Ingvill Stuvøy: An unfamilial third-party. Configurations of assistance in third-party reproduction

The event is open for all. It's organised in hybrid form: face-to-face in Linna building and in Zoom. Contact Riikka Homanen for Zoom link.

Ingvill Stuvøy: An unfamilial third-party. Configurations of assistance in third-party reproduction

"In what was still early days of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), esteemed anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (1992) noted how the new techniques in many instances were not so much remedying infertility as enabling access to the fertility of others. These others – often referred to as ‘third-parties’ – contribute with gametes, i.e., eggs or sperm, or with gestation and birth on behalf of those intended as parents of the potential child. In this talk, I examine the position of the third-party in relation to the family in the making, interrogating how this position is configured in such different institutional settings as the global fertility market and the Norwegian welfare state. Empirically, I draw on my previous research on transnational surrogacy involving Norwegian intended parents as well as my on-going research on the implementation of the 2020-decision to legalize egg donation in Norway. In the analysis, I show how different institutional configurations enable the (re)production of the family as delimited and culturally recognizable, with the third-party as a paid or unpaid outsider to the family proper. Thus, the state configuration of third-party reproduction in Norway comes to parallel that of the market model, despite the political intent of keeping the market and its logics at a distance of state-approved assisted reproduction. This, I suggest, indicates a need for alternative configurations and imaginations of reproductive assistance and familial relations."

Ingvill Stuvøy is an associate professor in sociology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU, and holds a PhD in Sociology (2018) from the same institution. During the Spring of 2022, Stuvøy is a guest researcher at Centre for Gender Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. Stuvøy’s research examines the economization and governance of reproduction, with particular attention to assisted reproduction.