Dr. Laura Perler

PhD at the university of St.Gallen. Title of dissertation: “The imaginary of the ‘healthy’ child. An Analysis of the Spanish egg donation economy“.

Since 2021

PostDoc position at the SNF project “Reproductive Geopolitics: Governing and Contesting In/Fertility in the Global Intimate“

“Reproductive Geopolitics: Governing and Contesting In/Fertility in the Global Intimate”

The overall aim of our project is to understand how uneven access to reproductive technologies reflects the valuation of certain bodies and lives. Whose bodies are reproduced in the future depends on who has access to reproductive technologies, here understood as both low-tech and high-tech technologies affecting fertility and infertility, conception and contraception, pregnancy and pregnancy termination, and birth and infanticide. 

While in the past states governed fertility through health regimes, family planning programs, and eugenics, in the present, the stratified access to reproductive technologies has resulted in a new mode of reproductive governance. The research field of reproductive geopolitics we aim to develop in this project will show how access to reproductive technologies becomes geopolitical when individuals, states, international organizations, transnational corporations, and religious and nongovernmental organizations define and contest whose bodies count as desirable for reproduction and whose bodies are denied reproduction or restricted in it. 

In my subproject, I will investigate the reproductive biographies of asylum-seeking women in Switzerland against the backdrop of current migration regimes, populist narratives about the threatened Swiss community, changing legislation, and networks of solidarity. I aim to analyze how the multiscalar asylum system in Switzerland and the resulting spatiotemporal disruptions in women’s asylum journeys complicate women’s access to reproductive technologies and how women contest access to reproductive health.

Reproductive Precarities: The case of Swiss-Spanish egg-provision arrangements

In my dissertation, I am investigating the practices of a transnationally operating fertility clinic in Spain. I understand the phenomenon of egg donation as a transnational market that connects different actors in a very visceral way. In this market, not only economic, medical and biological connections are important, but also very specific values. An example for this is the importance of a certain understanding of “health”, closely linked to the concept of "free choice". These visions and ideas are main vectors of the practices in the field of reproductive medicine, yet as they are perceived as a matter of fact and self-evident, they often remain imperceptible. In my dissertation, I examine a certain conceptualization of health as a significant “Sociotechnical Imaginary” (Jasanoff and Kim 2015: Dreamscapes of Modernity. Sociotechnical Imaginaries And The Fabrication Of Power) in the field of egg donation. My ethnographic field research shows how these imaginaries link future, past and present, and how bodies are normed and medicalized reproduction gets normalized through those imaginaries. The study of different point of views within the clinic also shows the extent to which the imaginaries have a stratified effect along further categories of difference. Following Jasanoff, the specific "topographies of power" (Jasanoff and Kim 2015, 18), which characterize the transnational egg donation market, become apparent.