Journal Articles by Tessa Moll
American Ethnologist, 2024
In South Africa's urban hubs, young women are increasingly participating in the global fertility ... more In South Africa's urban hubs, young women are increasingly participating in the global fertility market by donating their eggs. Egg providers, who supply oocytes for others’ use in fertility treatment, are a key resource in the fertility market, and they are emblematic of new forms of biolabor. Egg markets have tapped into a precariously middle-class population of young Black women in Johannesburg, where the neoliberal state has largely retreated from fostering social mobility. What role does egg donation play in the social world of young South African women? I approach this question by extending Cohen's concept of “operability,” which can illuminate how egg donation becomes a means for young women to enact modernity, or relationality beyond the postapartheid state and the horizons of their social worlds, structured as they are by the entanglements of race, class, and gender.
BioSocieties, 2024
The disciplinary integration of biology and economy is taking new forms in the postgenomic era, t... more The disciplinary integration of biology and economy is taking new forms in the postgenomic era, transforming long-standing exchanges between human biology and economics. In this article, we first describe how an emerging area of research in development and health economics has embraced, stabilized, and expanded the emerging field of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). We map the global expansion of this literature particularly in the Global South. Via an analysis of shifting models of health in human capital, we argue that as economists draw on DOHaD theories, their increasing focus on marginalized groups in postcolonial settings produces a darker model of health deficit. Based on notions of accumulated shocks, this model questions the generalizable expansion of the economization of life and speaks to a wider and more sombre range of figures. Health models in economics reflect the double nature of biological and developmental plasticity caught between agency and passivity, change, and near-permanency.
Science, Technology and Human Values, 2022
Part of the normalization of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) is the premise that the ch... more Part of the normalization of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) is the premise that the children born from in vitro fertilization (IVF) are no different from their counterparts conceived spontaneously. However, interest in peri-conception health and new epigenetic understandings of biological plasticity has led to some questioning the presumed irrelevance of conception in vitro, and when doing so, describing IVF children as “apparently healthy.” Taking “apparently” and “healthy” seriously, this article explores how modes of attention—ways of naming and framing embryo potentiality—shape understandings of health and normality. I contend that understanding the politics of potentiality, and how they may emerge in a postgenomic age, requires an unpacking of various modes of attention and framing. Ethnographic findings from South Africa’s fertility clinics and emerging literature on epigenetic variation in IVF conception demonstrate how, under a genetic mode of attention, IVF clinics views “abnormality” as fated, unviable, and discardable. Exploring the possibility of answering the postgenomic questions to IVF reveals structural challenges to knowing long-term health implications. Incipient attempts within the fertility clinic at managing these questions shows various strategic techniques, such as leveraging epigenetics to marketable ends and shifts to individual responsibility.
American Journal of Human Biology, 2022
Recent studies demonstrating epigenetic and developmental sensitivity to early environments, as e... more Recent studies demonstrating epigenetic and developmental sensitivity to early environments, as exemplified by fields like the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and environmental epigenetics, are bringing new data and models to bear on debates about race, genetics, and society. we first survey the historical prominence of models of environmental determinism in early formulations of racial thinking to illustrate how notions of direct environmental effects on bodies have been used to naturalize racial hierarchy and inequalities in the past. Next, we conduct a scoping review of postgenomic work in environmental epigenetics and DOHaD that looks at the role of race/ethnicity in human health (2000-2021). Although there is substantial heterogeneity in how race is conceptualized and interpreted across studies, we observe practices that may unwittingly encourage typological thinking, including: using DNA methylation as a novel marker of racial classification; neglect of variation and reversibility within supposedly homogenous racial groups; and a tendency to label and reify whole groups as pathologized or impaired. Even in the very different politico-economic and epistemic context of contemporary postgenomic science, these trends echo deeply held beliefs in Western thinking which claimed that different environments shape different bodies and then used this logic to argue for essential differences between Europeans and non-Europeans. We conclude with a series of suggestions on interpreting and reporting findings in these fields that we feel will help researchers harness this work to benefit disadvantaged groups while avoiding the inadvertent dissemination of new and old forms of stigma or prejudice.
Reproductive BioMedicine & Society Online, 2022
Scholarly interest in reproductive travel has increased in recent years, but travel within, to an... more Scholarly interest in reproductive travel has increased in recent years, but travel within, to and from the African continent has received much less attention. We reviewed the literature on cross-border reproductive travel to and from countries of sub-Saharan Africa in order to understand the local forms of this trade. Access to fertility care remains deeply stratified, which is an ongoing concern in a region with some of the highest rates of infertility. We found a wide variety of reasons for reproductive travel, including a lack of trusted local clinics. Destinations were chosen for reasons including historical movements for medical treatment broadly, diasporic circulations, pragmatic language reasons, and ties of former colonial relations. We describe the unique tempos of treatment in the region, with some intended parents staying in receiving countries for some years due to the contingent support networks that reprotravellers develop during their treatment and travel. Unique to the region is the movement of medical professionals, such as the ‘fly-in, fly-out’ clinic staff to deliver fertility care. Future research should include practices and movements to presently neglected ‘reprohubs’, particularly Kenya and Nigeria; the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 on the movements of intended parents, reproductive assistors and reproductive material; and the impact of low-cost protocols on treatment access within the region. This scoping review provides insight into the relevant work on cross-border reproductive care in sub-Saharan Africa, where a unique combination of access factors, affordability, and sociocultural and geopolitical issues fashion individuals’ and couples’ cross-border reproductive travel within, to and from Africa.
Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 2021
In this essay, I argue that exploring institutional racism also needs to examine interactions and... more In this essay, I argue that exploring institutional racism also needs to examine interactions and communications between patients and providers. Exchange between bioethicists, social scientists, and life scientists should emphasize the biological effects—made evident through health disparities—of racism. I discuss this through examples of patient–provider communication in fertility clinics in South Africa and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic to emphasize the issue of mistrust between patients and medical institutions. Health disparities and medical mistrust are interrelated problems of racism in healthcare provision.
Medical Anthropology Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness , 2020
Anthropological literature on Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) has burgeoned in the forty y... more Anthropological literature on Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) has burgeoned in the forty years since IVF emerged as a potential solution to childlessness. A lexicon has consolidated, and key sets of debates have been identified. Chief among these are questions of kinship, the intersection of technologies and local moral worlds, and the circulation of gametes and technological know-how. The recent publication of five books in the Berghahn series on Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality offers an opportunity to think about new affordances and futures for research. We review the texts and suggest several strands for research, concluding that anthropological objects do not become saturated by our knowledge of them and that ARTs will remain fertile ground for thought.
Medical Anthropology, 2019
What shapes would-be parents’ choices of gamete donors for third-party IVF? Following extensive e... more What shapes would-be parents’ choices of gamete donors for third-party IVF? Following extensive ethnographic fieldwork in South African fertility clinics and egg donor agencies, I explore the work of donor matching, a process in which translational figures mediate patient desires, donor biography and corporeality, and racial imaginaries to assist would-be parents. In doing so, these figures, or “matchers,” draw upon both historical schemas and novel articulations to enact race, and certain forms of whiteness. I describe this through the concept of “curature,” a post-apartheid technology of racialization that reflects a neoliberal shift to privatized sites of power.
Reproductive BioMedicine & Society Online, 2018
‘Unsuspecting young South African women are heading overseas to donate their eggs to infertile co... more ‘Unsuspecting young South African women are heading overseas to donate their eggs to infertile couples and earn a free international holiday in the process. But, at what cost?’ This was the voice-over during a news show in South Africa in 2016 that described the phenomenon of young white South African women going abroad to ‘donate’ their eggs. Through the media, medical professionals sought to warn ‘naïve girls’ about ‘unscrupulous agencies’ taking advantage of them, and in doing so putting them at grave medical risks in ‘Third World’ clinics. Yet owners of agencies and egg providers themselves countered this imagery; here, the egg provider becomes a far more complex biocitizen who finds an opportunity to combine an act of altruism with an opportunity to earn money and travel. Through interviews with travelling egg providers, doctors and egg agencies, and analysis of public and social media, we analyse these competing discourses critically by situating them within the specific context of egg provision in South Africa. We argue that travelling egg providers' defence of their involvement may challenge some gendered assumptions made by the media and medical staff, but at the same time reaffirm what we call ‘gendered bio-responsibilities’, or the gendered nature of the emphasis on (individual) responsibilization of biological citizens. By focusing on a relatively understudied aspect of the burgeoning literature on biocitizenship, we argue that the project of biocitizenship assists the expansion and normalization of new biomedical technologies, often without proper emphasis on the disproportionate obligations on the women involved.
Book Chapters by Tessa Moll
A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology, 2023
In this chapter, we offer an overview of the “biosocial turn” in anthropology in response to shif... more In this chapter, we offer an overview of the “biosocial turn” in anthropology in response to shifts in models of heredity from the genomic to postgenomic eras. We explore the ways that epigenetic frameworks afford expanded understandings of how environments shape biology and, alongside, assisted reproductive technologies. We then discuss how, despite the potential of epigenetics as a framework for explaining how the social gets under the skin, scientific hype, policy, and popular responses tend to reinscribe gendered and racialized discourses of individual responsibility and harm. We conclude by examining the utility of postgenomic frameworks for decreasing health inequities.
Birthing Techno-Sapiens, 2021
In the north of the Limpopo province of South Africa, state workers spray DDT on the walls of mak... more In the north of the Limpopo province of South Africa, state workers spray DDT on the walls of makeshift homes—insecticide that flows through rivers, food systems, and bodies. In urban Cape Town, embryologists maneuver a delicate balance between protecting absorptive embryos and monitoring them daily to find “the best”—the one most likely to produce a live baby. In this chapter I use these two scenes to reflect on the ways in which notions of sacrifice and the sacred, debility and attrition, surplus and waste provide the scaffolding for overarching logics in disparate corners of contemporary South Africa. I situate these two scenes in the afterlife of apartheid, where the legacy of racialized political economies, geographies of surplus populations, and varying proximities to death mark the spectrum of reproductive potentiality. This chapter points to underlying logics of attrition that connect superfluous lives as sacrificial lives, spaces of sacrifice as entangled with toxic barriers, and present sacrifices for differing futures.
Birth controlled: Selective reproduction and neoliberal eugenics in South Africa and India, 2022
South Africa’s growing presence in the global bioeconomy for reproductive material and services h... more South Africa’s growing presence in the global bioeconomy for reproductive material and services has attracted recent attention, both in media and in the academy. At least in the pre-Covid context, egg provision in South Africa was a propelling a multi-million-rand market in in-vitro fertilisation and drawing reproductive travellers from numerous countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia. This chapter explores the local histories, regulatory conditions, and the political economy of access to assisted reproductive technologies as they intersect with racial imaginaries in the making of South Africa as a ‘repro-hub.’ Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on IVF and egg provision in South Africa, I situate white egg provider as subjects of scarcity, whose subjectivity emerges alongside the market framing of their seemingly scarce biogenetic material and historical racial imaginaries of respectable whiteness. This reflects that whiteness operates as paradoxically both global, on one hand, and scarce and particular on the other.
Online Articles by Tessa Moll
Medical Anthropology, 2020
Assisted reproductive technology (ART) has proven an empirically and theoretically abundant arena... more Assisted reproductive technology (ART) has proven an empirically and theoretically abundant arena for medical anthropology. From intensifying and globalizing stratified reproduction (Whittaker and Speier 2010) to highlighting the geographies and politics of knowledge (Bärnreuther 2016) and reigniting classic anthropological questions of kinship (Mohr 2015), work on ARTs has contributed to Medical Anthropology’s commitment to theoretical sophistication and ethnographic richness on the social patterns of health, illness and wellbeing.
Somatosphere, 2020
Recent scholarship on toxicity has been driven by a growing concern with permeable and absorptive... more Recent scholarship on toxicity has been driven by a growing concern with permeable and absorptive bodies. This indexes a conceptual shift within the biological sciences to thresholds and hybrid zones of interactions. Solomon asks, “What is the body and what is environment? Where does one end and the other begin?” (2016: 9). Donna Haraway (1991), in a famous essay introducing the figure of the cyborg, asked a similar question: “Why should our bodies end at our skin?” (178). Inspired by literary scholars who have explored the potential of surfaces for generative political reconfigurations in South Africa (see Nuttall 2013), I want to focus on the skins and the surface—the aesthetics, affects, and expressiveness of postcolonial life—in scenes of toxicity.
ADI Policy Briefs, 2020
The global fertility industry has grown rapidly in recent years and is expected to be worth A$63 ... more The global fertility industry has grown rapidly in recent years and is expected to be worth A$63 billion by 2025 (Business Wire, 2018). In addition to Australia’s fast-growing fertility sector, many Australians travel overseas to access fertility care elsewhere. Australians pursue cross-border reproductive travel for several reasons, including side-stepping domestic bans on commercial surrogacy and non-anonymous gamete donation. COVID-19 has dramatically altered the state of fertility treatment worldwide and has intensified existing legal, regulatory, and social challenges. While data collection on the impacts of COVID-19 on fertility care remains limited, an intensifying economic recession and recent news of Australians unable to complete cross-border arrangements present policy questions that demand urgent attention.This paper proposes three policy directions to improve fertility care in Australia:
Book Reviews by Tessa Moll
Anthropology Southern Africa, 2015
Projects by Tessa Moll
Epigenetic explanations of the impact of the environment on the genome are increasingly influenti... more Epigenetic explanations of the impact of the environment on the genome are increasingly influential in social policy. Epigenetics is invoked by experts seeking solutions to persistent problems, including the legacy of racism in South Africa, diabetes in urban India, and Aboriginal health in Australia. The historical use of theories of heredity in social policy (e.g. eugenics, assimilation) indicates the need for caution. This project comparatively analyses how epigenetics is mobilised in public debates on responsibility, risk and the amelioration of disadvantage. Project outcomes will ensure that the policy translation of epigenetics maximises social benefits and reduces risks of social harm, particularly to vulnerable minority groups.
Papers by Tessa Moll
Anthropology Southern Africa, Apr 3, 2015
BioSocieties
The disciplinary integration of biology and economy is taking new forms in the postgenomic era, t... more The disciplinary integration of biology and economy is taking new forms in the postgenomic era, transforming long-standing exchanges between human biology and economics. In this article, we first describe how an emerging area of research in development and health economics has embraced, stabilized, and expanded the emerging field of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). We map the global expansion of this literature particularly in the Global South. Via an analysis of shifting models of health in human capital, we argue that as economists draw on DOHaD theories, their increasing focus on marginalized groups in postcolonial settings produces a darker model of health deficit. Based on notions of accumulated shocks, this model questions the generalizable expansion of the economization of life and speaks to a wider and more sombre range of figures. Health models in economics reflect the double nature of biological and developmental plasticity caught between agency and...
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Journal Articles by Tessa Moll
Book Chapters by Tessa Moll
Online Articles by Tessa Moll
Book Reviews by Tessa Moll
Projects by Tessa Moll
Papers by Tessa Moll