The PdD thesis explores the relations between value, labour and the body in the South African bioeconomy of egg donation. It focuses on the complex ways that bodies get inserted intobioeconomic regimes of accumulation and (re)production and asks: How does the metabolicpathway from biomaterial to biovalue/biocapital work in the South African fertility industry? The conceptual attention to the body in different material-semiotic figurations in relation to labour is what makes this thesis stand out in the broad field of literature on biocapital(ism) and biovalue. My hypothesis is that regimes of value and labour within the South African economy of egg donation are at the same time ‘apparatuses of bodily production’ (Haraway) that bring forth new ideas, norms and material assemblages of the (re)productive body along intersectional axes of power. In moving beyond the idea of the (labouring) body as an organic entity my thesis widens the scope of how labour in the life sciences has been conceptualised so far and allows to explore connections between the egg donation market and the logistic industry, global data flows and virtual economies. This reasoning leads towards a neomaterialist theory of body formation and opens up new grounds for a feminist critique of ARTs. The thesis is grounded in extensive ethnographic and textual/visual material collected during two phases of field research in South Africa and analysed through qualitative text and metaphor analysis. The data material provides revealing insights into the South African egg donation market; a thriving fertility industry in a special geopolitical, historical and cultural setting that has not been research yet.
