Mobilities Meet Reproductive Vibes . . .
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Abstract
What mobilizes people to take up reproductive options, directions, and trajectories in ways that generate the possibilities and practices of mobilities? People's desires for procreation or to resolve fertility challenges or partake in sperm donation, egg freezing, or surrogacy; the need for abortion services; and forced evacuation for childbirth care all involve movement. Reproductive aspirations, norms, and regulations move people's bodies, as well as related technologies and bioproducts. At the same time, these corporeal, material, in/tangible mobilities of bodies, things, and ideas are also generative of reproductive imaginaries and practices. Reproduction is mobile and movement affects reproduction. Building from an interdisciplinary workshop on reproductive mobilities in Kelowna, Canada, this article aims to push the mobilities framework toward the edges of feminist, affect, queer, decolonizing, materialist, and nonrepresentational theories in thinking through both reproduction and movement.
Contributor Notes
Susan Frohlick is Professor of Anthropology and of Gender and Women's Studies and the Head of the Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies at the University of British Columbia on Syilx Okanagan Nation territory. She is the author of Sexuality, Women, and Tourism: Cross-Border Desires through Contemporary Travel (2015), as well as articles on mobilities and subjectivities, related to global tourism in Costa Rica and youth migration/post-settlement in Winnipeg. She is a co-PI on the Reproductive Mobilities project funded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Email: susan.frohlick@ubc.ca
Mimi Sheller, PhD, is Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University. She is Founding Coeditor of the journal Mobilities, Associate Editor of Transfers, and past President of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. She has helped establish the interdisciplinary field of mobilities research. She is author or coeditor of ten books, including, most recently, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (2018). Email: mimi.sheller@drexel.edu
Kristin Lozanski is Associate Professor of Sociology at King's University College at Western University in London, Ontario. Her research focuses on globalized mobilities and citizenship. Through intersectional analyses of birth tourism, transnational surrogacy, and migrant labour, she traces the articulations between reproduction and (in)formal practices of inclusion/exclusion. Related work has appeared in Social Theory and Health and Social Science and Medicine. She was a co-organizer of the interdisciplinary workshop Reproductive Mobilities: Dialogue, Exchange, and New Research Directions in August 2018. Email: kristin.lozanski@uwo.ca
Amy Speier is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Arlington. She earned her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Her book, Fertility Holidays, was published by New York University Press in 2016. She focuses on the ways in which patient travelers are making decisions to travel abroad for care, the networks that are established between North American patient travelers, and their experiences in Czech clinics. Over the past five years, she has been tracing the fertility journeys of intended parents traveling from all over the world coming to the United States for assisted reproductive technologies. Email: speier@uta.edu