. House of Lords. Department of Health 1992: Human Fertilisation and Embryology (Disclosure of Information) Bill. House of Lords. Explanatory Memorandum. The European Commission, 1989: Fertility and the Family: The Glover Report on Reproductive Technologies to the European Commission, London: Fourth Estate. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990: London: HMSO. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority 1991a: Egg Donation, London. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority 1991b: Code of Practice, London. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority 1992a: Sperm and Egg Donors and the Law, London. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority 1992b: Annual Report, London. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority 1992c: Revision of the Code of Practice: Consultation Document and Explanation, London. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority 1993a: Egg Donation, London. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority 1993b: Second Annual Report, London. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority 1993c: Code of Practice, London. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority 1994a: Third Annual Report, London. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority 1994b: Donated Ovarian Tissue in Embryo Research and Assisted Conception. Public Consultation Document, London.

338 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority 1994c: Donated Ovarian Tissue in Embryo Research and Assisted Conception. Report, London. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority 1995a: Fourth Annual Report, London. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority 1995b: Code of Practice (Second Revision), London. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority 1995c: The Patients' Guide to DI and IVF Clinics, London. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority 1995d: Statutory Storage Period for Embryos. Report by The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to the Health Ministers of the United Kingdom, Department of Health. Interim Licensing Authority 1990: Egg Donation. Your Questions Answered, London. Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1995: Human Tissue Ethical and Legal Issues, London. Review of the Guidance on the Research Use of Fetuses and Fetal Material (Polkinghorne Report). London: HMSO. Cm 762.

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