ABSTRACT
The starting point for this chapter is the moral and emotional investment people have in sex and gender, and how this is shaped by science, technology and social life. It involves the most fundamental of questions, that of the sex of a baby and the ways in which the biology and genetics of sex have become a commodity in global bioeconomies. The desire to influence and select the sex of a future child are ancient, yet now new reproductive technologies allow us to accurately manipulate human potentiality to ensure an embryo of the desired sex is implanted in a woman’s womb. Recent developments of in vitro fertilisation (IVF), pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and MicroSorting sperm present the ability to sex select as a biomedical technique. This apparently objective scientific procedure conceals implicit moral assumptions that are refiguring how genetic sex traits and families are imagined and reproduced. This chapter is about the intersection of these possibilities within a global bioeconomic market in which technologies and people travel across the globe. The advent of cross-border reproductive travel within the context of global capitalism raises a range of possibilities as people travel to circumvent restrictions of medical procedures in their home countries. A range of clinics – from Thailand to North Cyprus to California – offer sex selection services for non-medical purposes. Sex genes have become one of a myriad of commodities in this trade. Taussig, Rapp and Heath (2005: 201) note that within ‘a marketplace of biomedical free choice’ such as the medical travel trade provides, genes and their technology become alienable ‘objects of desire’ allowing people to remodel and reimagine the self, and their children, in new ways. In this chapter I explore some of these new imaginings and the political economy supporting their fulfilment. In describing this trade as a ‘new global sex trade’, I use deliberately provocative terminology designed to reflect the commodification of biological sex traits, and the foundations of this trade in gendered social constructions and expectations.
