ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the global bioeconomy as the broad socio-political context for my envisaged analysis of the procurement, brokering and circulation of donor eggs in South Africa, which is in turn deeply entwined with the transnational fertility and surrogacy industry. Accordingly, it outlines the research interest of the book in ‘bodies at work’ in relation to the question of how value is produced in the bioeconomy and presents the key hypothesis of the project; namely, that egg donation needs to be acknowledged and analysed as a new form of reproductive/embodied labour. In a second step, the chapter sketches the academic debate and strands of literature within which the project is embedded and to which it seeks to contribute: with STS scholarship on biocapital/biovalue as the overarching frame, and Marxist theory, interdisciplinary feminist work on reproduction and feminist body studies as key (additional) strands. In a third step, the chapter gives an overview of the case study, the bioeconomy of egg donation in South Africa, and describes the methodological framework of the project, which combines diffractive reading with a ‘situational analysis’ of a rich corpus of ethnographic data.
