The pieces in this issue of S&F Online bridge two critical threads of feminist analysis that are only rarely brought into direct conversation with one another: legal, market, and science and technology studies analyses of reproductive technologies, on the one hand, and reproductive justice analyses, on the other. The spark for the issue came from the 2009 Scholar & Feminist conference on "New Technologies of Life," at which speakers repeatedly emphasized the need to shift the conversation about reproductive technologies from the individual "choices" that people make about building their families to the contexts in which those "choices" are made and discussed.

Contributors, many of whom spoke at that conference, were invited to think broadly about reproduction, including new technologies, but also adoption, so-called "non-traditional" families, and the aspects of reproduction that are about family maintenance rather than simply conception and birth. This broad approach to reproductive technologies is in keeping with a definition of technologies as "hybrid assemblages of knowledges, instruments, persons, systems of judgment, buildings and spaces, underpinned at the programmatic level by certain presuppositions and assumptions about human beings."[1] Thus, we don't only look at those kinds of technology that typically go under the umbrella of new reproductive technologies (NRTs) or assisted reproduction technologies (ART), but also at what might be called UN-reproductive technologies (birth control and abortion). We look to technologies that are employed by/for those with both high values in the reproductive futures market (e.g., egg donation, sperm donation, IVF) and those whose reproductive futures are feared and despised (e.g., pregnancy surveillance, forced sterilization). We look at both "hard" technologies (those that require science, labs, and equipment), and also "soft" technologies like adoption and the surveillance of pregnant women for "risky" behaviors. Beyond the activities and materials required to bring a child to the point of birth, human reproduction also involves the work of rearing children (and, in an even broader sense, the ongoing domestic labor involved in feeding, clothing, and otherwise caring for people's human needs throughout their lives). Thus, we look at the labor of nannies and babysitters, who are often dropped out from the complex calculation of how many "parents" a modern child can have.

With these broad definitions of technology and reproduction in mind, we posed the following questions to contributors: How do we create a feminist practice that is honest about the political economy of reproduction, on the one hand, and respectful of the affective dimensions of people's family-building practices, on the other? How do we move beyond the observation that reproductive technologies often serve to reinscribe conservative notions of what constitutes a "natural" family, and begin to explore ways in which such outcomes are not necessarily inevitable? How might critical feminist analyses affect the future of reproduction?

Producing Justice

What exactly gets reproduced by reproductive technologies? All too often, as many pieces in this issue detail, reproductive technologies are modes for reproducing hierarchies based on race, sex/gender, sexuality, class, physical ability, and position in the global economy. As Sarah Franklin reminds us in this issue, though, there is a long feminist tradition of imagining that new technologies—in the right hands, in a feminist mode—may produce fantastic new ways of being, perhaps even disrupt the sex distinction itself. Reproduction, as Rose prompts, is never a simple matter of projecting identical entities (be they people, traits, or DNA sequences) relentlessly into the future.[2] Instead, every reproduction opens the possibility for change, "mutations" that are sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic. This is true on an organic level, and also the social one. Viewed this way, technologies of social reproduction also hold the possibility of producing something that does not yet properly exist—namely social justice. Multiple versions of this particular feminist vision have been articulated and enacted by artists, activists, scholars, and ordinary people trying simply to rework the meaning and modes of "family-building" to align with a politically-grounded determination to act as if all reproductive futures mattered.

Reproductive justice offers a way to rethink the fundamental conditions of reproduction, potentially giving structure to longstanding but ad hoc feminist moves towards transformation in this realm. Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice, a group of health activists, coined the term to signal "reproductive health integrated into social justice" at a meeting in 1994.[3] More than simply a term or a concept, reproductive justice describes a movement, led by women of color and allied with other movements against oppression based on race, gender, sexuality, class, migrant or immigrant status, and nation. While the movement is new, the reproductive justice concept is rooted in longstanding insights of women of color activists and scholars, such as Puerto Rican activist and physician Helen Rodriguez Trias, whose eloquent critique of sterilization abuse in Puerto Rico can be heard in the documentary La Operación,[4] and Angela Davis, whose 1981 classic Women, Race, and Class included a chapter devoted to the history and politics of reproductive rights.[5] There, Davis called out the racism and class-bias of the white foremothers of the movement for birth control and abortion rights, as well as the generation of abortion activists who followed uncritically in their footsteps:

The abortion rights activists of the early 1970s should have examined the history of their movement. Had they done so, they might have understood why so many of their Black sisters adopted a posture of suspicion toward their cause. They might have understood how important it was to undo the racist deeds of their predecessors, who had advocated birth control as well as compulsory sterilization as a means of eliminating the 'unfit' sectors of the population.

As the rich historical accounts by Dorothy Roberts, Jennifer Nelson, and Silliman, Gerber Fried, Ross, and Gutierrez show, Black, Latina, Asian, and Native American women have been an energetic force behind the demand for reproductive freedom for decades, pushing against the narrow notion that reproductive freedom means only freedom from (unwanted) reproduction.[6] Ensuring that birth control went hand in hand with provision of health care, nutrition programs, and broad anti-poverty work that would allow women to raise the children they bear with dignity, feminists of color and their white allies have been pursuing a reproductive justice agenda for a far longer period than the lifetime of the term.

Though she's rarely if ever claimed as a foremother of the reproductive justice movement, we find other roots of contemporary reproductive justice demands in the words of Audre Lorde. Delivering the speech I Am Your Sister at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn in 1984, Lorde pulled sexuality-based oppression onto the stage. Identifying some of the same broad issues that other feminists of color were connecting to reproductive rights, Lorde noted that homophobia and heterosexism blocked recognition that she and other lesbians were active members of Black women's struggle for justice:

When I picketed for Welfare Mothers' Rights, and against the enforced sterilization of young Black girls, when I fought institutionalized racism in the New York City schools, I was a Black Lesbian.[7]

Lorde went further, pointing out that homophobia and heterosexism were strategically used not just to demonize lesbians, but to obscure the reality of Black people's lived experiences of "family":

I have heard it said that Black Lesbians are a threat to the Black family. But when 50% of children born to Black women are born out of wedlock, and 30% of all Black families are headed by women without husbands, we need to broaden and redefine what we mean by family. I have heard it said that Black Lesbians will mean the death of the race. Yet Black Lesbians bear children in exactly the same way other women bear children, and a Lesbian household is simply another kind of family. Ask my son and daughter.[8]

In the past few years, foes of abortion and reproductive health services have adopted the language of racial and sexual justice, pointing selectively to the history of racism in the reproductive rights movement, and arguing that the disproportionate number of abortions obtained by women of color amounts to "genocide." As we go to press, conservative Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona has just signed a law banning abortions that are performed because of the race or sex of the fetus; this is the first law banning "race selection" abortions, but three other states (Illinois, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania) have already banned abortions performed because of fetal sex. While the surface language of the Arizona law is one of equal human dignity, the content of the debate shows how concepts like justice and "multiculturalism" can be mobilized to serve the anti-immigrant sentiments that dominate Arizona politics. As one Arizona Republican who supported the bill explained, "We are a multicultural society now and cultures are bringing their traditions to America that really defy the values of America, including cultures that value males over females."

The threat of fines, loss of license, and imprisonment for doctors conveys the (erroneous) impression that most abortions are coerced, and the laws may well deter even more doctors from providing abortion. But the main targets of these laws, ironically, are women of color. As Sujatha Jesudason points out in this issue, "Leveraging a collective sense of shame, unease, and outrage over 'missing girls' and racist eugenics, this legislation and campaign is emerging as the latest tactic of the anti-abortion movement to regulate the reproductive lives of women of color and limit access to abortion for all women." The same week the Arizona law was passed, a billboard campaign was unveiled, beginning in Chicago, President Obama's hometown. The billboard features Obama's likeness, and reads: "Every 21 minutes our next possible leader is aborted."[9] When I read the Chicago Tribune article online, there was a large ad in the middle of the page that read "Millions of Babies Killed on Your Dime. Defund Planned Parenthood." The ad is linked to a petition in support of a major push by anti-choice legislators in Congress to strip Planned Parenthood of all federal funding (including funding for "well-woman" gynecological exams). Meanwhile, the "Stop Taxpayer Funded Abortions Act" which has 221 co-sponsors and is now being considered by the U.S. House of Representatives, would further curtail abortion access, especially for poor women, and create further disincentives for health care plans to cover abortion services. One especially important element of the proposed law is that while Medicaid will currently pay for abortions in the case of rape, the proposed law would narrow this to "forcible rape," which eliminates statutory rape.

Reproductive justice activists have worked overtime to fight this latest challenge, objecting to this as a cynical tactic that fundamentally blames women of color as either stupid or collaborators with murderous racism and sexism. One of the most intriguing fruits of their labor is a newly nuanced understanding of the historical relationship between Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and Black communities. According to research by the Sister Song Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, "African American leaders had worked with Sanger in the 1930s to ask for clinics in black communities. We challenged our opponents' historical revisionism by citing famous leaders like Mary McLeod Bethune, W.E.B. Dubois, Walter White, Mary Church Terrell, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and organizations like the NAACP, the National Urban League and the National Council of Negro Women. We dared them to call these icons of the civil rights movement pawns of a racist agenda."[10] Sister Song's work signals a new level of complexity in the discourse on reproductive freedom, a complexity that is on view in many pieces in this issue. Along with the aforementioned piece by Jesudason, Faith Pennick's groundbreaking film Silent Choices undermines the characterization of Black women who opt for abortion as "dupes" or enemies of Black people's advancement. These themes are also echoed in Michele Goodwin's analysis of fetal protection laws, and the response to Goodwin by Jeanne Flavin and Carol Mason. In these pieces, women who are particularly vulnerable to State and medical surveillance by virtue of their poverty and/or race are shown to be targeted both as individually "suspect" (potential or actual) mothers, and also as representing a "wedge" that abortion opponents can use to advance the legal status of fetuses in order to curtail abortion.

In linking reproduction to social, political, and economic power, the activist movement for reproductive justice has an academic "sibling" that emerged around the same time. If a single term can capture this thread of feminist scholarship, it would probably be Shellee Colen's notion of "stratified reproduction," which she first articulated in 1986 and elaborated in a chapter of Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp's landmark volume Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction. Ginsburg and Rapp succinctly celebrated Colen's notion with the observation that it "helps us see the arrangements by which some reproductive futures are valued while others are despised."[11] Pointing to the role of "hierarchies of class, race, ethnicity, gender, place in a global economy, and migration status," Colen argued that:

The reproductive labor—physical, mental, and emotional—of bearing, raising, and socializing children and of creating and maintaining households and people (from infancy to old age) is differentially experienced, valued, and rewarded according to inequalities of access to material and social resources in particular historical and cultural contexts. Stratified reproduction, particularly with the increasing commodification of reproductive labor, itself reproduces stratification by reflecting, reinforcing, and intensifying the inequalities on which it is based.[12]

Stratified reproduction transforms the meaning of reproductive ethics. When ethical issues are addressed in mainstream reproductive rights discourse, dominated as it is by the concerns of white, Western, relatively affluent, heterosexual women, ethics are generally framed in terms of individual choice, freedom, and privacy. Women are described as actually or potentially in conflict with fetuses, men/fathers, medicine, employers, or the State, but rarely with each other, and rarely do the reproductive struggles women face in these narratives stem from anything other than their female embodiment and gender oppression (both imagined as more or less universal). Both reproductive justice and stratified reproduction frameworks shatter the fantasy of the "universal woman," and direct our focus away from individuals to the level of the social: social structures, social hierarchies of oppression and privilege, and social histories. Rather than the generic (and therefore implicitly privileged) Woman, these frameworks require consideration of actual women, in all their varied, complex, and hierarchically-arranged social locations. Pursuing reproductive justice demands that we ask, "How are the burdens and possibilities for bearing and rearing children distributed?"

Further, to understand these distributions not merely as neutral differences in individual "abilities" to reproduce, we have to also ask: "What are the histories and the social structures that have created these current conditions?" That is, we must seek to understand how reproductive resources (as well as imperatives to reproduce or not) are actively distributed, rather than naturally occurring. Human reproduction, whether "assisted" and "technological" or not, is an inherently social process, and a historically contingent one. By historicizing the conditions of reproduction, such questions return us again to the possibility of transforming human reproduction to fit with a broad vision of social justice.

Of course, reproduction has already been undergoing sweeping transformations in the past few decades with the rapid rise of assisted reproduction, especially via reproductive technologies. New reproductive technologies have helped to generate not only millions of children, but also a vast and diverse literature on the ethical and political questions raised by the use of these new technologies. Interestingly, though, specific attention to the way that the uses of reproductive technologies are entangled with questions of social justice has been relatively sparse. Ginsburg and Rapp's volume, mentioned earlier, is an exquisite exception to this statement. In that volume, contributors considered technologies such as national abortion policies, prenatal diagnostic screening, midwifery, in vitro fertilization, nannying, hormonal birth control, and coitus interruptus (to name just a handful) with an eye towards "comprehend[ing] the transnational inequalities on which reproductive practices, policies, and politics increasingly depend."[13] There have been few entries in this overlapping field since, though two notable short pieces include Emily Galpern's concise "Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Overview and Perspective Using a Reproductive Justice Framework," written for the Center for Genetics and Society,[14] and a recent essay extending the concept to a "post-human" and environmental frame by Greta Gaard.[15] An especially exciting recent addition is Wendy Chavkin and JaneMaree Maher's 2010 edited volume The Globalization of Motherhood: Deconstructions and Reconstructions of Biology and Care.[16] With this special issue of S&F Online, we don't presume to cover the vast territory of entanglement between reproductive technologies and social justice, but rather to contribute to mapping it, and to push some of its apparent boundaries.

Outlining Social Justice Implications of Reproductive Technologies

I noted that this issue draws on feminist science and technology studies (STS), that branch of feminist inquiry that deals with the reciprocal influences between social structures, especially those concerning gender, sexuality, race, and class, on the one hand, and science, on the other. In looking at new reproductive technologies, a feminist STS approach entails asking how assumptions about masculinity, femininity, sexual morality, the good citizen, and so on get incorporated into scientific practices that shape the new technologies as well as the ways they are distributed and taken up. It also entails looking at how the mere existence of these technologies may reinvigorate, transform, or challenge the social landscape of parenthood, especially as notions of the "good parent" are tied to gender, sexuality, physical ability, class, and race, and are bound up in national identity. Sarah Franklin refers to such effects when she identifies "the disappearing margin between new choices and having-no-choice-but-to-choose-them." A feminist STS approach also directs us to ask about the assumptions that underpin research in reproductive technology. Assumptions are the "givens" in research; they are not tested. While scientists' assumptions within studies simply go along for the ride, as it were, they nonetheless emerge looking as though they have been tested—so folk notions get new life and new authority by their association with scientists and their work.[17]

One of the most important folk notions that gets added traction from association with new reproductive sciences is the idea of genes as a "blueprint" for our development, influencing or even determining a major and predictable proportion of everything from our physical attributes to our personalities, behaviors, and achievements. As Wendy Chavkin suggested at the Scholar & Feminist "New Technologies of Life" conference, the field of new reproductive technologies, "is a jumble of high science and low science and no science. I mean, anybody who thinks that SAT scores and 'good at tennis' resides in the egg, or the sperm ...."[18] Chavkin's comments point out the need to clear up elisions that are too often made (even in the critical literature on reproductive technologies) between reproduction in the idealized versus "realist" mode. The idealized version entails "gee whiz" miracles of science that offer clean, smooth, predictable, progress—a technologically complex but manageable project of, in the words of the Critical Art Ensemble, "building a better organic platform." Genes are idealized as "master molecules" that churn out faithful replicas of the traits displayed by the people from which they came. After all, a person's genes added together construct a clone—the popular version of which entails an identical "second self" right down to the ideas, desires, and the haircut. While the eugenic fantasies of "optimizing" human offspring are worrisome because of the politics and values they mobilize, countering those dystopic fantasies must be done in a way that points out the factual errors they contain.

In addition to countering the idea that genes (or "collections" of genes found in eggs and sperm) neatly program for offspring with complex traits, it is important to expose other promises of "quality-controlled offspring" that reproductive medicine makes (sometimes in the abstract, sometimes more explicitly), but on which it cannot, in fact, deliver. Chavkin's 2009 talk also noted that for all the promise and expense of reproductive technology, the success rates (especially when measured via healthy, live births) are surprisingly low. Several pieces in this issue touch on the ambivalent achievements of reproductive technology. Judith Helfand's classic documentary Healthy Baby Girl traces the devastating personal and social consequences of the pharmaceutical attempts to "improve" reproduction by administering the synthetic estrogen diethylstilbestrol (DES) to pregnant women at risk of miscarriage in the third quarter of the 20th century. Eggsploitation, a film from The Center for Bioethics and Cultures highlights the way that commercial interests have created a vacuum of information on the risks that egg donation poses to donors, as well as to women whose eggs are harvested for use in their own IVF cycles—even though existing data point to (probably) rare but very serious consequences, including ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, future infertility, and even death. Michele Goodwin points out that reproductive technologies like IVF convey risks to the fetus that are significantly greater than the risks posed by illicit drug use among pregnant women—though the former are celebrated and supported, while the mere threat or possibility of the latter justifies elaborate systems of surveillance targeting women whose poverty or race calls into question their fitness to bear and raise children. Noting that the unintended consequences of ARTs "reverberate through the life cycle," Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp follow the long-term consequences (for individuals, families, and communities) of the high prevalence of disabilities among children who are conceived or sustained as premature neonates via new technologies.

Stepping back, social justice implications of reproductive technologies appear to fall into two basic arenas of concern. First, reproductive technologies engage ideas about "ideal" parents and "ideal" offspring, as well as the flipside of those ideals: "unfit" parents (especially mothers), and "faulty" offspring. Second, the technologies are situated in the global political economy, and the market values attached to the labor and bodies of workers in this highly stratified context transfer with uncanny fidelity onto the market values assigned to people and their parts in what Debora Spar has dubbed "the baby business."[19]

Are the new reproductive technologies, in particular, which aim towards "improving" reproduction with a range of high-tech interventions, unavoidably eugenicist? The answer is complex. On the one hand, many of the technologies (gamete donation, especially) are advertised and used within a blunt discourse of "custom-building" ideal babies, selecting the "fittest" eggs and sperm from young, healthy, attractive and talented people, and trading on the long-standing science fiction/fantasy that the complex traits and accomplishments of the donors will be passed to offspring through the donor's DNA. Two of the artistic entries in this issue—Critical Art Ensemble's (CAE) Flesh Machine and the exhibit of pieces by the subRosa Collective—capture the enticements of glamour, human perfectibility, and the promise of a clean, bright future that propels the idealization of science in this discourse. The racialization of "high quality" humans is unavoidably white in this future, a point made in a no-nonsense way by subRosa's "Calculate Your Fleshworth" worksheet, which assigns specific values to your eggs or sperm based on your race. The eerily white fantasy future projected by the imaginary "bioCom"/Flesh Machine (CAE) corresponds all too well to the visual promise of white babies made by the websites of real-world companies advertising surrogacy services (even where the surrogates themselves are brown, as Waldby describes).

And it's not just the sellers of services and materials in the reproductive market that imagine a future of whiteness. In a beautifully empathic and complex ethnography of clients of an IVF clinic in Dubai, Marcia Inhorn relates the tale of "Eyad," a Palestinian man who longs for (and apparently manages to obtain) the eggs of a white donor he glimpses in the clinic. "In the future," Eyad tells Inhorn, "all people will look like they are Americans!"[20] Eyad's longing for eggs from the "American-looking" donor is connected to his status as a foreigner and history as a refugee, and it plainly articulates the connection of race, national belonging, and transnational mobility:

'I hope my wife gets some eggs from that girl, because my child, she'll be coming white—already American!—and not black like my wife.' He added, facetiously, 'My child, when he comes, he will take the American passport in the future.'

Should we call Eyad's longing eugenicist? Again, the answer is complex. Historically, eugenics stemmed from a position of anxious privilege: economically well-off white people concerned about a perceived loss of control and a potential loss of authority and status. Hierarchies embedded in discourse about reproduction of "the fit" did and still do coincide with people's own hopes and plans for offspring that would make them proud—but the alignment is sometimes a queer one. The queerness comes from the difference between the message of dominant discourse, and the conditions of its reception, most specifically including one's relative position of privilege. 19th century middle-class whites were concerned about degeneration: evolutionary "backsliding" and "race suicide" seemed to threaten the privileges they enjoyed and wished to secure for their heirs—among whom they counted the "future nation" and "the (white) race." In the present, "successful reproduction" for the privileged may similarly aim to prevent downward economic and social mobility in an environment that is perceived as more highly competitive and pressured than ever. I think it is right to name as eugenic this "defensive" reproduction of the privileged—even when it is practiced on a small scale rather than as a matter of social policy, and even absent a conscious disavowal of "unfit" race, class, sexual, or bodily types. But for people who are economically, socially, and/or politically marginal, strategies for "successful reproduction" may draw on the same hegemonic values (regarding race, ability, gender, sexuality, and so on), but they can't ever be properly "eugenic" because their aspirations for upward mobility involve a breach of the fundamental purpose of eugenics: the reproduction of existing hierarchies.

Sorting individual technologies or their users into "eugenic/eugenicist" or not is, however, not the point. Instead, it is useful to be alert to the potential these technologies have for (re)animating some of the most pernicious modes of ranking human types and traits. Questions we might return to again and again include: Whose reproductive futures are highly valued, and whose are discounted in the global reproductive market? How are specific technologically-assisted reproductions built on those hierarchies, and how do they revitalize the habit of ranking people and traits, as well as the specific content and order of the hierarchies? How and when do reproductive technologies disrupt the eugenic goal of reproducing hierarchies? For example, a wide range of reproductive technologies are used to facilitate reproduction among LGBT people, who are both historically and currently "disfavored" reproducers by the dominant schema. Sperm washing, chemotherapy during birth, and cesarean sections enable reproduction among HIV+ women and men, though the dominant expectation is that HIV+ people "should not" reproduce. As Gwendolyn Beetham's exploration of first-person accounts from queers and infertile heterosexuals suggests, reproductive technologies can and do "queer" reproduction, even as they simultaneously reinforce certain normative assumptions, such as the privileging of biological over adoptive parenthood.

Affect and Exploitation in the Reproductive Market

There is no doubt that the decisions that go into the creation of families are at once very personal, and at the same time linked to broad and inequitable social structures including race, class, sexuality, religion, ability, and geopolitical location (i.e., global North vs. global South). How do people articulate the challenges they face when they try to stay tuned in to both registers—the personal and the political? There is a seeming dearth of first-hand accounts from people who might be called "critical adopters"—those who take up reproductive technologies and other forms of "assisted" reproduction (adoption) to make or get children, but do so while explicitly taking the political economy of reproduction into consideration. In this issue, Karen Winkler, a white, American feminist professor, therapist, and long-term activist who is also the adoptive mother of a child from Guatemala, responds to essays by Jessaca Leinaweaver and Claudia Castañeda (also in this issue) that are critical analyses of the racial, class, and global political hierarchies engaged in transnational and transracial adoption. As a package, these three essays begin one of the conversations between critics and "users" that we think have to happen for feminist analysis to really transform reproduction. (There are also few accounts from children whose birth or families of rearing were facilitated by these technologies; that is just one of the many directions that we can see, but have not yet taken in this issue.)

Thinking about the affective dimensions of reproduction is crucial in working out real solutions to the challenges that people face in building and maintaining their families, not simply abstract or idealized versions of complete and unfettered reproductive freedom for all. I think we might look to Aimee Carrillo Rowe's article "Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation" for some clues on how to proceed. Carrillo Rowe's title is an imperative for us to "long"—for the people we love but from whom we are separated, for the multiple places we belong but where we are not now located, and so on. Carrillo Rowe writes:

We are always already being hailed by our various (be)longings from the moment of our birth, from those moments well before our births: moments of conquest and settlement, moments of miscegenation and antimiscegenation, of mixing and blending and resistance. We tend to overlook the ways that power is transmitted through our affective ties. Who we love, the communities that we live in, who we expend our emotional energies building ties with—these connections are all functions of power. So the command of this "reverse interpellation" is to call attention to the politics at stake in our belonging, and to envision an alternative.[21]

By emphasizing a "politics of relation" rather than a "politics of location," Carrillo Rowe hopes that we might hold ourselves accountable to the way we live out our own privileges, by fundamentally inclining ourselves towards the "others" with whom we wish to be in alliance. The "politics of location" to which she refers (and which she rejects) is too easily a rather static accounting of relative privilege, as well as a reiteration of the fundamental separateness of people who are sorted out by various social hierarchies. Carrillo Rowe's formulation is useful because instead of looking for a quantity of "power" or "oppression" as a static sum of resources that any person might hold, she points us to the processes through which power is transmitted—and she especially points to the role played by affective ties as relations of power. Carrillo Rowe's approach might be a useful beginning for someone who wants to use reproductive technologies in an ethical and just manner.

Likewise, critics who are trying to parse the specific power relations involved in given transactions would do well to recall that people are rarely if ever perfectly privileged nor utterly without agency. As Jennifer Nash argued in her 2008 piece, "Rethinking Intersectionality," clear thinking about the intersection of multiple vectors of power involves considering not just multiple subordination, but the complex interplay of both subordination and privilege.[22] For example, in the arena of reproductive technology and justice, infertility itself is often stigmatized, especially for women, and perhaps especially by those in a woman's intimate network: her partner, family, community. Seen in this context, the use of technologies is not often a simple, commercialized exercise of privilege for those who can "afford" to buy other people's precious reproductive material. Instead, the use of technologies can involve a drastic re-ordering of buyers' potentially scarce resources, in order to follow what may be experienced as both a deeply personal longing, and a cultural and/or familial imperative with dire consequences attached to failure. Rebecca Haimowitz and Vaishali Sinha's documentary Made in India, excerpted in this issue, follows a lower middle class heterosexual couple from Texas whose infertility leads them to hire a surrogate in India to gestate their embryo. The film's sympathetic portrayal of the "intended parents" does not obscure the chasm between them and the surrogate they hire, a chasm marked by relative wealth, race, education, and place in the global political economy. But Haimowitz and Sinha take pains to dismantle the abstract idea of privileged Western jet-setters that might be conjured up by the term "reproductive tourism" by showing the slim economic margin on which these "tourists" operate: it involves selling their house and working multiple jobs, among other things. The viewers, along with the filmmakers, are also able to see the narrow and distorted grounds on which the "receiving parents" negotiate the terms of their exchange with the surrogate. The surrogate negotiates with a clinic, which in turn negotiates with a broker, who is hired by the intended parents. Somewhere in this chain of agreements, the surrogates' compensation package dwindles: the pay described by the broker is more than three times what the surrogate herself says she received (even though she ends up bearing twins); the clinic administrator refuses to clarify the amount that the surrogate is paid, saying that the information "is proprietary." The "receiving couple" feels confused and manipulated and can't get the information to determine who is manipulating them: the surrogate, the brokerage, or the clinic.

Family values are one thing, but the market values of family-building practices are another entirely. Certain ideas about the exploitative nature of commercialized reproduction make the issue very much a twin to sex work—when people sell what we as a culture believe is not supposed to be sold, we may be especially inclined to see exploitation as an explanation. This treads on the 'holy' territory of the sexual "gift economy" (as Waldby notes in this issue), the commercialization of human flesh and intimate bonds. But what affiliations and obligations are enforced by demanding that sexual relations and reproduction both be transacted only within the "gift economy" rather than in a market where values are more directly negotiated? As Susan Markens' analysis of surrogacy narratives in this issue points out, the recurring themes of "altruism" versus "commercialism/exploitation" are used to sort "good" from "bad" surrogates in popular narratives of surrogacy. Likewise, Kalindi Vora's ethnographic work on surrogacy in India shows how stories about surrogacy toggle ambivalently between a discourse of altruism, and one of "social work," which highlights surrogacy as an arrangement that improves surrogates' lives. Rather than viewing surrogacy as either exploitative or empowering and altruistic, it seems useful to acknowledge that surrogates' stories suggest that surrogacy is all of these things: altruistic, empowering, exploitative, and a way to make a better life for themselves and their families. In other words, it's a lot like other forms of labor. We should therefore interrogate the impulse to see transactions in the reproductive market as always and inherently more degrading than other forms of transaction, negotiation, and even physical labor that people perform, instead paying close attention to the real circumstances of people who enter this reproductive market and offer their bodily services and even bodily tissues.

In this volume, Iris Lopez offers a refreshing new analysis of the experiences that Puerto Rican women in New York have had with sterilization. Refusing to see these women simply as either dupes or "free agents," Lopez steers towards what she calls an "integral analysis" that incorporates a wide range of contextual factors into understanding how women exercise agency within constraints, making the best of the often difficult and oppressive circumstances they face. Such an integral approach could be an important corrective for much of the extant analysis of exploitation in the reproductive market.

Conversely, we should also avoid the urgings of those who would suggest there is inherently less exploitation here than in other industries, because the actors involved are motivated by benevolence, love, longing for children, and altruistic concern for infertile couples or orphaned and abandoned children. In their important analysis of what they call "the baby business," Debora Spar and Anna Harrington argue that market practices and lack of regulation obscure the commercial interests and the huge financial flows involved in the global reproductive market.[23] I would suggest that this opacity may make it seem that the "consumers" / "receiving parents" are the ultimate beneficiaries in reproductive transactions; indeed, decrying the practice of "buying babies" implicitly points the finger of blame at intended parents rather than at the commercial entities (clinics, pharmaceutical companies, medical tourism firms) and affluent professionals (research scientists, clinicians, administrators) who build personal and family fortunes on this enterprise. When our analysis stops here, with these "middle people" in the "reproflow" (to use Inhorn's term), we demonstrate our cultural distaste for the intersection of love and intimacy with money and overt trade—the companies escape the blame, perhaps, because they aren't the ones mixing love with money.

The thrill of the reproductive justice movement is, for me, both its capaciousness and the way its practitioners combine a recognition that justice is indivisible with the equally crucial recognition that justice is about power. This is not a simple "feel good" alliance under a banner of diversity, but the kind of tough demand to face others in a human and empathic way. This means addressing reproduction not just as what we (whoever that may be) "need" to meet our own aspirations for love and family, especially children, but how our aspirations are caught up with one another, sometimes in symbolic ways, and sometimes in very material, and even bodily ways. What does this mean for building ethical alliances on the global level, as well as the radically local, face-to-face and body-to-body transactions of modern reproduction? It means recognizing "we are all in this together"—but some of us are standing on others of us, and some of us are squished very much in between. Our "choices" are not independent of one another, and we need new means to be accountable to that fact, new alliances that will help us face it in loving, responsible, and humane ways. We offer these pieces in hope that the history, analysis, and images here will bring us closer to that possibility.

Endnotes

1. Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Quoted in Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2007): 17. [Return to text]

2. Ibid. [Return to text]

3. Loretta J. Ross, Understanding Reproductive Justice (Sistersong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, 2006). [Return to text]

4. Ana María García, La Operación (New York: Cinema Guild, 1982). [Return to text]

5. Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1981). [Return to text]

6. Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body (New York: Pantheon, 1997); Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2003); and Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena Gutiérrez, Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004). [Return to text]

7. Audre Lorde, I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1985): 6. [Return to text]

8. Lorde, 4-5. [Return to text]

9. Dawn Turner Trice, "Anti-Abortion billboard campaign opens in Englewood," Chicago Tribune 29 March 2011. [Return to text]

10. Loretta J. Ross, "Fighting the Black Anti-Abortion Campaign: Trusting Black Women," On the Issues Magazine (Winter 2011). [Return to text]

11. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, eds., Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995): 3. [Return to text]

12. Shellee Colen, "'Like a Mother to Them': Stratified Reproduction and West Indian Childcare Workers and Employers in New York," in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, eds. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995): 78. [Return to text]

13. Ginsburg and Rapp, 1. [Return to text]

14. Emily Galpern, Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Overview and Perspective Using a Reproductive Justice Framework (Oakland, CA: Center for Genetics and Society, 2007). [Return to text]

15. Greta Gaard, "Reproductive Technology, or Reproductive Justice?: An Ecofeminist, Environmental Justice Perspective on the Rhetoric of Choice," Ethics and the Environment 15.2 (2010): 103-129. [Return to text]

16. Wendy Chavkin, "Introduction: The Globalization of Motherhood," in The Globalization of Motherhood: Deconstructions and Reconstructions of Biology and Care, Wendy Chavkin and JaneMaree Maher, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2010). [Return to text]

17. Rebecca Jordan-Young, Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). [Return to text]

18. See also Chavkin, 2010. [Return to text]

19. See Debora Spar, The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2006), as well as Spar and Harrington reprinted in this issue. [Return to text]

20. Marcia Inhorn, "'Assisted' Motherhood in Global Dubai: Reproductive Tourists and Their Helpers," in The Globalization of Motherhood: Deconstructions and Reconstructions of Biology and Care, Wendy Chavkin and JaneMaree Maher, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2010): 194. [Return to text]

21. Aimee Carrillo Rowe, "Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation," NWSA Journal 17.2 (2005): 16. [Return to text]

22. Jennifer Nash, "Re-thinking Intersectionality," Feminist Review 89 (2008): 1-15. [Return to text]

23. Spar, 2006. [Return to text]