“Emotional choreography” and the cross-border egg trade

I've written a fair amount about egg donation over the years and have interviewed donors who travelled places to do it. There is a lot to think about when you consider that droves of young women are crossing borders to have medical procedures performed upon them for the benefit of other people. 

The paper "Emotion, embodiment, and reproductive colonialism in the global human egg trade" tackles many different parts of this picture — too many for a brief newsletter. So, drawing on both the paper and a conversation I had with one of the authors, Diane Tober, an anthropologist at the University of California San Francisco, I concentrate below on their findings on the role of emotion and emotion management in the egg donation process.

Young women are recruited into the global egg trade through shrewd emotional marketing techniques and a skillful manipulation of their emotions during the process, according to research published in the journal Gender, Work and Organization. Coauthors Diane Tober, at the University of California San Francisco, and Charlotte Krolokke, at the University of Southern...