Anna Rotkirch

Anna Temkina

Elena Zdravomyslova

Who Helps the Degraded Housewife? Comments on Vladimir Putin's Demographic Speech

Keywords:

Who Helps the Degraded Housewife?

In his annual address to the nation in May 2006, Russian president Vladimir Putin made several new suggestions concerning family and childcare policy. Later that year, his proposals were approved by the Duma and received legal status. This is the first time that post-socialist gender politics have been so clearly outlined in Russia. While, in the mid-1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev had envisioned the possibility of women returning to their traditional roles as a means to lighten their double burden, Putin strongly advocated both wage-work and state support for Russian mothers. What rhetorical and political strategies explain this interesting move? What gender ideology lies behind them? Putin's speech was discussed in the Russian and international press, both for its emphasis on foreign policy and for its -more unexpected -attention to demographic issues, upon which we focus in this article.

APPEAL TO INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE

First, the skilful rhetoric of the speech deserves mention. Putin referred to several cultural figures in order to legitimate and symbolically justify his programme. The names he invoked are not arbitrary and we should look at their background and the rhetorical context in order to grasp their meanings. In the first minutes, Putin cited a long quotation from US president Roosevelt's 1934 speech, in which Roosevelt described the Great National Programme known as the New Deal. Roosevelt was placed within the context of Russia's fight against the dishonest earnings of the so-called oligarchs and aligned with Putin's idea of social justice fostered by the state, as well as with the role of the state in curbing the devastations of wild capitalism. Putin openly stated that he followed the same lines of thinking and policy-making.

The writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a moral authority famous for his anti-Soviet dissent and strong liberal conservatism. The Russian president referred to Solzhenitsyn's words about 'preservation of the nation' in a broad sense, linking it to one of the most important problems in contemporary Russia: the demographic problem. Dmitrii Likhachev, the first Honorable Citizen of St Petersburg, native city of the president, is known as a liberal nationalist for whom the Russian intelligentsia and its focus on the cultural premises of Russian civilization were of major importance. Likhachev's liberal patriotism is revealed in the quotation cited by Putin: 'love for one's country starts from love for one's family'. Traditional family values, love of the home and hearth: this is the position with which the president identified. Ivan Ilyin, a fourth figure mentioned in the address, was a conservative Russian philosopher who emigrated from Soviet Russia in 1922. Ilyin claimed that 'soldier' is an honourable title, as 'it represents the whole Russian national identity, the Russian state's will, might, and honour'.

All of the Russian historical figures quoted in the speech were critics of the Soviet system. The speech thus appealed to Putin's main political allies, as well as to his probable opponents on the liberal right. Putin positioned himself as an adherent of the Russian traditions of a strong state, traditional patriotic values and gender polarization, and distanced himself from the Soviet past. But this was just a framework. As we discuss, the continuity with Soviet gender policies was obviously, though not openly, recalled.

INTRODUCING MATERNAL CAPITAL

Putin's 2006 address first noted how Russia's worrisome demographic development -'the most acute problem facing our country today' -is affected by three processes: mortality, migration and fertility. Road safety should be improved, and skilled migrants encouraged to immigrate. He also mentioned improving the general quality of life and supporting maternal care centres.

But the focus of his suggested demographic programme is on childcare policies encouraging fertility, and especially the birth of a second child. Monthly childcare benefits for children under 18 months are to be raised to 1500 rubles (just under €50) for the first child, and 3000 rubles (just under €100) for the second. Wage-earning mothers will receive at least 40 percent of their wages (with an upper threshold) until the child reaches 18 months. This maternal subsidy will be paid from the state budget. The huge numbers of abandoned children, it was argued, will be reduced by support for foster parenting.

Finally, Putin proposed a new form of benefit: the 'basic maternal capital'. This capital consists of a larger sum, which the mother is to receive when her second child turns three, and which should be invested in loans, housing, the mother's pension, or education for the child. The total amount of maternal capital for a mother of two children will be 250,000 rubles, and indexed annually for inflation. This benefit will elevate the status of a woman taking maternity leave, who might otherwise suffer from discrimination in the family. Funds from the maternal capital can only be spent on the state-defined targets mentioned above. In Putin's view, the maternal capital could thus function as a mother's wealth, which the state provides a woman as a mother when she has a second child, compensating for the loss of career momentum.

Political commentators judged the demographic theme as a brilliant way of appropriating one of the Communists' favourite topics. Communists and harsh nationalists have for a decade deplored what is called 'the ongoing genocide of the Russian population', and often blamed it on western influence, be it in the form of sexual permissiveness or imported drugs. Putin's rhetoric was notably free of any inflammatory, xenophobic rhetoric. Instead, it was clearly informed by the politically liberal Russian demographers, as well as neoinstitutionalists, who advocate a pragmatic and evidence-based approach to Russia's population problems (Vishnevskii, 2006a).

Putin's approach was monetaristic and pragmatic, both in analysis and policy formation. He asked:

What stops young families, women, from making such a decision today, especially when we're talking of having a second or third child? The answers are well known. They include low income, inadequate housing conditions, doubts as to their own ability to ensure the child a decent level of healthcare and education, and -let's be honest -sometimes doubts as to whether they will even be able to feed the child.

Thus, the problems were presented as mainly economic, and the solution, more money from the state:

A programme to encourage childbirth should include a whole series of administrative, financial and social support measures for young families. All of these measures are equally important, but nothing will bring results unless the necessary material support is provided.

A few sentences devoted to family values appeared only at the end of the speech. The recipient of the increased benefits is clearly the woman as mother. 'Young families' were mentioned occasionally, and often as synonymous with women and mothers: I propose measures to support young families and support women who decide to give birth and raise children. Our aim should be at the least to encourage families to have a second child.

The words 'men' or 'fathers' were glaringly absent from this speech, as was any reference to grandparents or other relatives, who still play an important role in Russian childcare arrangements. The indirect support of fatherhood was inferred only in the first part of the address, concerning the role of the military. There Putin advocated revising several legal conditions enabling a suspension of obligatory military service, including a delay of recruitment for conscripts whose wives are pregnant.

At least Putin's speech cannot be blamed for heterosexual normativity. While he could have deplored the rising numbers of unwed parents, divorcees and single mothers, he did not. Nothing indicates that his understanding of 'families' excludes single-parent families or enlarged households. Furthermore, Putin was especially critical of the economic dependence of mothers in nuclear families: dependent and frankly even degraded position within the family. We should not be shy about discussing these issues openly and we must do so if we want to resolve these problems.

We see here how Putin's speech aimed at strengthening the legacy of the Soviet family, which was centred around the civic entitlement of wage-earning mothers. The Soviet gender contract, which took root in the 1930s, required women to become both wage-earners and mothers, returning these favours with equal rights (or lack of rights) for all citizens and with female-friendly family policies. In terms of policy, this represented a kind of state feminism, while any independent feminist movement was forbidden in the Soviet Union.

The practices of working mothers have dominated in post-socialist Russia, although the range of gender contracts has come to include more diverse arrangements, notably the bourgeois housewife and male breadwinner [START_REF] Temkina | Soviet Gender Contracts and their Shifts in Contemporary Russia[END_REF]. That Putin labelled the image of women favoured by a section of the business elite as not only dependent, but 'degraded', is an interesting move. We are very far from the perestroika years of the 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev wished women to return to their traditional roles, and the dominating ideology supported male breadwinners.

Neither did Putin reproduce the strong symbolic elevation of women as mothers typical of the Soviet gender order. For instance, the address did not refer directly to specific female values and inborn psychological skills. It did so only implicitly by not mentioning fathers as caregivers.

Few other politicians of this level, anywhere in the world, have so strongly endorsed women's economic independence. The same approach can be found among the socialist classics such as Friedrich Engels, August Bebel and notably the Russian Alexandra Kollontay, who regarded state support to women as mothers as the main tool of family policy.

LIBERAL, CONSERVATIVE AND FEMINIST CRITIQUES

The Russian media commented extensively on the president's 2006 annual address. The discussion started immediately following the speech. No public hearings or debates had preceded the demographic programme formulated in the address, which was adopted without major change in 2007. Most politicians were unanimous in their approval of the measures providing family and maternity support. Thus, for example, St Petersburg governor, Valentina Matvienko, acknowledged the vital importance of the demographic problem as an actual threat to national security [START_REF] Reut | Izvetija[END_REF].

By contrast, critically oriented journalists have emphasized the general climate of public distrust towards national projects. Lay people have expressed disbelief as to whether the programme could be fulfilled. Local administrations are predicted to be the main culprit in the anticipated failure of the programme. They are perceived as being inherently inclined or well positioned to steal the maternal benefit money or block the programme in bureaucratic red-tape. In any case, many ordinary people believe the money will not reach its intended recipients.

Russian experts are more divided in their opinions. Most academics are sceptical, and claim that the monetary measures will not affect the demographic situation. We may identify three partially overlapping critical positions: those of the liberals, feminists and conservatives. The liberals represent the strongest and most visible sectors of public opinion critical of the authoritarian trend in Russian politics. This umbrella category includes many different positions and is also referred to as the shared democratic platform. The liberals are usually liberal both with regard to values and through their support for efficient monetary policies. They are opposed to the other main critical group, the conservatives, who promote family and nationalistic values and are often closely allied to the Russian Orthodox Church. We see the feminists as a third, separate line, because both liberal and conservative critiques often support traditional family arrangements, for instance regarding fatherhood.

A typical example of the liberal critique is that expressed by the director of the Independent Institute of Social Politics, Dr Tatiana Maleva. She argues that if women stay at home as mothers and housewives, the problem of labour resources, which is already acute, will intensify [START_REF] Reut | Izvetija[END_REF]. The budget expenses for maternal capital and child subsidies will result in the growth of inflation. The sum of maternal capital proposed by the president is not sufficient to be a real stimulus for a growth in birthrate, she points out; it equals the current price of just five square metres of real estate in Moscow [START_REF] Zheleznova | There Will be no Rise in the Number of Childbirths[END_REF].

The liberally oriented demographers and sociologists believe that Putin's programme is not sufficient to stimulate the birthrate, though it could further encourage people to have a second child if one has been planned already (Vishnevskii, 2006b). Additionally, only the poorer strata of the population are likely to be motivated by the small monetary gains offered in the programme. The suggested measures will stimulate only those ethno-cultural groups that maintain traditions of multiple-children families (which in Russia means parities of three and more) and where the issues of poverty are most acute [START_REF] Bessarabova | Childhood is Not Just Money[END_REF]. For the middle class, the maternal capital proposed is too small a sum and cannot compensate for the economic losses incurred by the household if one of the parents stops working, albeit temporarily. Thus the middle class does not stand to benefit, as their earnings are higher and a career is meaningful. Mothers risk jeopardizing their upward mobility and sacrificing their careers if they stay for two to three years on maternity leave. The costs of quality childcare and education are very high in contemporary Russia, the sociologists fur-ther note, and the expenses far exceed the amounts of child subsidies outlined by the president.

Thus, the general conclusion among Russian liberals is that the family programme rhetoric is a populist one and may have undesired economic and social consequences.

The Russian conservatives express other concerns: they would like the state to support the 'natural role' of women as mothers even more extensively. Sergei Mironov, the chairman of the upper chamber of the parliament and the leader of the party Fair Russia, has proposed the idea of a 'family salary' promoting housewifery, which is in his opinion still undeveloped in Russia. It would provide women on maternity leave with regular support from the state, rather than the one-off payment envisioned in Putin's concept of maternal capital. Additionally, Mironov expressed hope that the family salary would strengthen the prestige of the father as the breadwinner of the family [START_REF] Mironov | Future of the Family is the Future of Russia[END_REF].

The Orthodox Church has focused on the moral aspect of the problem, and demanded reinforcement of so-called spiritual and family values (which the conservative critic Mironov does also). Church publications deplore the general decline of moral values in connection with gender and childbearing in the family. However, the Church has not taken a very active stance in this debate and generally supports the president's policies.

The third line of critique is that of feminists and women's movement activists. They partly agree with the liberal position but also express their own concerns. As the programme is too monetarist, it is predicted to be insufficient overall. Monetary policies deflect attention from such urgent issues as the reform of maternal healthcare, where institutional trust is very low, or educational reforms. Feminists have also criticized the proposed programme for its shallow understanding of family types and arrangements and a focus on a certain type of family. Family benefits have to be more diversified; the programme's focus on families with two children is not justified, they claim. Social policy should also address other types of families, such as single-parent households and families with more than two children. This argument has been put forth, for example, by Deputy Ekaterina Lakhova, representing the political movement Women of Russia [START_REF] Reut | Izvetija[END_REF].

Feminists also deplore the traditional role assigned to fathers in Putin's speech, which did not present any understanding of shared parenthood. Putin's policies are seen to be very similar to the Soviet policies of assistance and support for the working mother as a natural caregiver and useful economic resource. These policies would strengthen the inferior positions of women on the labour market and reproduce gender polarization and gender imbalances on the symbolic level. Feminists are also critical of the fact that the issue of flexible employment schemes that could improve the balance between wage-work and family life was not even mentioned [START_REF] Gapova | Give Birth, Give Birth and You Will Gain Reward[END_REF].

CONCLUSIONS

The family policies proposed in Putin's 2006 address increased childcare benefits and introduced the new concept of maternal capital as support for mothers having two children. These policies present themselves as emphatically women-friendly. We consider that the address and following policies prove that the Russian president has appropriated notions of gender and parenthood that were typical of the Soviet period. In its entirety, the address included two complementary gender issues: the 'female' demographic problem and the 'male' reform of the military service. Femininity was defined in terms of the wage-working mother supported by the state on a symbolic level, and receiving small monetary benefits on an economic level. This suggests that the balance of work and family is exclusively a woman's issue. This type of polarized gender consciousness, with strict division into feminine and masculine spheres, appears to be typical of the Russian administration today.

If US president George W. Bush is a compassionate conservative, Putin is a pragmatic conservative. Putin is conservative with regard to the Soviet social policy legacy, in which the state presents itself as a mother's best friend. He is pragmatic in paying more attention to real-life problems and in discarding the praise of motherhood familiar from Soviet ideology.

We basically endorse the feminist line of critique. We agree that the economic part of the programme will not achieve its goal; it cannot stimulate the birthrate as it claims, in spite of its populist rhetoric of pragmatism ('effective measures'; 'duty of the state towards women'; 'we need to do something useful and necessary that will reap the gratitude of millions of mothers', 'young families' and 'all the people of this country').

We believe that priority should be given to policies fostering the growth of qualities and qualifications of parents, gender-equal parenthood, improvement of childcare, family-friendly working conditions and maternitycare systems.

The symbolic appeal of the new presidential programme of fertility growth should not be underestimated, however. Russian women's citizenship has once again been defined in terms of the working-mother contract. There is no longer any discussion of sending women 'back home'. Instead, there is some recognition of the dilemma of child-rearing for educated women in contemporary Russia (to stay at home and quit work, or to prefer career over children), and of the forms of discrimination experienced by economically dependent housewives in their families. The state is viewed as the agent that should fight against family patriarchy. Even if parenthood is still defined in terms of motherhood only, gender issues are once more visibly at the centre of Russian national politics.

European Journal of Women's Studies 14(4)

I think that the state has a duty to help women who have given birth to a second child and end up out of the workplace for a long time, losing their skills. I think that, unfortunately, women in this situation often end up in a European Journal of Women's Studies 14(4)


Michal Nahman

Nodes of Desire Romanian Egg Sellers, 'Dignity' and Feminist Alliances in Transnational Ova Exchanges

Keywords:

This article presents qualitative research conducted in an Israeli ova 'extraction' clinic in Romania. Following on from a piece written by Jyotsna Gupta and published in this journal in February 2006, this article asks what kinds of feminist alliances can or should be made in the arena of reproductive technologies. In conversation with Gupta, the author asks whether 'an ethic of universal human dignity' is possible or desirable. This article looks to the voices of Romanian egg sellers themselves as a source of theoretical and political direction for transnational feminists who try to think about responses to reproductive technologies.

INTRODUCTION

A proliferation of enquiry, controversy, concern and contemplation over transnational ova trading practices has recently arisen within Europe (Dickinson, 2002;[START_REF] Gupta | Towards Transnational Feminisms: Some Reflections and Concerns in Relation to the Globalization of Reproductive Technologies[END_REF][START_REF] Waldby | The Biopolitics of Reproduction: Post-Fordist Biotechnology and Women's Clinical Labour[END_REF][START_REF] Waldby | Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism[END_REF]. The potential implications of these practices for prospective ova recipients and donors, European law and for the advancement of reproductive medicine have been given much attention on television news programmes and popular dramas, online blogs and various kinds of print media. Under the united banner of 'feminism', groups such as the 'Hands Off Our Ovaries' initiative in Europe seek to put an immediate halt to the trading of human ova. Yet, little has been heard from the women in Eastern Europe themselves who have opted for selling or trading their ova. As an attempt to fill this lacuna, this article examines some perspectives of female egg sellers. The sellers were interviewed in September 2002 in the Bucharest clinic of a company that specializes in transnational ova trade and has IVF (in vitro fertilization) clinics in Israel, the US and Western Europe (see Appendix for research methods and some ethical considerations). In addition to having first-hand knowledge about ova extraction and exchange in Eastern Europe, the women I interviewed may be able to provide important insights for transnational feminist theory and practice. Thus, through the egg selling stories of Romanian donors, and ethnographic description of this clinic, this article examines the question of what kinds of feminist alliances, responses and contributions can be made to present practices of transnational ova trade. This question was partly inspired by a recent piece by Jyotsna [START_REF] Gupta | Towards Transnational Feminisms: Some Reflections and Concerns in Relation to the Globalization of Reproductive Technologies[END_REF] in the European Journal of Women's Studies, and partly by my own ambivalence about being asked to join the 'Hands Off Our Ovaries' initiative.

Gupta's article asks vital and timely questions regarding feminist responses to reproductive technologies. She traces shifts in theorizing feminist alliances internationally from 'global sisterhoods' to 'transnational feminisms' [START_REF] Gupta | Towards Transnational Feminisms: Some Reflections and Concerns in Relation to the Globalization of Reproductive Technologies[END_REF]. Gupta reminds us that the early popular notion of feminist alliances relied on a kinship metaphor: sisterhood. Global sisterhoods, we know now, were imagined through ethnocentric, heteronormative and middle-class versions of similarity and unity among all 'women'. Such illusory imaginings made feminist alliances unrealizable, as not only did women across the world have different interests; they also had different approaches for achieving their interests. In short, difference was not accounted for in the 'global sisterhood' model of feminism. Transnational feminism came about as a recognition of the need to fight towards common goals of improving women's lives, through an acknowledgement of their differences in experience of gender, class, race, diaspora and work. It is through this acknowledgement of difference, and within the context of Third World feminisms that, as I understand her, Gupta suggests the formulation of feminist bioethics on reproductive technologies based on an idea of human dignity. Yet this notion of universal ethics brings in strange bedfellows, such as those campaigning largely against the use of reproductive technologies, as I demonstrate later. Furthermore, the very notion of 'dignity' has a long, fraught history, one which often erased the very people it was intended to protect. The concept of 'dignity' retains a western neoliberal understanding of subjects [START_REF] Khanna | Indignity[END_REF]. In order to examine the potential pitfalls of feminist alliances being made under the banner of 'human dignity', I shift the discussion to an interrogation of the theoretical and political usefulness of drawing on Romanian ova sellers' own narratives of selling their ova [START_REF] Abu-Lughod | Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories[END_REF][START_REF] Verran | Reimagining Land Ownership in Australia[END_REF]. I see these voices as important starting points for asking the question of what a feminist response to new reproductive technologies should be and indeed what kinds of feminist alliances can be made here in this arena of ova exchanges. I echo Gupta's suggestion that the question of what a feminist response to these practices should be is a much rehearsed and, still today, a much needed one.

The starting point here, and Gupta states this already in her 2006 piece in this journal, is: IVF produces many 'spin-offs'. Extracting ova out of women's bodies is extracting something for the creation of monetary value, through the development of new techniques, generating more research papers and developing new pharmaceuticals associated with reprotech. This is made even more salient when we view the extremely low success rates of IVF with ova donation [START_REF] Nahman | Synecdochic Ricochets: Biosocialities in a Jerusalem IVF Clinic[END_REF][START_REF] Throsby | When IVF Fails: Feminism, Infertility and the Negotiation of Normality[END_REF]. That is, if we take into account the fact that very few babies result from IVF with ova donation, the reasons that so much energy is put into the practice (setting up transnational clinics, sending people, gametes and medical equipment around the world) become much more about something other than the reproduction of humans.

Yet it does not follow that the women selling their ova are simply exploited, either. As I demonstrate later, they are savvy participants in this neoliberal economy, where desire operates as a force for linking differently positioned women. I do not see Eastern European donors as passive objects at the mercy of global capitalism, bioenterprise and the desires of other ova recipients. I would argue that they are actively engaging in selling eggs. However, whether they are active or passive somehow does not capture the nature of the relationships in this system. I am led to the feminist question of women's agency here. But perhaps the notion of 'agency' isn't particularly useful either. Both agency and choice, we know, operate within the neoliberal epistemology rather than outside it. In particular, an indication that this is not simply about whether the donors are agents or passive can be seen in what one woman ova seller told me about the concerns she had about the treatment: I'm worried about the risks of the treatment. I'm scared there will be damage to my ovaries. I'm going to be a medical assistant, so I think about the consequences. I asked the doctor about this, but she didn't tell me anything. (Lily, ova seller) Consent is a slippery concept, where patients do not always know what they are consenting to, to what future use their body parts will be used and in this case, where their ova would be taken [START_REF] Corrigan | Empty Ethics: The Problem with Informed Consent[END_REF]. Some sellers, with whom I spoke immediately before their extraction was performed expressed persisting concerns about the process of ovum extraction. The women I spoke to, whether highly educated or not, were aware that the process they were entering into was complicated and that it put them in a somewhat compromised position. To speak here of agency would lose all the historical and emotional dimen-sions of this process. Charis Cussins talks about women who engage in an 'ontological choreography' through which they place their own subjectivity aside briefly and become 'objectified' under the surgical knife, in order to become new kinds of agentic persons: mothers [START_REF] Cussins | Ontological Choreography: Agency for Women Patients in an Infertility Clinic[END_REF]. The 20 Romanian ova donors I interviewed are very different from the IVF patients whom Cussins presented. Ova donors are differently positioned to one another, in terms of their relationship to the state, power, the global economy and ova recipients. This is due, first, to the fact that the women I interviewed are solely sellers, so that the benefit that they will achieve is monetary. Second, these sellers, in post-Communist Romania are positioned differently to US ova donors in a global economy. The IVF patients whom Cussins writes about, and the Israeli recipients whom I write about [START_REF] Nahman | Materialising Israeliness: Difference and Mixture in Transnational Ova Donation[END_REF][START_REF] Nahman | Synecdochic Ricochets: Biosocialities in a Jerusalem IVF Clinic[END_REF]Nahman, forthcoming), live in countries where the state is significantly wealthier than the Romanian state. This makes the positionality of recipients and donors I observed very different. Thus, there is a unique kind of global ontological choreography going on in this clinic, which is also about participation of sellers and buyers of ova in a wider global economy.

As a way of explicating this further, I turn to my chosen nomenclature for the women in my study: sellers. To call the women I interviewed 'donors' would be a great misnomer. They are explicitly there to sell their ova for a specified sum of money. One woman I interviewed, Nadia, explained this well. Nadia told me she had decided to sell her eggs out of necessity; it was just for the money, and not out of altruism or wanting to 'donate'. She said that she had plans to renovate her house, lay the foundation for a floor, because her floor was made of earth. She did not care about the risks because she felt that, 'in anything you do there is a risk'. She was a 27-year-old, a second-time seller, living in the countryside near Bucharest and working at home, taking care of her son. I asked her whether she thought about the ova she was selling, and she told me that she thought about 'her babies' once in while. She said that she imagined how they were travelling around the world and pictured them as 'little devils' like her. She added that she was 'giving life. So, it's not a problem to get paid to give life.'

To say that the women are egg sellers is important. The way desire operates for them in this economy is about getting a supplement to their income. Her 'dignity', it might be said, is gained by being able to participate in this economy, where some people want to reproduce and she wants to supplement her income. We may then need another language with which to articulate the situation where ova sellers are something other than brutalized victims who need a helping hand to be made to feel dignity (which is what is implied in the Hands Off Our Ovaries manifesto, highlighted later). Perhaps the historical and geographic specificity of this example is useful for careful assessment of the moral terrains of these practices. This example should be viewed in the context of Ceausescu's anti-abortion laws, poverty, unemployment and women demanding abortions as a signal of the even more complicated and ambivalent relations of bodies, global economies and biomedicine.

Gail [START_REF] Kligman | The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu's Romania[END_REF] has illustrated in The Politics of Duplicity how reproduction was strictly policed during Ceausescu's rule in Romania. Abortions were banned in Romania in 1966 (Kligman, 1998: 1). The state insisted that families have four or five children in order to support population growth. This resulted in illegal abortions. Some of the egg selling stories that follow bear strange echoes of the denial of access to safe technological means to prevent reproduction; it occasionally seemed as though a remnant of that time resided in sellers' desire to sell ova as an act of resistance against a repressive past. This is illustrated later in an extract from an interview with one woman whose logic for selling her ova is partly about doing what she wants with her own body. The ova selling stories also mark the lack of a shift beyond the level of poverty found in Ceausescu's time. Some of the women I interviewed expressed their reasons for selling in terms of wanting to experience something interesting, or different. Others expressed it as a need to help them get through another month's rent payments. In contrast to the strict regulation on reproduction in the earlier period Kligman described, reproduction in Romania is now relatively unregulated.

THE CLINIC

I was first granted permission in 2002 by Dr Zer 1 from the Israeli IVF centre, Universal IVF, to visit the egg harvesting clinic in the capital city of Romania, Bucharest. My research there was conducted over two weeks as part of a nine-month ethnographic study of practices and representations of extraction, exchange and implantation of ova [START_REF] Nahman | Israeli Extraction: An Ethnographic Study of Ova Donation and National Imaginaries[END_REF]. The broader study aimed to examine shifts in borders and notions of citizenship in Israel and Europe through a study of reproductive technologies. In this clinic, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 ova sellers and three clinic staff. These were tape-recorded, transcribed and then analysed. A few nights were spent sleeping in the clinic itself while in Bucharest. 2 The clinic is in an inconspicuous building that appeared, from the outside, to be a small three-storey house. The exterior blended in well with the rundown neighbourhood, but the interior was a recently renovated, clean and well-equipped building. The main floor has a large waiting room, with about 10 chairs. These face a doctor's office/kitchen. In the office/kitchen medicine is kept in a refrigerator together with food. Next to this is a nurse's office. Behind the waiting room is an enclosed, paved yard. On the first floor are three bedrooms, belonging to Dr Zer the head physician, to Nakhum the embryologist from Israel and an extra room in which staff occasionally rest or sleep (the one I slept in during my stay). Adjacent to one of the bedrooms is a tiled grey bathroom and shower. The next floor above is dedicated to the surgery room, recovery room, lab and pre-surgery shower room.

Donor recruitment at this clinic happened by word of mouth. This was done until a large 'pool' of donors formed. As part of her duties at the clinic, Dina, the manager, would recruit donors for the clinic by bringing in friends who subsequently brought other friends, thus enlarging the pool of donors. While in 2001 the clinic had only 100 donors, by September 2002 there were already 300. The method worked.

In the round of ova extractions I observed, there were 20 egg donors. Over a period of one month the women were injected with ovarian stimulating hormones. They arrived nightly, to spend three nights at the clinic for this injection, which is administered by a nurse. Six or seven women came to the clinic each night, and each morning six or seven came for extraction. At around 10.30 p.m., the nurse arrived, tired and dressed in clothing that seemed too big on her. She had spent the day working at another hospital and was now about to administer hormone injections to seven egg donors. The first donor, Anna, arrived and sat looking a bit nervous. I chatted with her and told her about my research. She appeared to be interested in this and told me about some of her experiences with ova donation. As the others arrived, they joined in the conversation. Three women could understand and speak English relatively well, so they acted as translators. It seemed as if the young women knew one another, but, they told me, they had only met at the clinic. The clinic is a site in which women sellers meet, comfort and support one another. It is a site in which they give one another advice.

WHAT THE WOMEN HAD TO SAY

The women I interviewed had very clear ideas and responses (though sometimes ambivalent) to my questions regarding why they chose to sell their ova. Their responses might give some sense for why the notion of 'dignity' and the human rights discourses may not be the most useful way to approach the issue of transnational ova trade. So their responses might also be a source for theorizing what a feminist response to this troubling trade could be. Women's accounts of their own experiences can have immense epistemological value. Here I believe what they have to say about their own experiences can speak to questions of feminist alliances and ethics. Their stories come from what were necessarily short 20-minute to one-hour interviews held in the ova extracting clinic, either in the day before ova extraction or on the day of extraction (before and after). Some quotations are taken from conversations in the recovery ward, and others come from the waiting room, or the smokers' corner in the back yard.

Laura

Laura is 22 years old and works at a firm where she has a very busy schedule from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. At the time of our interview in September 2002, she was a two-time donor. Her previous ova extraction occurred four months prior to our meeting. She used the money from the first cycle to buy a television and vacuum cleaner. This time she will redecorate her kitchen. She told me that her salary just covers the cost of her food and other necessities. She explains to me that it was not an easy decision for her to make, to sell her eggs. She thought about it for a month, and consulted with her boyfriend about it. He told her that it was her body and that she should do whatever she wants with it. 'I don't want to have kids now', she tells me: Like the other ova donors she is paid US$200 for undergoing one cycle of 'aspiration' (the somewhat euphemistic biomedical term for the invasive surgical procedure of ovum extraction). After the surgery, she will receive an envelope with US$200, in cash. This money amounts to twice her monthly salary. Despite the fact that she said she would not do this again due to the pain it caused her the first time, she commented that:

. . . it's addictive, like a drug . . . it's a constant need for money. It's something you need, the money. For money you can do almost anything.

Dina the clinic manager (and her friend) told her that in the US they pay a lot more, 'but how do I get there? It's all about money.'

The 'right' to do with her body what she wants -a 'pro-choice' discourseis put to use in this context in order to justify selling ova. She recoups her alienated labour as a 'right'. How can 'dignity' and 'human rights' be invoked when selling a body part is turned into a 'right'? According to the Kantian notion of 'dignity' (upon which western notions of dignity are based), ova donors are excluded from having dignity because they have a market value (see Khanna, 2007: 263-4). I return to this later.

Elena

Elena was a 24-year-old woman who works as a manager selling used books in the underground markets of the metro. She was a part-time student of construction/building, and she wanted it to be known that she studied this in French. She was a second-time donor. Elena heard about this clinic five months prior to our meeting, from her friend who delivers bed sheets to the clinic from a linen company that is based across the road. Despite the fact that she reported that the treatment felt easy to her, her employment made it difficult to schedule sessions at the clinic.

She told me that her family did not know she was doing this because they live far away and, 'they are old and don't understand' and she was not close to them. Besides which, 'my mother is very very curious. If she knew, she would come here to see.' Elena has told her friends, however, and they were going to the clinic to sell their ova as well.

Elena informed me that she was aware that there are certain risks in donating eggs. She added that she did not feel that there were big risks involved in the treatment. This made it much easier for her to undergo. Furthermore, she had distanced herself from her relationship to her ova, saying, 'it's not mine mine'. That is, she did not consider the child that could potentially result from her donation as her own. She denied any kinship relationship with her ova. Hence, she had decided that she did not want to know about what she nonetheless referred to as 'my baby'. She added that she hopes it will be OK.

She said that she had not wanted to sell a second time. However, her need for money made her do it. Perhaps she has detached herself from her ova because of this. She said: I feel shame to win the money in this way. I believe it's not a help for me, because I don't really work for this money. I prefer to work for this money, but in this case it came and it was easy. It's like a weakness. She associates not working for money as negative. She told me that she would not donate again but that she would use the US$200 she received to pay her rent, which is three months late. She planned to buy clothes, to go drinking with friends and to give her mother a portion. Doing some arithmetic in front of me Elena determined that she was paid 32 cents an hour at her job. Despite this low wage, she counted herself as lucky because she determined her own work schedule and could thus accommodate her studies. Having the freedom to decide, whether to sell or not to sell, what to spend the money on, and who to tell about it seemed to be the crux of many of the donors' reasoning about donating.

Vanessa

Vanessa was a 19-year-old first-time donor. She was married, had a twoyear-old son and lived in Bucharest. She worked in a factory that made Barbie accessories. Her job was to assemble the boxes in which dolls and accessories were packaged. When I first met her in the waiting room, she had a large pink Barbie box with some sort of Barbie accessories inside. The women in the waiting room (including myself) were all talking about it and passing the box around to examine it. She had initially worried about how the treatment would affect her health, but her friend had advised her she could trust the clinic, that it was 'OK'. Vanessa was worried that she would not be able to have another child because of this procedure. But her friend had assured her that, two months after the treatment, she would be able to have a baby. She had waited to see the effects on her friend. After the treatment, she saw that indeed, her friend felt well. Based on this, she decided to do it as well. Thus far, she had not had any side-effects from the medicine, but, she added, the procedure made her stomach hurt a little. I asked her why she had decided to sell her eggs. She told me that her decision was 'for the money'. She explained that the money she receives from doing this procedure is quite good. It amounts to four or five months' salary. She quickly added that part of her decision to donate had to do with the fact that her uncle and aunt cannot have children and are very unhappy. She said that she thinks of them when she sells her eggs. She added that, unfortunately, the eggs are going to people who can afford to buy them, rather than to poor people. But she believed that it was better for the ova to go to people outside Romania, 'because here it's poor' and the children that result from the ova donation would have a better life if they left Romania. Some of the women, I believe, were exercising a desire for participation in a neoliberal culture -selling something to get 'stuff' and money. This may have been in response to a repressive reproductive history in Romania, and it may be seen as the only way out of poverty -however, temporarily. To a western feminist, they may be quite troubling, indeed when I was there, they troubled me. I often recalled Aihwa Ong's apt injunction that feminists recognize and accept that women in different societies may choose to live differently from a western feminist ethnographer's ideals (Ong, 1988: 90). Other postcolonial feminists have critiqued the colonialist tendencies of western feminists, especially in the 1980s (for examples, see [START_REF] Mohanty | Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses[END_REF][START_REF] Spivak | Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture[END_REF]. Hence, I was also troubled by being troubled. My concern for the women I spoke to at the clinic marks a significant tension between the priorities of western Euro-American feminists and the women in my study. I am left with several questions then: What are the connections between recipients and so-called donors? What kind of meaningful relationships can feminists create in order to bring about some necessary changes? Can we agree on what those changes should be? Or to quote Jyotsna Gupta: 'Is transnational solidarity possible and on what grounds will it be built under the conditions of transnational capitalism in this era of globalization?' (Gupta, 2006: 24).

COALITIONS?

I follow Gupta in suggesting that broad coalitions are necessary. But in the arena of ova donation some coalitions are more problematic than others. I am thinking here of the Hands Off Our Ovaries manifesto. This manifesto was written and signed by a range of women, feminists and non-feminists, pro-choice and pro-life [sic] campaigners, men, secular and religious, seeking:

. . . a moratorium on egg extraction for research purposes until such time as global discourse and scientific research yields information sufficient to establish adequate informed consent. (www.handsoffourovaries.com, accessed 28 January 2007)

Their website states that it is a call to action that has resulted in the coming together of pro-choice and pro-life feminists. Yet arguably many prochoice feminists would say that pro-life campaigners are anything but feminist. These are precisely notions of dignity, subjectification and ontology that are in conflict here. The manifesto was spearheaded by anti-abortion group Core Ethics' Comment on Reproductive Ethics. Their version of ethics is based upon assuring 'dignity' and human value to unborn embryos and foetuses. According to their website, 'Absolute respect for the human embryo is a principal tenet' (www.corethics.org, accessed 28 January 2007). Yet, this discourse demonstrates clearly the way that embryos have epistemologically been turned into liberal human subjects (Franklin, 2006).

Further insights can be garnered from the Hands Off Our Ovaries manifesto:

The trade in human ova already crosses national borders, and there are numerous examples demonstrating that this growing international trade is brutally exploiting young women living in Eastern Europe and other countries. For example, poor, semi-literate young Romanian factory workers are reported to repeatedly sell their ova for $250 in efforts to escape the depredations of poverty and the absence of employment opportunities that pay a living wage. (www.handsoffourovaries.com, accessed 28 January 2007, my emphasis)

The quote begins with notions of brutality, exploitation, poverty and youth. I witnessed the sometimes inept medical procedures being carried out, so I would not contest that dimension. However, the agency enacting this brutality seems to be missing from this picture. What/whom is causing this international trade? How are the demand for eggs and the fact that IVF is a part of 'enterprise medicine' creating ever more markets for pharmaceuticals and bits of technology connected to this brutality? There seems to be a kind of resonance here as well with a feminism of 30 years ago, where white middle-class western feminists reproducing a version of imperialism, set out to save Eastern women from their oppression. What do the feminists in Eastern Europe have to say about the selling of eggs? Although one signatory of the manifesto is based in a feminist organization in Prague, in the Czech Republic, not one Romanian woman egg donor has signed it nor are any cited in the manifesto. Importantly, the women I interviewed were obviously concerned for their health. That is an important but separate issue for the moment. What is central is the language of 'brutal exploitation' in the manifesto, which both elides the personhood of the woman selling her ova (her history, her logic) and the actual fact of who or what is doing the exploiting. Framed within a neoliberal discourse of choice, human rights and dignity, this manifesto perhaps does not take its criticism far enough. Is it the physicians who are doing the brutalizing or is it capitalism?

DISCUSSION

Although they play a vital role in helping some western ova donation clinics function, the women egg sellers are distanced from the people who run the clinic and the ova buyers/recipients both socially and economically. Their own aspirations to improve their lives are attained through a detachment from their body parts. In this sense, some of their material aspirations are enabled by this detachment. The aspirations of western scientists, of IVF patients and of egg donors may be viewed as being related to each other through an oppositional or 'torqued' relation. 3 There is an inherent inequality in the relation, to which it is not reducible. What is key here, is that the inequality is made through 'desire'. 4 I have thus started to think of these relations produced in exchanges, processes and discourses of transnational ova trade as 'nodes of desire': temporally limited, produced by/in/through the desire for capital, freedom and children.

If finally what remains intact is the intention or desire to have a child, then that desire is what the child 'reproduces'. So in becoming a means to fulfil such a desire, procreation itself ceases to be the crucial 'reproductive moment'. We might see that moment as instead the acting out of intention or desire. (Strathern, 1995: 355) The notion of 'desire' has figured in recent feminist accounts of reproduction and kinship. For example, Cori Hayden has written about lesbian kinship as kinetic rather than 'genetic'. She contends, 'it is less an issue of ownership of biogenetic substance than one of placing this substance in motion' (Hayden, 1995: 13). In a similar vein, Marilyn [START_REF] Strathern | Displacing Knowledge: Technology and the Consequences for Kinship[END_REF], in 'Displacing Knowledge: Technology and the Consequences for Kinship', has illustrated how new reproductive technologies instantiate new ways of knowing about kinship. These new epistemologies, she says, partially (but not totally) replace old ways of knowing (Strathern, 1995: 347). She refers to the practice of gamete donation, arguing that, in an age of reproductive technologies, how people think about reproducing themselves changes. In the preceding quote, Strathern claims that reproduction resides in desire, or the desire to reproduce, rather than in procreation. She links this to the idea that reproduction is 'enterprised up', and that consumer choice has become an integral aspect of reproduction in some western countries [START_REF] Strathern | Displacing Knowledge: Technology and the Consequences for Kinship[END_REF].

Strathern builds on the work of feminists who have critiqued 'choice' as the only mode of figuring reproductive technologies (see especially [START_REF] Mcneil | The New Reproductive Technologies[END_REF]. In her study of IVF in Britain, Sarah Franklin indicates that the 'options' provided through IVF often leave people feeling they have 'no choice' but to try it (see especially Franklin, 1997: Ch. 5). In this sense, Franklin is arguing that the hope of IVF patients may be immobilized by the technology itself, 'what women look to IVF to provide may be exactly what it takes away from them' (Franklin, 1997: 173, emphasis in the original). The hope is taken away, but the desire for a child is not. In a related study about reproduction and juridical understandings of kinship, Janet Dolgin examines court rulings over the rights of unmarried fathers. She indicates that 'intent' to be a parent may carry greater social and legal force than 'biological ties'. Dolgin examines how, in order to maintain a traditional family structure of mother, father and child, court judgments often ignored or denied the biological ties privileging the idea of 'intent' or desire to parent (Dolgin, 1995: 62-3).

Building on the research described above, and keeping in mind McNeil's and Franklin's cautionary perspective on choice, I would suggest that the multiple desires of donors and recipients to give and receive eggs in Romania and Israel produce a kind of relationality that is temporary but noteworthy. 'Aspirations' (extraction of ova) may well be 'reproductive moments' [START_REF] Strathern | Displacing Knowledge: Technology and the Consequences for Kinship[END_REF], in the case of Romanian ova donors. Their 'intent' and the intent of recipients may be what replaces biological ties and creates a kind of 'torque' between them. The donors' decision to donate may indeed be linked to the sense of having 'no choice' [START_REF] Franklin | Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception[END_REF] but to donate, because of economic constraints and aspirations. The ova selling stories indicate these momentary nodes of desire, where one may attempt to gain a sense of dignity within global capitalism by doing precisely what will perpetuate the system, buying and selling.

It is important to emphasize that the relations outlined here do not completely and permanently immobilize donors. The donors have other desires, which will create different kinds of relations. These will have different effects on their mobility in an economic and global sense. These may include, for example, the social mobilities that transpire as donors gain educational qualifications (as some of the women in my study were doing) or access to migration, which is so prevalent throughout Eastern Europe (see Wallace, 1999: 199-200). That is, the problem here is not the process of reproduction and reproductive technologies themselves, but the system that enables the inequalities that pervade and persist. The problem might be larger than bioethics.

They are not 'dupes' for wanting these things either. Gupta calls for 'universal ethical norms of human dignity' to be enrolled in a feminist bioethics. I agree with her entirely that there is a need for an internationalist feminism to come to some sort of basic understanding of what an ethical norm is. But how would it be decided what represents a universal ethic of human dignity? [START_REF] Khanna | Indignity[END_REF], instead, calls for doing away with the notion of dignity. Correctly, I believe, she recalls the history of human rights discourses in western philosophy and the erasures they enact. According to Khanna 'dignity' operated differently for colonial powers than for colonized peoples. Crucially, 'dignity' 'was formed through the elision of the instrumentalization of colonized resources and peoples' (Khanna, 2007: 261). The women sellers are a source of profit to the clinic, which gives them US$200 for approximately 20 ova, which it sells in 'batches' of six fertilized embryos to people in Israel for US$3000. They are also a source of raw materials for potentially making future people for ova recipients. So dignity will operate in a very different manner here.

The kinds of elisions necessitated by the notion of human dignity are impossible in the example I have chosen to highlight here -we cannot enact a Kantian separation of morality from the marketplace. Money for ova donors 'is working in the realm of desire' (Khanna, 2007: 275). Following Khanna, then, it is not the capital itself which is the problem, but capitalism (Khanna, 2007: 275). Thus, 'if the category of dignity has been the basis of the human, it indeed needs to be deconstructed, and placed alongside indignity, shame, disgrace and other forms of desubjectivation and deontologization' (Khanna, 2007: 267). She suggests looking to disposability rather than dignity. This involves an approach that acknowledges the logic of a marketplace but does not approve of it. 5 From my reading of Gupta, I believe she would agree with this last point. She is right to suggest that it is vitally important to defend women's bodies from the ever growing voraciousness of enterprise medicine. So, what are some possible directions? What of the links and echoes with prolife activism to be found among the people promoting this manifesto? Do we make such strategic connections?

What may be of importance are the ethics of who is positioned as more appropriate to sell a bit of their body. The fact that the women in my study themselves feel 'dignity' in gaining stuff for their homes and in becoming westernized women who 'choose' what to do with their bodies puts one in a quandary. It would be a kind of feminist imperialism to tell them they are wrong to desire these neoliberal ideals.

As mentioned earlier, I am also hesitant to be making feminist alliances with anti-abortion activists who framed the Hands Off Our Ovaries manifesto as a heroic salvation to the victimized women. So what is the available route to me? An attention first of all to the neoliberal global forces that place women, and men, in the position of feeling they need to commodify their bodies in the first place would be one step. Seeing the transnational connections between different kinds of aspirations and different ways of attaining 'dignity' might be one direction. And finally, one has to recall that the torque has many sides and that women seeking treatment with egg donation are being turned into ova consumers by state policies and cultural practices that encourage putting the onus on them as individuals to 'choose'. As one of my Israeli respondents said of their relationship to one IVF clinician, 'we were being turned into a mill for his private savings account', but that is another chapter in the story . . .

APPENDIX: RESEARCH METHODS AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

I conducted this research as part of a larger anthropological study into transnational ova exchange practices between Israel and Romania (see [START_REF] Nahman | Israeli Extraction: An Ethnographic Study of Ova Donation and National Imaginaries[END_REF]; also cited in [START_REF] Waldby | The Biopolitics of Reproduction: Post-Fordist Biotechnology and Women's Clinical Labour[END_REF]. I employed ethnographic methods of observation and interviews. I interviewed 20 ova sellers, the clinic manager, an anaesthetist and a nurse. Group discussions among the ova sellers and the researcher emerged spontaneously in waiting rooms and recovery rooms. Limitations imposed themselves on this study in the form of the locale (an IVF clinic), language (I can understand Romanian and speak only a little, so translators were occasionally used) and time constraints (I was invited to the clinic for the two weeks of ovum extraction).

Participant observation was conducted over a period of five days, with three evenings and informal visits to the clinic on additional days prior to and after the interviews were completed, so that the entire research period in Romania was two weeks. Although brief, it was fortunate that I was allowed even this short period as no other social scientist had been permitted to conduct research at that clinic. This participant observation involved 'hanging out' in the waiting room with women, observing in the surgery room during ova extractions, observing in the post-operation recovery room and observing in the laboratory.

'Hanging out' in the waiting room took place when the women were visiting the clinic at around 10.30 p.m. to receive their final pre-extraction hormonal injection from the nurse. There was a slight nervous energy in the room as we sat and chatted, and the women generally managed this by making jokes. The atmosphere here was generally friendly and I was included in the conversation despite my being an outsider and a nondonor. Indeed, some of the women wanted to know about my research, why I was conducting it and what the practices of ova donation were in other places. I happily obliged, taking it as both an opportunity to introduce myself and the aims of my research.

Interviews were conducted in private rooms, with only me and the interviewee (and on a couple of occasions, a translator from among the ova sellers). These were semi-structured interviews that consisted of questions ranging from 'How did you find out about this clinic?' to 'How did you decide to donate your eggs?' I also asked questions about consent and the nature of the consent forms provided by the clinic. I elicited consent to my own interviews verbally and recorded this on tape. This was the chosen method because of a lack of time to find someone who could understand my research well enough to translate my form. I was also concerned that a consent form describing my research in English might be less easy to understand than a verbal explanation. This is a tricky area in any kind of research, as the interviewee does not precisely ever know what it is they are consenting to. (Indeed, some of the interviewees commented to me about the forms provided by the clinic, saying they were misleading and confusing.) In light of this, I tried to be as clear as possible about the purposes of academic research into egg donation and my own aims of accessing their experiences and perspectives.

Research ethics and bioethics cross over in the social study of biomedicine. What can be thought of as a problem for science and medicine can also be theorized by the social scientist who may have a more historicized and contextualized view of the issues pertaining to what can or should be done in science [START_REF] Konrad | Narrating the New Predictive Genetics: Ethics, Ethnography and Science[END_REF][START_REF] Rabinow | French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory[END_REF]. Konrad has indicated that anthropologists might have useful epistemological tools for bioethics by virtue of the fact that anthropology examines the narrative dimensions of bioethics [START_REF] Konrad | Narrating the New Predictive Genetics: Ethics, Ethnography and Science[END_REF]. Rabinow has shown how anthropologists' role might be to name the new moral dilemmas emerging in the biosciences [START_REF] Rabinow | French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory[END_REF]. Indeed, questions of bioethics and research ethics emerged as overlapping ones from the research. While the ethical considerations of this part of the research are examined in greater detail elsewhere [START_REF] Nahman | Israeli Extraction: An Ethnographic Study of Ova Donation and National Imaginaries[END_REF], I say a few words about these overlapping ethical concerns, what I call elsewhere 'intersecting aspirations' [START_REF] Nahman | Israeli Extraction: An Ethnographic Study of Ova Donation and National Imaginaries[END_REF]. For instance, 'should ova donors be paid more to undergo an operation which might affect their future quality of life?' became a central question for both the researcher and the research participants alike during the research. Many of my concerns at the time regarded how the women were being treated, failure of certain medical procedures and machinery. I realized that these were questions about biomedical practices that I was unable to answer. More centrally, I was concerned with how much to tell the women regarding the global state of reproductive technologies, as it might be emotionally painful for them to hear that they were being paid a rate much lower than the average in North America for example. Indeed, the head physician of the clinic threatened to halt my research there when he discovered one of his 'donors' had heard of this lack of parity from me. My decision to answer the interviewees' questions truthfully was not conceived as an act in donation-prevention or some sort of intervention, but based on the fact that the women I interviewed were mostly IT literate people who could have also found this information from other sources such as the Internet.

There is no doubt that some of the observations and research experiences I recount here are related to my own sense of ambivalence about having once been asked to donate my ova to a woman in exchange for a large sum of money and having said 'no'. After much deliberation, I said no largely because of the power differential and the confusing kinship that the exchange of my ova would instantiate between me and the woman who had made the very difficult request. I said no even though I was deeply saddened by the fact that the woman who had asked me really wanted a child and I wanted to be able to help her. By the time I conducted my research in Romania, I was also already deeply moved by the stories I'd heard from women in Israel who were trying to have a child. My sense of the profoundly unequal relation between donors and recipients within the global order was crystallized in this clinic in Romania. I did not want to counsel women not to sell their ova, sensing that they were part of larger historical and economic processes that went beyond such personal 'choices'. Nevertheless, when asked, I would provide them with information (about payment in other countries) that for some of them, made them say they would think twice about donating again in Romania. Others, however, seemed unmoved and held fast to their decisions to sell their ova. In research we are always speaking with people who speak and argue back, and develop their own ethical models. I have tried to make this idea central to my analysis and writing about this research.

NOTES

This research was wholly funded by a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and was made possible by a four-year doctoral fellowship from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

1. All names of research participants and clinics are pseudonyms. 2. Clearly, I had quite a significant amount of access to the clinic and my assessment of this is the subject of another article [START_REF] Nahman | Israeli Extraction: An Ethnographic Study of Ova Donation and National Imaginaries[END_REF]. 3. Donna Haraway borrows from [START_REF] Bowker | Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences[END_REF] the notion of 'torque' and states that, 'where biographies and categories twine in conflicting trajectories there is torque' (Haraway, 2003: 296). When lives and social and political categories come together, they often do so in ways that are oppositional, yet mutually dependent. 4. I am aware that there is a large psychoanalytic literature on the concept of desire but for this article I deal with feminist anthropological perspectives that link it to 'kinship'. I've made this selection because it helps me to better deal with the questions of international feminism, and global 'sisterhoods'.

5. Khanna utilizes psychoanalytic theory here, especially Freud's, to articulate the notions of disposability and melancholia.

  Because it's hard to live. Raising kids is complicated and you have to give them education. He must grow in a perfect place. You have to offer him everything. And I cannot do this now. And I think if somebody needs my eggs to have a baby and raise it properly I think it's good that I'm doing it. If I can help other people, why not?

European Journal of Women's Studies 15(2)


est destinée au dépôt

Hequembourg proposes a refreshing new approach to the depiction of lesbian motherhood. She presents a well-informed review of relevant studies and a cogent delineation of the social and political context of lesbian motherhood. Hequembourg suggests that it is time to move beyond dichotomizing discourses that have tended to stunt thinking about the nature of lesbian motherhood by locating it within reductivist conceptualizations that portray it as a discrete state to be contrasted with 'normal' motherhood. Such discourses, which cast lesbian motherhood in terms of sameness/difference, assimilation/resistance, emerge from either/or debates that almost inevitably exude the sense of a need to defend the legitimacy of the status of lesbian motherhood. They tend also to lead researchers into rather sterile and intellectually shallow waters where the goal of the research effort becomes to prove the null hypothesis, that is, to demonstrate no differences on comparisons between children growing up in lesbian-led families and those growing up in more traditional constellations. While such studies can serve a useful function within legal contexts, Hequembourg argues that they fail to engage with the full spectrum of individual experiences of growing up in lesbian-led families and are inherently problematic on methodological and conceptual grounds.

Hequembourg has begun to develop a promising approach, based on the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987). This represents an attempt to escape from legalistic or dichotomizing discourses, by acknowledging discourses of sameness and difference but conceptualizing them as occurring within a more dynamic system. The picture painted is of women constantly negotiating away from and towards hegemonic discourses according to varying social contexts and relationships. The most 'conforming' women (i.e. those where couples have adopted traditional 'male'/'female' gender roles) are not necessarily consciously negotiating new positions. However, Hequembourg portrays them as constantly creating social identities and statuses that evolve across differing social situations. This creates an overall impression of alternative discourses as gyrations around hegemonic discourses, with the constant process of becoming consisting of micro-movements around and about macrodiscourses. Such a conceptualization contests a view of women as entrenched within static confrontational discourses and so points the way to a far more subtly nuanced understanding of the nature of lesbian motherhood. To support her new ways of thinking about lesbian motherhood, Hequembourg provides illustrations drawn from thoughtful analysis of the narrative accounts provided by lesbian mothers. These self-portrayals provide evidence of a variety and subtlety that seriously challenge the validity of more popular discourses that tend to produce a more limited, stereotypical view.

While it may have been useful if the difference between micro-and macro social contexts had been distinguished and defined more clearly and there was a tendency at times to repeat rather than to elaborate, Hequembourg's attempt to develop an alternative conceptual framework is commendable. In my view, this book is an extremely valuable addition to thinking about lesbian motherhood. The second edition of Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration interrogates the wave metaphor while seriously engaging with the arguments of self-identifying third wave feminists. This revised collection of essays opens with a new foreword by Imelda Whelehan and concludes with an afterword by Jane Spencer. This second edition also contains an interview with Luce Irigaray and newly commissioned chapters that explore a broad range of issues: transgender feminism (Susan Stryker), postfeminism (Amanda Lotz), Polish feminism (Agnieszka Graff), postcolonial feminism (Anastasia Valassopoulos) and pornography (Melanie Waters).

As the section headings indicate, the overarching themes of the collection centre around the issues of 'Generations and Genealogies' (Part I), 'Locales and Locations' (Part II) and 'Politics and Popular Culture' (Part III). In the introduction, the editors Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford voice their concerns about the discourse that contrasts different feminist generations. They argue that a generational approach to differences within feminisms risks establishing a divisive rather than dialogical framework. The issues of generations and genealogies are also addressed

  Helen Barrett. Book Review: RETHINKING LESBIAN MOTHERHOOD Amy Hequembourg Lesbian Motherhood: Stories of Becoming New York and London: Harrington Park Press, 2007, 191 pp., ISBN 978-1-56023-687-0. European Journal of Women's Studies, 2008, 15 (2), pp.132-133. 10.1177/13505068080150020402. hal-00571318

  REFERENCEDeleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Helen Barrett Birkbeck, University of London A THIRD WAVE: ABOUT THE POLITICS OF PROCLAIMING A 'NEW' FEMINISM Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford, eds Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, expanded 2nd edn Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 310 pp., ISBN-13 978-0-230-52174-2

  Ritchie, Ani and Meg Barker (2005) 'Feminist SM: A Contradiction in Terms or a Way of Challenging Traditional Gendered Dynamics through Sexual Practice?', Lesbian and Gay Psychology Review 6(3): 227-39. Rubin, Gayle (1984) 'Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality', pp. 267-319 in C. Vance (ed.) Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. London: Routledge. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1990) Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press.

	Meg Barker
	London South Bank University
	RETHINKING LESBIAN MOTHERHOOD
	Amy Hequembourg
	Lesbian Motherhood: Stories of Becoming
	New York and London: Harrington Park Press, 2007, 191 pp., ISBN 978-1-56023-
	687-0


RESPONDING TO VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN WITH AUTHENTIC MORALITY

M.L. Penn and R. Nardos Overcoming Violence against Women and Girls: The International Campaign to Eradicate a Worldwide Problem Oxford: Rowman andLittlefield, 2003, 255 pp., ISBN 0-7425-2500-7 This is a very interesting book that seeks to address a number of very difficult problems. It starts with an excellent review of the international response to various forms of oppression and discrimination of women and girls by outlining the historical progress of international statutes and laws from within various departments of the UN. From the outset, this book is aware of international differences and as such acknowledges the different forms of oppression facing women in both developed and developing countries. Subsequent chapters focus on specific forms of abuse and provide excellent international statistics on the prevalence of different forms of abuse facing women and children. This includes a chapter on sexual violence that includes: an exploration of incest and child sexual abuse; sexual inequality in child-rearing; the underestimation of the damage caused by childhood sexual abuse; trafficking; rape and sexual violence by armed forces; rape as a weapon and instrument of domination and control; sexual harassment; and cyberporn and the sexual exploitation of children. As this list illustrates, each chapter is comprehensive in its description of the ways in which different forms of abuse manifest themselves and the impact they have. Some chapters, although not all, also include some reference to the legal responses outlined within the introduction, as well as the theory of authentic morality that underpins the book as a whole.

The authors, in organizing the book in the way they have, appear to be presenting the legal discourse as a useful but ultimately limited solution to the problem of gendered violence. In seeking to explain how legal solutions, akin to a liberal feminist agenda of equality, might not be adequate the authors state:

The underlying assumption appears to be that when the national and international instruments necessary for securing gender equality and for protecting women's rights have been fashioned and applied, gender-based discrimination and abuse will find an inhospitable environment and gradually disappear . . . violence against women and girls is sustained by longstanding, maladaptive patterns of thinking and relating, legal strategies, unaccompanied by efforts to address the intrapersonal dimensions of the problem, are likely to prove ineffective. (pp. 13-14) The solution to violence against women and girls offered by the authors is based on a theory of authentic morality and in relation to this theory many of the chapters include some discussion of the philosophical concepts that underpin such a theory. Ultimately, this book is challenging the legal discourse by referring to the metaphysical interactions that occur within and between humans. In Chapter 2 ('Sexual Violence against Women and Girls'), the authors introduce the moral and spiritual dimensions of that problem in terms of the challenge of self-mastery. By introducing Plato, the authors begin to challenge the notion of the 'force of law and threat of punishment' as an adequate response to 'individuals [who] cannot regulate his [sic] own passions' (p. 67).

Chapter 3 addresses physical abuse including: battering; domestic violence in lesbian relationships; violence against domestic and migrant workers; conceptualizing domestic violence as torture; and the impact of gender-based violence on children. As with Chapter 2, this chapter is well referenced and avoids focusing on western literature where the impact of global poverty is often ignored. The discussion of violence within lesbian relationships also ensures that the authors do not ignore the problem of abuse by women in intimate relationships with other women.

Chapter 4 is concerned with culture, traditional practices and gender-based violence and includes a lengthy section on female genital circumcision that highlights the campaign against such practices as well as recent information about the practice. This chapter also includes a section examining dowry-related violence.

Part 3 of this book begins to move away from the specific examples of gender violence outlined in previous chapters, and begins to look at potential solutions. Chapter 5 is concerned with education that is presented both as an example of gender discrimination as well as potential solution to it. The authors state:

While some of the factors limiting women's access to education are structural, significant barriers to the education of female children are attitudinal. Women and girls are routinely denied access to education out of fear of the impact of too much freedom for females, a preference for investing in sons, and traditional stereotypes that continue to raise questions about the usefulness of educating girls. Nevertheless, a significant body of research shows that when women and girls are given access to education, it is among the most effective of all means for raising the level of health, education, and prosperity for the entire population. (p. 105) This chapter differentiates between different types of education, which it defines as, material education, human education and spiritual education. Material education relates to basic knowledge concerned with improving 'humanity's physical wellbeing and health' (p. 106). Human education, on the other hand, relates to those areas of science, mathematics, arts and humanities that distinguish humans from animals and within which men have predominated. The notion of spiritual education that is introduced again moves us back into a discussion of the underlying moral theory of the book. In introducing the concept of spirituality and morality, the authors suggest, on the basis of research, that without moral leadership the global initiatives intended to address, for example, education will ultimately fail.

At this point in the book, I felt that the authors failed to bring together adequately the violence outlined in previous chapters and the moral theory they seek to propose as a potential solution to it. Primarily, I think this fails because the authors become degendered in their discussion of moral theory. For example:

A somewhat subtle but crucial logical distinction must be made here. It is not social structures but individuals who compete, seek power, or engage in conflictual behaviour towards each other. The very existence of morality and moral questions depends upon the existence of individual free will. (p. 116)

Having spent the first 100 pages of this book outlining the abuse of women and children, predominately by individual men or social structures dominated by men, it is disappointing that in discussing the relationship between individuals and social structures in relation to agency the gender of the actors they are referring to is ignored. The authors do acknowledge that women's agency is somewhat 'thwarted', which impacts on their ability to achieve justice, but do so in a context where the solution they propose is again one of 'human virtue, and a healthy community goal' (p. 120). This begs the question of whose virtue and whose community, a problem which I felt was not adequately addressed.

Part 3 of this book continues with a comprehensive outline of the 'Authenticity Project', which advocates a basic framework for moral education as a way to challenge gendered violence through its regard of 'altruistic love as the fundamental principle of human relations' (p. 127). Once again the admirable principles and virtues outlined in this section failed to overcome my scepticism of this project on the basis that the gender of actors seemed inadequately explained. For example, the authors state:

The evidence of history has led the Authenticity Project to another basic principle of its program of moral development: the human being is capable of both extreme cruelty and extreme altruism. (p. 128) This statement appears incongruous against the many examples of abuse, by men, against women and children outlined in the book up until this point. Furthermore, when introducing the notion of victimization the authors suggest that:

. . . our response to individual evil should be governed not so much by the degree of injustice perpetrated against us, or even by the other's active intention to harm, as by the educated effectiveness of our response. We must respond in a manner that maximises the likelihood that the perpetrator will gain effective insight into the nature of his own moral condition. (p. 131) This concept of response fails to acknowledge that women have, throughout history, survived the abuse of men both individually and collectively by many methods including by appealing to their better nature. Within the philosophical paradigm itself, women have frequently been presented in this role as arbiters of men's inability to control their inner selves. Such concepts, I felt, were not adequately critiqued. Also absent at this juncture is a discussion of restorative justice -the principles of which this extract seems to be advocating. Bringing in such a discussion at this point would have brought the book full circle in terms of the historic use of legal remedies and moved it forward with a notion of authentic morality.

Chapter 7 develops the authentic morality theory further by examining emotional competency before Chapter 8 examines the role of men in eradicating gender-based violence. This is, unfortunately, one of the shortest chapters in the book, but does raise the important question of the role of men in challenging the oppression of women, not just in extreme cases of abuse but within wider social structures (such as capitalism) that present gendered images which impact on girls, women and wider society. Similarly, there is an acknowledgement of the role of perpetrator programmes in beginning to challenge the moral education of individual men. This final acknowledgement of the active role of men in challenging their own and/or other men's behaviour and spiritual morality again felt somewhat lacking. Consequently, I felt that this book should have focused far more on the behaviour of men and been explicit in naming whose spiritual morality the Authenticity Project is concerned with.

To conclude, this is a very interesting book that attempts to fulfil two aims and doesn't quite succeed in doing so. The first two parts are excellent in describing the impact and prevalence of gendered based violence within the historical context of international law. Additionally, relevant extracts from international statutes are included in the appendices, which would make an excellent reference for students. In my opinion, the authors failed to successfully marry this critique of the practice of gendered violence with the moral theory of the Authenticity Project. To conclude, I felt that it might have been better to publish two books, allowing a more adequate exploration of the distinct parts of the book rather than bringing the two things together.

Emma Williamson University of Bristol

OCCUPIED AFGHAN WOMEN'S LIVES: MULTIPLE EXPERI-ENCES, MULTIPLE CONSCIOUSNESSES Elaheh Rostami Povey

Afghan Women: Identity and Invasion London: Zed Books, 2007, 159 pp., ISBN 978-1-84277-855-5 In Afghan Women, Povey provides us with a powerful account of women's struggle for survival and resistance during the Afghan wars, illustrated by life stories collected among various groups of women both within Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora in Pakistan, Iran, the UK and the US. Women's voices emerge out of the narrative; voices that have hardly been heard since the invasion of Afghanistan; voices imprinted with a material realism in great contrast with western representations of Afghan women since 9/11. From a feminist postcolonial standpoint, Povey depicts Afghan women as politically conscious of the rules of global politics, having a clear vision of how women's status should be improved from within, taking into account culture and religion, but first of all the material conditions of Afghan society under western occupation.

Five years after the 'liberation' of Afghanistan, security conditions are worsening, attacks against girls' schools are multiplying, and threats against politically active women are increasing. Povey questions the extent to which the US and their allies were really interested in the plight of Afghan women. She shows how the condition of women has been used to develop a 'moral grammar of war' (Weber, 2005) and to gain public support for military intervention. As the 'War on Terror' seems to have reached a point of no return, Povey warns western countries about the risk for Afghan women of getting caught in the middle of an international discursive struggle, at times portrayed as a clash of civilizations and at other times as simply a matter of human rights, and a nationalist discourse that defends with absolute certainty the terms of a contested terrain in which they themselves have had very little input in creating.

Povey talks about Afghan women's political agenda for defending women's rights. She explains how the international community has been deaf to Afghan women's views on gender relations. She speaks about an indigenous women's movement that has emerged out of Afghan women's solidarity networks developed during the various Afghan wars. If this is what I expected to find when I came