Racialization, Genes and the Reinventions of Nation in Europe

Ben Campbell

The general question that I pose of the gamete-matching regulation is, what does it tell us of the way that cultural projects are being realized by clinical means? As a contribution to debates about geneticization of social life, I discuss new reproductive technologies (NRTs) as an explicit configuration of kinship that makes a deliberative assemblage of bodily matter, identity and intent, and compare this to changing conceptions of the nation as a similar kind of assemblage. At one level this consists of asking whether a shared culture of kinship informs assisted reproduction, in which the social objective of having a child is privileged over the genetic provenance of donated gametes (within limits of racialized (in)visibility). At another level, there is a question to ask of the relationship between new ways of reproducing human bodies, and ideas of reproducing national societies by incorporating new kinds of members, who voluntaristically, rather than by ancestral connection, have joined European nations. Are there similar logics operating that make gametes the plastic objects of social projects (enabling infertile partners to have a child), and that match immigrant communities to the goals of reproducing national economies? Contemporary intersections of kinship and ethnicity can then be examined in self-proclaimed, 'multicultural' nations, to ask how different kinds of 'raciological' (Gilroy 2000) underpinnings characterize the ideas and practices that formulate persons as citizens, rather than as members of self-conceived genetic nations.