Making a Match: Curating Race in South African Gamete Donation

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhat shapes would-be parents’ choices of gamete donors for third-party IVF? Following extensive ethnographic fieldwork in South African fertility clinics and egg donor agencies, I explore the work of donor matching, a process in which translational figures mediate patient desires, donor biography and corporeality, and racial imaginaries to assist would-be parents. In doing so, these figures, or “matchers,” draw upon both historical schemas and novel articulations to enact race, and certain forms of whiteness. I describe this through the concept of “curature,” a post-apartheid technology of racialization that reflects a neoliberal shift to privatized sites of power.