The market for sex cells incorporates both financial compensation and the language of donation, a combination that appears oxymoronic at first glance. The reason that paid donation sounds so incongruous is the longstanding assumption that gifts and commodities are not only completely distinct from one another, but are also very different kinds of things. Arjun Appadurai traced this assumption among social scientists to the different legacies of Marcel Mauss and Karl Marx, providing the following summary.
Gifts, and the spirit of reciprocity, sociability, and spontaneity in which they are typically exchanged, usually are starkly opposed to the profit-oriented, self-centered, and calculated spirit that fires the circulation of commodities. Further, where gifts link things to persons and embed the flow of things in the flow of social relations, commodities are held to represent the drive—largely free of moral or cultural constraints—of goods for one another, a drive mediated by money and not by sociality.
In an echo of Zelizer’s argument, Appadurai considers this dichotomy to be an oversimplified depiction of economic life, and he has encouraged scholars to trace the social life of things. In particular, he underscores the possibility that the same thing can sometimes be both a gift and a commodity, albeit at different points in its trajectory. Lesley Sharp pushes this point further, drawing on research in organ donation to contend that multiple understandings of the same bodily good might be operating at the same time, especially in medical settings. For the deceased’s kin, a donated organ is a part of the family that lives on; for the recipient, it is a lifesaving gift; for the doctors, it is a valuable commodity that should not be “wasted” on an undeserving recipient. Sharp concludes, “The language of gift exchange may obscure capitalist forms of commodification. In other words, two models of commodification might be at work simultaneously, one more akin to Mauss’s understanding of the symbolically charged gift and reciprocity, the other to Marx’s notion of commodities as goods produced under the alienating conditions of capitalism.”
The question is whether these various understandings matter for the people whose bodies are being commodified. What happens when paid donation is considered to be more of a gift or more of a job? Shifting the focus from determining which things are actually gifts or actually commodities to comparing the use of gift rhetoric and commodity rhetoric makes possible an analysis of whether commodified exchange can be experienced in different ways.
The first possibility is that framing donation as a gift or a job makes no difference whatsoever. It is merely language that “obscures,” to use Sharp’s word, what is really going on. This is a common theoretical vision of bodily commodification, one that also appears in Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ definition of it as “encompassing all capitalized economic relations between humans in which human bodies are the token of economic exchanges that are often masked by something else – love, altruism, pleasure, kindness.” These scholars echo the view of Titmuss and others that the monetary exchange is fundamental, that commodification is inherently objectifying and alienating, and calling it something else does nothing to change the experience of being paid for bodily goods.
The second possibility is that these gendered frames do have consequences. Given that gift exchange is traditionally associated with affective ties and reciprocity while commodified exchange is marked by contractual relations that conclude when payment is rendered, it is possible that even just the use of gift language evokes a sense of sociability, a sense of connection between donor and recipient that is more durable and lasting than would be expected given the monetary exchange. This is especially plausible in a market for genetic material, as eggs and sperm are purchased in the hopes of conceiving children. Our culture’s emphasis on biogenetic ties in defining kinship may mean that donors are considered more as family than as strangers.
However, forging such connections may result in the expectation that donors and recipients demonstrate care and concern for one another, a form of emotional work. Arlie Hochschild originally formulated the concept of “emotional labor” in her study comparing female flight attendants, who had to exhibit empathy for the customer’s every concern, with male debt collectors, who had to manufacture anger with debtors over the phone. Subsequent studies have revealed that these sorts of gendered expectations for emotional work appear in many kinds of employment, and they are based in large part on the cultural norms of nurturing femininity and distant masculinity discussed in the previous section.
More recent research on emotional labor suggests that it may be experienced as more than just coercive and alienating. In a study of nursing home workers, Steven Lopez finds that meaningful interactions can result from “organizational attempts to create hospitable conditions for the development of caring relationships between service providers and recipients.” This raises the possibility that instilling an emotional connection between gamete donor and recipient may forestall feelings of alienation, in that both parties are offered an alternative narrative to the stigmatized story of handing over cash for body parts.
Since the dominant assumption has been that bodily commodification is inherently and uniformly degrading, there has been relatively little empirical research on the experiences of those who participate in such markets, including the market for sex cells. There is a rich tradition of sociological and anthropological research on reproduction, some of which includes discussions of commodification, but most of it centers on pregnancy, abortion, and birth, so there is little known about men’s experiences in this realm. In general, there has been less concern about the commodification of men’s bodies.
~~Sex Cells- The Medical Market For Eggs And Sperm -by- Rene Almeling
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