ABSTRACT
In the footsteps of Marxist/materialist feminism and recent scholarship on embodied or ‘clinical labour’ (Cooper & Waldby 2014) in the bioeconomy, this chapter dismantles the discourse and practice of ‘altruistic donation’, and with it the more general equation of vitality = value of bioeconomy policy strategies. It argues that the so-called donation of human oocytes needs to be analysed and acknowledged as labour, and hence as a value-producing activity. The core of the chapter is an ethnographically grounded analysis of what labour is in the context of egg donation in South Africa. It reveals the disparate dimensions of labour activities that egg donors perform: from creating good physical cultivation conditions through a healthy lifestyle, providing valuable data, to the immaterial and digital labour that donors undertake through (online) self-marketing. The third section further examines the complexity of labour in egg donation as it seeks to go beyond the human body-as-organism. In doing so, it sheds light on past and present ‘fertility workers’ in different economic sectors (e.g. logistics, the pharmaceutical industry), whose naturalised or neglected labour provides the technological and infrastructural conditions of possibility for today’s bioeconomy of egg donation in South Africa.
