(K)information: Gamete Donation and Kinship Knowledge in Germany and Britain [Paperback]

Openness about sperm and egg donation and the regulation of donor anonymity or non-anonymity are new phenomena. How do affected families, clinics, and regulators deal with information about gamete donors and the donation itself? And how does this knowledge management contribute to the creation and enactment of kinship? Addressing these questions in Germany and Britain, this ethnography makes a comparative contribution to the empirical and theoretical analysis of kin-formation and social change.

In(K)information, Maren Klotz presents a contemporary renegotiation of the values of privacy, information-sharing, and connectedness as they relate to the social, clinical, and regulatory management of kinship information. Transparency, not genetics, is the moral imperative, and instead of an unambiguously discernible geneticization, her findings on donor non-anonymity and parental openness display a pattern of transparentization. This pattern represents a shift in authority over kinship away from the sometimes highhanded reproductive medical profession towards concerned groups, parents-by-donation, and policymakers.

Maren Klotzis a senior lecturer in the Department of European Ethnology at the Humboldt University Berlin. She is coeditor ofReproductive Technologies as Global Form: Ethnographies of Knowledge, Practices, and Transnational Encounters.