Dimensions of Property in Reproductive Economies: Practices, Structures, and Discourses

Stefanie Graefe · Irina Herb · Susanne Lettow

Oct 2025 · Strukturwandel des Eigentums Book 5 · Campus Verlag

About this ebook

Since the late 20th century, the production, circulation and consumption of bodily materials and reproductive services such as oocyte transfer and surrogacy have evolved into proliferating transnational reproductive economies. A wide range of new actors have emerged in this field, alongside an array of locally specific legal regulations, as well as (bio-)ethical discourses. Critical research on the political economy of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) has studied and problematized these developments. In this context, concepts such as production and reproduction, gift exchange, commercialization and labor have been adopted and re-formulated in order to grasp the specificity of reproductive economies and their correlations with capitalism. This edited volume aims to extend these critical perspectives through taking property and processes of propertization systematically into account. Focusing on property relations helps to highlight and analyze processes that constitute property objects, property subjects and property relations and their entanglement with intersecting relations of power and domination in reproductive economies. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode