The Oocyte Economy: The Changing Meaning of Human Eggs by Catherine Waldby (review)

This book examines the contemporary biopolitical significance of an emerging global market for oocytes. Reproductive cells specific to biological females, oocytes are increasingly circulated far and wide between social locations. Given the new possibilities for their use, management, and exchange, Waldby employs a feminist perspective to examine the gendered experiences that yield a highly personal valuation of oocytes. Drawing on Raymond Williams's (1997) "structures of feeling" (132), she aims to give qualitative texture to the affective dimensions of human eggs and the complex ways in which these intersect with the lives of women.

New technical developments have rendered oocytes more profitable because they can now be "procured, managed, banked and circulated in a system designed to maximize their latent productivity," but it is the additional value conferred upon them by their unique role in processes of reproduction that "forms the key to the oocyte economy" (Waldby 2019, 4). The book explains how ooctyes have evolved as commodities, with particular attention paid to the inner workings of fertility businesses. Waldby deftly explores the contradiction inherent in tissue economies: even as intimate relationships between donors to recipients are supplanted by large-scale corporate markets, they remain "necessarily personified systems" (192).

Participating in the oocyte economy, she contends, gives women a "wider scope of action for ordering their fertility" (197) amidst shifting social dynamics and contested narratives about motherhood. Accordingly, studying participants' implication in relations of power as they seek reproductive assistance is deemed a "domain of feminist research" requiring "intense emotional labour" (12). Putting forth a defense of distinctively emotional experiences as evidence (13), Waldby goes on to offer a reevaluation of oocytes as a cell lineage informed by feminist critiques of science and medicine. Furthermore, the interview subjects' understanding of their maternal duties and obligations are framed using a relational perspective. At the same time, the book shows restraint in its ethical analysis of the oocyte economy. Waldby wants to move away from measuring experiences against a set of previously articulated normative positions, attempting instead "to discern the ethos, quality of social experience, and lived meaning" of women vis-à-vis their oocytes (16).

With a disciplinary background in medical sociology, the author developed an expertise investigating the significance accorded to different types of donated human tissues such as cadavers, blood, organs, and stem cells in rapidly developing economies of exchange. Waldby followed up her influential book Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (coauthored with Robert Mitchell, 2006) with Clinical Labor (coauthored with Melinda Cooper, 2014), which focused on the transactional aspects of the production and labor of fertility providers. The Oocyte Economy directs its inquiry to oocyte circulation from the experiences and perspectives of those involved in practices of consumption to build "a more specific 'tissue economy' account" (3).

Fieldwork for the three studies was carried out in Australia, Europe, and North America over a period of eight years. Beginning in 2008, the data collection timeline aligns with what the author views as "key developments in stem cell research and reproductive medicine" (11), fallout from the Hwang ethical scandal of 2005 and an alarmist public rhetoric about women's diminishing fertility. Waldby uses 130 qualitative, face-to-face interviews and focus groups undertaken across a variety of groups: former IVF patients, reproductive oocyte donors, clinical and counseling professionals, stem cell scientists, regulators, laboratory and fertility business staff, women who banked oocytes, clinicians, and ethicists. Moreover, a wide range of topics are covered, namely, cross-border oocyte transactions, assisted reproductive technologies, financial aspects of the fertility business, and biomedical research. Such a snapshot approach effectively favors the production of contextual knowledge over the elaboration of a "comprehensive account" (11).

Waldby begins by outlining the evolutionary history of oocytes in support of her argument that the material qualities of gametes shape how we experience them as discrete physiological objects. Manipulation of human oocytes is uniquely constrained due to their being the rarest cell in the body and the steady loss...