Curating Conception: IVF, Race, and Reproduction in South Africa

Curating Conception: IVF, Race, and Reproduction in South Africa

In this presentation, I draw on my forthcoming book, Curating Conception: Race and Reproduction in South Africa, to examine a central tension in contemporary fertility care: while assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) are framed as technologies of choice, hope, and control, in practice they remain deeply uncertain, uneven, and stratified, structured by broader social hierarchies. This tension is rarely more apparent as in South Africa, a country where fertility care remains embedded in histories of colonialism and apartheid and an enduring racialized political economy that shapes both access to treatment and the valuation of reproductive subjects.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in private fertility clinics in South Africa, I develop “curation” as a conceptual framework for understanding how choices in healthcare are shaped through the everyday technologies, relations, and infrastructures of care. While IVF refers to the singular moment of fertilization in a glass petri dish, in practice it is an assemblage of technologies: from test tubes to medical files, success rates to religious institutions, and from national regulations to the racialized imaginaries of family and kin. Curating captures the tension between care and authority in biomedicine, where guidance and support may function simultaneously as care and as techniques of discipline and power, mediated through the infrastructures that make care possible and govern its terms. Practices of curation operate along three interrelated axes: temporality and transmission; selection and mediation; and the politics of inclusion and exclusion. To curate conception is thus to manage both the uncertainty of reproduction and the social orders that shape reproductive futures.

Within this context, ARTs in South Africa are shaped by racial imaginaries that anticipate the White, heteronormative family as the default reproductive subject. By foregrounding these curatorial logics, I aim to shift attention within debates on reproductive rights and justice beyond questions of access alone. Instead, practices within the clinic itself demonstrate how IVF is an extension of “White world-making” (le Roux 2024). In this way, fertility clinics emerge as sites where particular reproductive futures are authorized while others are foreclosed.

Bio:

Dr Tessa Moll is a Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. Her research explores how science and technology shape practices of making and sustaining life in post-apartheid South Africa, with a particular focus on race and reproduction. She is co-editor of the Handbook of DOHaD and Society (2024) and the author of the forthcoming monograph Curating Conception: Race and Reproduction in South Africa. Her work spans assisted reproductive technologies, postgenomic science, and global health. With support from a Wellcome Trust Early Career Award, she is currently leading a project on the use of DDT in malaria control, examining its implications for accountability and intergenerational health.

Venue: Byrne House, University of Exeter (spaces limited)

Virtual: via Zoom

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