Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart is a compelling account written with analytical clarity and remarkable compassion. Helena Ragone has given long overdue humanity and voice to the actual participants in the surrogate motherhood experience-a heretofore inaccessible population-and the results are fascinating. Anyone interested in fertility, parenting, reproduction, and kinship, or anyone interested in contemporary culture will want to read this book.

Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood charts new territory by exploring the notion of motherhood for women of differing classes, races, religions and nations in the light of various strategies and new technologies used to attain motherhood. This collection of essays by leading experts offers a wealth of ethnographic case studies that illustrate how women experience and practise motherhood in the United States, Egypt, Israel, South Africa, the United Kingdom and other nations.
By examining such topics as transracial adoption, surrogate motherhood, in vitro fertilization, pregnancy loss and caring for disabled children, the contributors reveal how race, gender, kinship and personal identity are transformed through the lens of motherhood, and how motherhood itself is being reconfigured across national and cultural contexts.

Focusing on the key themes of power, kinship, and technological innovation, this volume offers a set of carefully argued studies that emphasize the importance of ethnographic method, as well as anthropological theory, to current debates about the reproductive processes of humans, animals, and plants. Reproducing Reproduction addresses these debates in a range of sites in which reproduction is being redefined and argues persuasively for a renewed appreciation of the centrality of reproductive politics to cultural and historical change. In chapters on abortion, assisted conception, biodiversity conservation, artificial life sciences, adoption, intellectual property, and prenatal screening, Reproducing Reproduction contends that ideologies of class, nation, health, gender, nature, and kinship have reproductive models at their core. Including prize-winning essays by Charis Cussins and Stefan Helmreich, this volume will be of great interest to a wide audience in the social sciences and health technology fields.

Situated Lives brings together the most important recent feminist and critical research that illuminates the living experience of ordinary women and men. Focusing on gender and culture, these essays situate gender in relationship to the historical and material circumstances where gender, race, class and sexual orientation intersect and shape everyday interaction.