Paper short abstract:

Using narratives of egg providers, I consider the entanglement of aspirations, reproductive labour, and urban form in Johannesburg. This paper explores how egg provision knits ideas about the future good life with the topography of the city, history, and mobility.

Paper long abstract:

Anonymized egg providers, who supply reproductive tissue for another’s use in in vitro fertilization, are a key resource in the global market for reproductive services. Africa is a growing global market for reproductive technology, with key fertility hubs in Nairobi, Cairo, Lagos, Cape Town and Johannesburg. Recent research in egg provision has highlighted how political, historical and economic contexts shape and structure egg providers’ encounters with the global market in reproductive tissues and services. Global forces such as increasing neoliberal economic policies, longstanding legacies of colonialism, and national legislation, history and ethics have been reflected in the intimate engagements with egg provision. In this paper, I unpack egg provider narratives to consider the entanglements of aspirations with urban form, namely Johannesburg. Here, I follow three uses of aspirations. In the first, aspirations as the technical reproductive labour involved in retrieving eggs, a technique also described as an “egg aspiration”. In the second, aspiration as what Appadurai describes as a navigational capacity, which connects one’s situatedness with a topography and horizon. And third, as a hoped for, perhaps different and imaged future; that is, what egg providers hope their reproductive labours will make possible. This paper in sum explores how egg provision knots together ideas about the good life, or the better life, with the topography of the city, environments, history, and mobilities.