West is best: Affective assemblages and Spanish oocytes

This article employs the concept of affective assemblage to discuss how fertility travelers make sense of their decision to travel to Spain for oocyte donation. Motherhood is brought into being through racialized and gendered discourses on ova exchange; idealized and feminized (fertile and gift-giving) Spanish donor bodies. In their accounts, fertility travelers employ a narrative in which oocytes become necessary spare parts, yet also, exotic substances with temperament and racialized nationality as well as collective bodies - shaped by the recipient woman's body, intent, and desire. In this manner, kinship is created through shared blood and space, desire and intent while differences between recipients and donors are minimized. The directionality of desire, hope, and imagination has the effect of naturalizing transnational egg donation and transforming it into a shared western European femininity of sorts.