Extractions An Ethnography of Reproductive Tourism [Hardcover]

Michal Nahman traces different kinds of 'extraction': the practices of human egg harvesting in different national contexts; the political economic consequences of such extraction for the women involved and the ways in which this has consequences for nationalism and race or 'Israeli extraction'.Extractions Theorist Sellers Embryo Method Repro Migrants Borders Explosion Crisis Synecdoche

'This book is best approached as an account of a conversion. It was during the course of fieldwork on a seemingly unrelated topic (egg 'donation') that the author found her views on state and politics (concerning Israeli and its neighbours, and thus Zionism) became completely upturned. It was a particularly tense time, but rather than compartmentalising how these arenas were talked about, the author saw them in combination. The result is a thought-provoking weaving back and forth: the bulk of the study is of an unusual experiment in reproductive transfer (eggs and sperm travel but not the people, in this case between Romania and Israel), which is interspersed with references to how the developing political situation formed her perspective as an individual researcher.

'What provides the common ground here is what she refers to as 'Israeli national imaginaries' and how the state thinks about its own reproduction. As she says at the outset, the book is about that way in which 'everyday practices and procedures of Israeli egg donation create and reinforce nationalised, racialized bodies, borders and ideals'. This is more than play with metaphors. Much more so than in many parts of the world, here the realities of people's everyday lives are bound up the problematics of citizenship, the military and survival. While this Israeli nexus of symbols and practices has been described before, the novelty of Extractions lies in its address to family-oriented practices that involve cross-border treatment.

'The author makes a persuasive defence of the combil3