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Eggs and sperm are parallel bodily goods in that each contributes half of the reproductive material needed to create life. Yet these cells are produced by differently sexed bodies, allowing for a comparative analysis of how the social process of bodily commodification varies based on sex and gender. Drawing on interview and observational data from two egg agencies and two sperm banks in the United States, this article compares how staff recruit, screen, market, and compensate women and men donors. Results show how gendered norms inspire more altruistic rhetoric in egg donation than in sperm donation, producing different regimes of bodily commodification for women and men. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for debates in sociology of gender about biological differences among women and men and the cultural norms attributed to these differences; debates in economic sociology about how social factors shape the expansion of the market; and debates in medical sociology about the intersection of the market and medical practice.
INTRODUCTION
Commodification is a core concept in sociV-/ological theory, but too often it serves as a conclusion to the research enterprise rather than as a starting point for analyzing how social factors shape the process of assigning economic value to market goods. This is especially true in the realm of bodily goods, where moralizing discourses about the sanctity of human life tend to foreclose a rigorous examination of market practices. There are exceptions. Most notable are Zelizer's analyses of markets in life insurance (1979), children (1985), and intimacy (2005). Healy (2006) has recently built on this work and on that of Titmuss ( 1971 ) by demonstrating the importance of organizations to the procurement and distribution of blood and organs. While these studies reveal much about the interplay between social and economic factors in markets for bodily goods, these particular markets are not strongly differentiated based on sex. In other words, while boys and girls and men and women populate these studies, left unexamined is whether the social process of assigning value to the human body varies based on the sex and gender of the body being commodified.
This question is unavoidable when one considers the twenty-first century medical market in eggs and sperm. Egg agencies and sperm banks recruit...