"Konrad has produced an exceptionally interesting and totally original book . . . a major contribution to social theory." - Marilyn Strathern, Cambridge University Based on the author's fieldwork at assisted conception clinics in England in the mid-1990s, this is the first ethnographic study of the new procreative practices of anonymous ova and embryo donation. Giving voice to both groups of women participating in the demanding donation experience - the donors on the one side and the ever-hopeful IVF recipients on the other - Konrad shows how one dimension of the new reproductive technologies involves an unfamiliar relatedness between nameless and untraceable procreative strangers. Offsetting informants' local narratives against traditional Western folk models of the 'sexed' reproductive body, the book challenges some of the basic assumptions underlying conventional biomedical discourse of altruistic donation that clinicians and others promote as "gifts of life." It brings together a wide variety of literatures from social anthropology, social theory, cultural studies of science and technology, and feminist bioethics to discuss the relationship between recent developments in biotechnology and changing conceptions of personal origins, genealogy, kinship, biological ownership and notions of bodily integrity.

Every time it is invaded the City gets a new name, but to the natives in is the Nameless City, and they survive by not letting themselves get involved--but now the fate of the City rests in the hands of Rat, a native, and Kaidu, one of the Dao, the latest occupiers, and the two must somehow work together if the City is to survive.

An international journal of general philosophy.

While it has been argued that anonymity in gamete donation has been brought to an end by legal changes and technological developments, Amelie Baumann suggests that this is in fact still in transformation. By focusing on the narratives of those who were conceived with anonymously donated gametes in the UK and Germany, she examines this transformative process and the role which donor-conceived persons play in it. This book shows that it is not someone's decision to procreate that turns »being donor-conceived« into a meaningful categorisation. Rather, kinship knowledge gets activated by the donor-conceived in specific ways for »being donor-conceived« to become a powerful identification.