Description
This book is a collection of multidisciplinary case studies on biopolitical practices and discourses. The chapters discuss the regulation of assisted reproductive technologies in the Arab states, Israel, and Serbia; the biopolitics of abortion in Poland and Hungary; abortion used as a method of sex selection in Georgia, Armenia and India, and sex selection used to avoid abortion in the Arab states and in Germany. Other chapters explore local cases in a global biopolitical context: virginity tests conducted in order to humiliate women in Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey; transnational surrogacy commercializing the bodies of women in India; stem cell research abused in the lack of regulation in Russia; and the representation of Roma as research subjects in human genetic research in Hungary. Some of the essays discuss novel and unique reproductive policies, such as the pronatalist measures of a local municipality in Serbia, or the utilization of pronatalist policies by originally not targeted groups, such as gay and lesbian couples in Israel. There is also a set of case studies in the book that focus on reproductive tourism and procreative exile and analyze the practices of escaping the restrictive reproductive policies in one country and utilizing reproductive services in another.
