Date/Time
Friday
27 Sep 2019
12:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Location
470 Stephens Hall

Event Type
Lunch Discussion

Diane Tober
Assistant Adjunct Professor, U.C.S.F. Institute for Health and Aging

Michele Pridmore-Brown
CSTMS Research Fellow and Science Editor of the LA Review of Books

Diane Tober, author of Romancing the Sperm: Shifting Biopolitics and the Making of Modern Families will be in conversation with Michele Pridmore-Brown to discuss the biopolitics of how people choose eggs and sperm; the role of fantasy, fetish and pragmatics in these choices; the changing market in 1990’s San Francisco versus now; the rapid evolution of new kinds of consumers and family relations; and the monetary and non-monetary motivations of donors.

Please RSVP by Wednesday morning, September 25th to sign up for lunch.

Michele Pridmore-Brown, PhD is a Research Associate of the UCB Program for the Medical Humanities and a Research Fellow of the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society. She recently reviewed Tober’s book for the Times Literary Supplement (“Sperm and Sensibility”), using Jane Austen’s analysis of how women choose mates as a point of departure. She writes about gender and science for scholarly and popular venues, and is the science editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Diane Tober, PhD is a medical anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Institute for Health and Aging at UCSF. For the past 20 years, she has been conducting research in assisted reproduction, gender and sexuality, and the commodification of the body. Her current NSF-funded research examines the experiences of egg donors, comparing human biomarkets in the US and Spain. A recent essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books addressed “genetic longing” in the donor gamete context.

♦ Sponsored by the Program for the Medical Humanities ♦