10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17237
This article examines "phenotype matching", a procedure used in Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) to coordinate the physical appearance of ova donors with that of recipients. Looking into phenotype matching as a socio-technical arrangement, and on the basis of an STS approach, the articles suggests that race is key in making kinship explicit, a making that is particularly important in the case of donor conception. By examining some of the ways in which race enters, and helps to sustain, a regime of visibility whereby family links need to be made visible in order to count as such, I make two concatenated claims. First, that race allows seeing the differences in bodily colours that may otherwise be too abstract to relate empirically. This making visible of certain features of body contributes, in turn, to the production of race as a material bodily substance. Second, I contend that the avoidance of racial in-coherence between mothers and offspring, which is argued both in "scientific" and "social" terms, helps to make kinship visible, that is, to make it real.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17237
1
en
Lucía Ariza
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Argentina
Keeping Up Appearances in the Argentine Fertility Clinic. Making Kinship Visible through Race in Donor Conception
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
6
Essays
2015-07-10
2023-06-17
2015-07-10
2023-07-31
5-31
TS
Lucía Ariza
2015/07/10
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17237
5
Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, University of Buenos Aires
2038-3460
1
Argentina
en
31
Keeping Up Appearances in the Argentine Fertility Clinic. Making Kinship Visible through Race in Donor Conception
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17237/16102
6
                                                                               Essay
                                                                                      5




Keeping Up Appearances in the Argentine
Fertility Clinic.
Making Kinship Visible through Race in Donor
Conception

Lucía Ariza
Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani
University of Buenos Aires
!
     Abstract: This article examines ‘phenotype matching’, a procedure used in
     Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) to coordinate the physical
     appearance of ova donors with that of recipients. Looking into phenotype
     matching as a socio-technical arrangement, and on the basis of an STS
     approach, the articles suggests that race is key in making kinship explicit, a
     making that is particularly important in the case of donor conception. By
     examining some of the ways in which race enters, and helps to sustain, a
     regime of visibility whereby family links need to be made visible in order to
     count as such, I make two concatenated claims. First, that race allows seeing
     the differences in bodily colours that may otherwise be too abstract to
     relate empirically. This making visible of certain features of body
     contributes, in turn, to the production of race as a material bodily
     substance. Second, I contend that the avoidance of racial in-coherence
     between mothers and offspring, which is argued both in ‘scientific’ and
     ‘social’ terms, helps to make kinship visible, that is, to make it real.

     Keywords: assisted reproductive technologies; phenotype matching; race;
     kinship; Argentina.

     Corresponding author: Lucía Ariza, Instituto de Investigaciones Gino
     Germani, University of Buenos Aires, Pte J. E. Uriburu 950, 6to
     (C1114AAD) Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina – Email:
     lucia.ariza@gmail.com



1. Introduction

   In this article I look into ‘phenotype matching’, a practice used in Ar-
gentine ARTs, and elsewhere in the world, to increase the probabilities
that children born from donated ova physically resemble their mothers
(and, in some cases, also their fathers). On the basis of the epistemologi-
TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
6 (1) pp. 5-31 - ISSN 2038-3460
!
www.tecnoscienza.net                                2015

!
6                                                                  Tecnoscienza – 6 (1)

cal and methodological contributions of Science and Technology Studies
(STS), I use ethnographic accounts of clinical work to explore how the
fertility clinic attempts to reproduce physical likeness materially and se-
miotically. I claim that although its necessity is rarely argued for in racial
terms, the matching of egg donors’ and recipients’ physical appearance is
primarily concerned with achieving racial coherence, supporting Wade’s
(2012a) suggestion of an expected ‘race-kinship congruity’ between par-
ents and offspring. In this article, I suggest that producing resemblance in
Argentina is rarely (if ever) solely about the replication of distinguishing
visible traits, like the size of the ears or the shape of the eyebrows. Rather,
it is about creating children who look like their parents in racial terms,
about keeping to a family both biologically and culturally. I argue, fur-
ther, that this ‘keeping to’ is also, in the context of the stigma still at-
tached to the use of donor gametes, a form of ‘keeping up appearances’,
not merely of belonging to a given family group, but more specifically of
belonging to it in a biological way. In Argentina, appearances, and their
centrality for both folk and scientific reckonings of race, help to sustain a
socially relevant fiction: that children born from donated gametes are the
biological offspring of their mothers. Building on Marilyn Strathern’s
(1992) suggestion that making family links explicit plays a crucial role in
making (English) kinship real, I suggest that racial congruity between
progenitors and donor children contributes to the realness of (Argentine
ART’s) kinship by allowing it to be seen. In examining some of the ways
in which race and kinship materialise in the actual clinical making of
mother/donor children similarity, the article contributes to a considera-
tion of their materiality, their entrenchment in technoscientific practice,
and how the latter displace the former as biological ‘facts’, evidencing –
what may have been theirs all along – enacted character (M’charek 2010a,
2013; Ossorio 2006; Szkupinski Quiroga 2007; Wade 2002; 2012a).
     The matching of physical appearance for donor children is an estab-
lished routine in ART practice in Argentina and around the world1. It
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
     1
      Countries that currently have legal and/or bioethical provisions regarding
the matching of donor and recipient(s)’ phenotypes include Spain, the US and the
UK, among others. The Spanish law on human assisted reproduction techniques,
which does not mention which traits are to be matched, states for the case of
sperm donation that ‘Under no circumstances will the [male] donor be selected
by request of the [female] recipient. The medical team will ensure the greatest
possible phenotypic and immunological resemblance of the available samples with
the female recipient’ (Law 14/2006, Chapter 2, Article 6, Paragraph 4, accessed
online 10 June 2010, my translation, my emphasis). In the US, the American Soci-
ety for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) and the Society for Assisted Reproductive
Technologies (SART) Guidelines for Gamete and Embryo Donation (2008) also
refer – again, only for the case of sperm donation – to matching of donor and
male recipients’ characteristics, although overall they are much less constrictive
than the Spanish case, indicating that ‘The couple should be encouraged to list the
characteristics that they desire in a prospective donor, including race and/or ethnic
Ariza                                                                                                            7
consists of the classification and matching of some physical features of the
gamete donor with some of those of the gamete recipient, these features
being eminently observable in accordance with what in scientific parlance
is defined as phenotypic. Characteristics that are usually matched include
eye, hair and skin colour, blood type and Rh factor, ethnic background
and height, among others2. In Argentina, the matching is always carried
out by a practitioner, yet depending on the centre, patients may or may
not be consulted regarding their willingness to accept a donor with cer-
tain given physical features. The identity of both donor and recipient is
always kept anonymous by the centre.
     Argentina is also a country of immigration like the US and the UK,
and to a certain extent Spain, as examples of three places where physical
coordinations also take place. Its main population intakes were Spanish,
Italian and to lesser degree French immigrants, as well as a smaller num-
ber of other Europeans, who by the first fifteen years of the 20th century
had given Argentina a third of its population. The ubiquity of immigrant
population in Argentina and Buenos Aires, especially at a moment of po-
litical consolidation and economic expansion as Argentina became global-
ly known as the ‘granary of the world’, helped to sustain local narratives
of the ‘Europeanness’ of Argentina’s population (Rodriguez 2011). As
Andrew Lakoff (2005, 6) has noted, this trope is one that made members
of the Argentine elites and middle class see themselves as “Europeans in
exile”. Ideas of this kind have pervaded commonplace discourse about
the origins of Argentine and Buenos Aires’s population, in part due to the
continual economic and cultural subjugation of native Indigenous groups,
and the relative invisibility of other immigrant parties of considerable
numerical importance (mainly Middle Eastern), and it is even today that

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
group, height, body build, complexion, eye colour, and hair colour and texture’
(ASRM/SART 2008, S36, my emphasis). In the case of the UK, traits that were to
be matched were never detailed in the regulation. The HFEA’s Code of Practice
6th Edition (2003) stated that ‘Where treatment is provided for a man and wom-
an together, centres should strive as far as possible to match the physical charac-
teristics and ethnic background of the donor to those of the infertile partner (or in
the case of embryo donation, to both partners) unless there are good reasons for
departing from this (...) those seeking treatment are expected not to be treated
with gametes provided by a donor of different physical characteristics unless there
are compelling reasons for doing so’ (HFEA 2003, 32-33). This phrasing was al-
ready a change from the one used in the previous version of the Code (2002),
where clinics were advised not to give patients gametes from persons of a differ-
ent racial origin (Wade 2012a). Notably, recommendations concerning phenotype
matching were dropped from the 7th Edition of the Code of Practice (2007), a
change that may be linked to the attempt at ‘publicly avoid[ing] policies that
might smack of eugenics’, as Wade (2012a, 86) suggests.
    2
       In addition to these, one sperm bank in Buenos Aires lists ‘physical type’,
‘hair type’ and ‘ancestry’ (Cryobank. (2014), Por qué Cryobank, in http://www.-
cryobank.com.ar/index.php/por-que-cryobank#tabs-3 (retrieved July 22, 2014).
8                                                                   Tecnoscienza – 6 (1)

Argentines identify themselves as of largely European origin.
     The facts above help to illuminate the wider rationalities at work in
the carrying out of physical coordinations as part of the use of donor
gametes in Argentina. They frame the enactment of race as part of the
material production of kinship and filiation. I will begin the article by
providing a brief account of previous contributions from the scholarship
on kinship and ARTs that contextualise the study of the clinical produc-
tion of physical resemblance. I also offer some examples of how medicine
has historically categorised human phenotypic traits, including the use of
racial categories in medicine and beyond. After concisely describing the
main technical steps involved in producing similar phenotypes, the first
analytical section of the article examines ethnographic accounts of the use
of phenotypic data forms where the physical data of egg donors and re-
cipients is recorded. Suggesting that phenotype matching can be under-
stood as an inscription device (Latour and Woolgar 1986), I analyse how
the data form helps to formalise the differences between, and thus mutu-
ally detach, the empirical variance of physical traits (i.e. the several col-
ours of human skin). This formalisation demands particular kinds of col-
our racialisation3 that entail enacting ‘race’ within medical practice, an
enactment which is significant in the light of the lack of a known scientific
basis for the existence of human races (Banton 2012; Ossorio 2006). Bas-
ing my argument on these considerations, and expanding Strathern’s
(1992, 52) “equation between what is seen, what is real and what is natu-
ral”, I suggest that phenotype matching is a device whereby race helps to
make body colours visible, race in turn being made real as a material
body substance. This arrangement helps to sustain the socially relevant
fiction of the biological connection of mothers and offspring, while also
performatively (and normatively) shaping the materiality of babies’ bodies
in ways that make them embody racial differentiation.
     On the basis of scientific argumentations regarding the need to realise
physical coordination between donors and recipients, I offer in the se-
cond section further examples of the ways in which race is implicated in
the production of resemblance between mothers and offspring, an impli-
cation that is particularly visible in the case of patients with white pheno-
types. Exploring how the search for racial coherence is argued in scien-
tific terms while race provides a telling example of the ways in which na-
ture works, I show that race is not only enacted as a biological aspect of
human life (as may be expected from a medical milieu primarily con-
cerned with the body), but also as a social one. Again following
Strathern’s lead, I contend that this alignment of scientific and racial
thinking entails making (white) kinship real by way of avoiding racial in-
coherence, that is, by making racial coherence visible. Finally, I suggest as
a future line of enquiry that the conflation of race and science may in-
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    3
      By ‘racialisation’ I mean the classification of people according to racial cate-
gories, although I do not necessarily imply a form of hierarchical classification.
Ariza                                                                        9
volve the protection of white against brown or black, which in the Argen-
tine and more widely Latin American contexts are still carriers of stigma
and confer fewer social advantages.


2. What’s in a face? The links between phenotype, race and
kinship

    It is a long established fact in the field of studies of kinship that West-
ern ideas of familiar relatedness involve notions of things transmitted
through ‘nature’, paradigmatically blood and genes, while these biological
connections are frequently socially re-deployed in ways that sometimes
replicate them, and sometimes complicate them, making them a set fea-
ture of kinship and yet a not straightforwardly accountable one. For ex-
ample, Schneider (1968) claimed that kinship in the US was understood
to be genetically based, yet he also underscored in later analyses the ex-
tent to which biogenetic ties were being submitted to the logic of choice
(Schneider 1984). Similarly, Jeanette Edwards (2000) accounted for the
ways in which people in a town in northern England conceived them-
selves as both being ‘born’ and ‘bred’, linked through descent but also
through culture, by the fact of having grown up with others in a certain
place. And relying on Strathern’s (1992) concept of “merographic con-
nection”4, Sarah Franklin has suggested that the new genetics work by as-
sembling parts (like the natural and the social) which, belonging to differ-
ent wholes, “instrumentalizes [...] the model of kinship that says it is part
of biological process and part of society” (2003, 82).
    The above-mentioned contributions have been important in problem-
atising kinship as something that is not simply a social construction of
natural facts, and as something which incorporates, in variable ways, ‘na-
ture’. Once these contributions established the importance of biological
links for Western kinship, Becker and colleagues (2005) focused on tes-
timonies of families constituted through donated gametes. They em-
ployed the term ‘resemblance talk’ to signal how commonplace ‘chit chat’
about parent-offspring resemblance illustrates how “the normative folk
model of kinship in the US attaches great significance to genetic or
‘blood’ relationships” (2005, 1301). In its apparent banal significance,
talk about children’s appearance is constitutive of the parent-child rela-
tionship, producing filiation by phenotypically relating babies to their
progenitors. Yet as Becker and colleagues make clear, ‘resemblance talk’
can also be a fairly destabilising moment for donor children’s families in
the sense that, if physical continuity is not clear, connections through in-
formal talk are more difficult to establish.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    Strathern (1992) defines a connection as ‘merographic’ when the parts that
     4

come together partake simultaneously of other ‘wholes’; this is, a merographic
connection is one which only engages parts partially.
10                                                           Tecnoscienza – 6 (1)

    The issue of parent-children phenotypic resemblance has also been
addressed in the case of other family forms like those of lesbian partners
(Nordqvist 2010) and those with adopted children (Carsten 2000). In the
case of heterosexual couples, however, physical resemblance is a highly
anticipated result of conception (arguably more than in the cases men-
tioned above), and provided that children look reasonably similar to their
parents, the fact that they were conceived with donated gametes becomes
less obvious. In Argentina in particular, parent-offspring physical resem-
blance is a fixed feature of everyday ‘chit chat’ over young children, and
when a child does not resemble their heterosexual parents (especially the
father) the fact is usually pointed out through colloquial and idiomatic
jokes alluding to a the mother’s infidelity. Biological parenthood and bio-
genetic kinship are still the preferred means of family constitution (Garay
2008; Tarducci 2008), and while ARTs have successfully positioned them-
selves as the great means for achieving these goals for those who can af-
ford the expensive treatment, donor conception is still stigmatised and
usually kept secret beyond the family nucleus. In this context, as Becker
and colleagues pinpoint, heterosexual parents forming families with the
help of donor gametes usually feel that resemblance talk “may cast doubt
on the legitimacy of the family structure and subject family members to
stigma” (2005, 1301). This situation affects the ways in which race-
kinship congruity is sought about in Argentina.
    Through the notion of ‘resemblance talk’ and the menace it might
pose for family cohesion and constitution, Becker and colleagues’ contri-
bution helps to emphasise just how much phenotypic appearance is taken
to be a ‘proof’ of a biological connection, and thus a key locus of kinship
enactment (insofar as the signalling of the presence or absence of the
former qualifies the latter). Their findings can also be thought as a partic-
ular case of the broader account by Marilyn Strathern. The author has
pointed out that tracing natural ties is part of everyday kinship-making in
England, emphasising how the naturalness of relations is not given but ra-
ther needs to be made explicit. She further observes that, in English kin-
ship, “if something [like biological connection] (...) is seen, it is real”
(1992, 52).
    The scholarship above is useful in highlighting the importance of
physical appearance for an understanding of kinship and of kinship-doing
in the fertility clinic. None of these contributions has, however, focused
on the articulation of kinship and race, a point that has been tackled by
Peter Wade and Seline Szkupinski Quiroga. Discussing racial thinking,
Wade asserts that it “is thinking about appearance, inherited substance
and behaviour in relation to specific categories which emerge out of colo-
nialism” (Wade 2012a, 80). Specifically on the relation of kinship and
race, Wade has suggested that “[k]inship is important in order to under-
stand race because racial identities imply notions of inheritance, both
‘natural’ and ‘cultural’, for which the most crucial means of transmission
is the family, at least in Euro-American kinship” (2012a, 80). In a more
Ariza                                                                       11
critical fashion, Szkupinski Quiroga (2007, 144) has argued that “ARTs’s
privileging of genetic relatedness is currently deployed in ways that sup-
port a white heteropatriarchal model of family in which race and white-
ness are reified as inheritable”, signalling how ARTs’ promotion of bio-
genetic ties entails the enactment of racialised models of kinship that seek
to reproduce the white nuclear family; a process underpinned by expecta-
tions of racial purity.
    This article explores how race is part of the material enactment of
physical likeness between mothers and donor children in the Argentine
fertility clinic. In order to do so, it draws upon the above-mentioned con-
tributions, which have underlined how ‘resemblance talk’ contributes to
enacting kinship as a form of biological continuity, as shown by Becker
and colleagues; how the ‘real-ness’ of family ties depends on them being
‘seen’, that is, on being visible, as suggested by Strathern; and how race
and kinship cannot be thought of separately in the context of a study of
ARTs, insofar as in the West both tend to pass as biologically given, are
paradigmatically noticed in physical appearance, yet need also to be un-
derstood in their technologically ‘constructed’ character. In this, the arti-
cle takes as a structuring assumption the acknowledgement that race is
not inscribed in genes (see M’charek 2010a; Ossorio 2006), but rather
that this is often the performative result of discursive and material con-
structs, including scientific and prosaic technologies, that gradually sedi-
ment such effect.


3. Race in medicine and beyond

    As mentioned above, the characteristics that are matched during the
phenotype co-ordinations concern a selected set of aspects observable in
a person’s appearance. From a historical perspective, it is clear that their
very selection and stabilisation through time as features of medical atten-
tion is the result of a long history of practices concerned with classifying
bodies according to their visible differences. This history intermixes with
that of racial categories, itself the result of specific political and economic
contexts, particularly of colonialism, which have grouped people in a lim-
ited number of collectives, usually termed Africans, Europeans, Native
Americans, Asians, Australasians (Wade 2012a), or similar. As has been
widely noted, such categorisations have underpinned many political pro-
jects of reformation, segregation, intervention but also of visibilisation of
particular human collectives that have been promoted by interest groups
as diverse as the criminologists and eugenicists of the 19th and beginning
of 20th century, and by genomic research actors and institutions, and
pharmaceutical companies more recently.
    Indeed, colonial medicine relied heavily on racial categorisations that
guided its interventions in dominated territories. In the Latin American
12                                                               Tecnoscienza – 6 (1)

case, as has been documented, for example, by Nancy Stepan (2001),
19th century ‘tropical medicine’ sought to classify the human diversity it
encountered, while deploying that very classification in recommendations
for improvement of dark bodies’ susceptibility to disease. Yet as Rodri-
guez (2011, 423) points out, racial categorisations cannot be separated
from the “creation of stigma and racialised ideas about people from hot
climates”. The use of classificatory regimes in medicine and politics, and
their racialising effects, has indeed been well analysed in studies of eugen-
ic movements in Latin America. Stepan (1991) argues that, in Latin
America, a neo-Lamarckist version of eugenics that was more politically
resonant than its opponent, the Weismann-Mendelian view of heredity5,
deployed notions of ‘race’ and ‘pure blood’ that guided eugenic interven-
tions in the social, with the expectation that such reforms would translate
in permanent improvement, and therefore evolution, of these countries’
populations.
    As it is well known, it was not until the end of World War II that the
political (ab)uses of race were explicitly countered in the arena of interna-
tional politics by UNESCO’s two documents on race (1950, 1951). While
the two groups of experts that participated in the discussions that led to
the publication of both documents found it difficult to arrive at a consen-
sus on the definition of ‘race’6, the debates that took place resulted in
‘population’ becoming the preferred category for use in biological re-
search, while ‘race’ was “allocated to the domain of ‘ideology’ and ‘bad
science’” (M’charek 2008, 524).
    Yet despite UNESCO’s statements and the relative disappearance of
‘race’ from the design of medical research for a few decades, recent years
have seen a re-emergence of interest in ‘race’ and human genetic variation
in medical and scientific discourse. In fact, as noted by M’charek (2008,
524) “race is making a vital comeback in various branches of genetic re-
search”. A paradigmatic example of this was the Human Genome Diver-
sity Project (HGDP), which in its effort to map the genome of so-called
disappearing populations, redeployed notions of race even in the face of
worldwide scientific consensus regarding its biological meaninglessness
(M’charek 2008, 2010b; Reardon 2004). Another notable example of this
resurgence is that of forensic technologies, which have been directed to-
wards identifying the genetic basis for traits like skin, hair and iris colour,
genetic ancestry and genealogy, in order to be able to use them in crimi-

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    5
      While the first conceived inheritable qualities as affected by environmental
changes, the second one thought of heredity as located exclusively in the germ
cells, that is, as made possible only by mechanisms internal to the body, rather
than external to it (Stepan, 1991).
    6
      While the participants of the discussions that led to the first document were
mainly sociologists and anthropologists, the heavy criticism met by its publication
entailed the participation of experts coming from the biological and medical sci-
ences in the discussions which led towards the second document.
Ariza                                                                           13
nal investigations. Of special interest to this article is forensic research
aimed at linking DNA with facial shapes and other externally visible
characteristics (Ossorio 2006). Such technologies, promoted in countries
like the UK and the Netherlands, have sought to produce a ‘partial physi-
cal profile’ out of the biological evidence left at a crime scene (M’charek
2008). Interestingly, as is wisely pointed out by M’charek, despite their
experimental character these technologies have not only been rapidly ac-
companied by legal developments, but at least in the Dutch case, were ac-
tually anticipated by the legislator7. These uses and imaginaries of the
power of technologies point in the direction of legal and scientific under-
standings of race as a biological and visible quality, inferable from ap-
pearance and genetically given, resonating with some of this article’s find-
ings.
     A third example of the renewed interest in race in medicine is provid-
ed by the pharmaceutical industry. As has been well documented, in 2005
a ‘race-specific’ drug (BiDil) to treat and prevent heart failure was ap-
proved by the US’s Federal Drug Administration. Although the clinical
trials that led to its approval were not properly designed to compare the
effectiveness of the drug in different populations (Duster 2007), the drug
was granted a patent that allowed it to be targeted specifically at ‘African-
Americans’, claiming an increased efficacy on this population as opposed
to the white one. Nevertheless, the biological mechanisms that under-
pinned such differences could not be explained (Inda 2014). More worry-
ingly, the trials that led to the drug’s approval lacked any substantial defi-
nition of how ‘race’ was understood and deployed in them (Coons 2009),
ultimately contributing to both deleting the socio-demographical factors
that could explain predisposition to heart failure in different populations,
and to promoting a view of racial difference as grounded in biology
(Coons 2009; Duster 2007; Winickoff and Obasogie 2008). Although the
granting of the patent has been substantially criticised by both social and
medical actors for, among other reasons, overstating the therapeutic sig-
nificance of race (due ultimately to economic incentives), arguments in
favour of the use of race in medicine have been made for a long time and
still are today (González Burchard et al. 2003; Hunt et al. 2013).
     Importantly, in all these examples it is always the same old classifica-
tory regime that is being deployed (Rabinow and Rose 2006), whereby so-
called ‘racial’ traits are being deduced from people’s phenotypic aspect or
self-ascription (Hunt et al. 2013; Reardon 2004). Rather than producing a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
     7
      As early as 1994 the Netherlands passed regulation permitting the use of
body samples for criminal investigations irrespective of the suspects’ willingness
to contribute such samples. This legislation was successively amended in 2001 and
2003. The second change included “the inference of ‘visible external personal
characteristics’ from biological samples” (M’charek 2008, 522-523). Here, physi-
cal traits were defined as ‘overtly visible to anybody’, while ‘race’ was comprised
among such ‘externally visible traits’ (2008, 523).
14                                                            Tecnoscienza – 6 (1)

‘new complexity’, Rabinow and Rose note, for the case of the HGDP and
other projects that seek to map the variability of the human genome, the
repetition of “the core racial typology of the nineteenth century’s – white
(Caucasian), black (African), yellow (Asian), red (Native North-
American)” (2006, 207). The implication is that increasingly advanced
technologies are being instrumented through the old classifications, now
re-directed by the use of molecular technologies in forensic and pharma-
ceutical research, while also re-deployed in contemporary (post) discipli-
nary constructs aimed at identifying persons and regulating their circula-
tion.


4. Methodology

    This article presents results from an STS examination of Argentine
ARTs. In the wake of critiques of technoscience regarding nature’s loss of
its a priori value “as referent or authority” (Franklin 2000, 190), the pro-
gressive erosion of its ontological difference from culture (Haraway 1997;
Rheinberger 2000), and the fact that nature is increasingly modelled on
culture (Rabinow 1992), the study sought to establish if and how nature
could be said to be (still) present in the practices of fertility medicine.
Thirty-five interviews were carried out with ART experts and researchers,
which included practitioners of gynaecology, embryology, genetics, psy-
chology and psychoanalysis, biology, endoscopy, endocrinology and
nursery. Three of these interviews were held with fertility researchers (bi-
ologists) working at research institutions rather than fertility clinics, while
the rest of the interviewees worked or had worked at centres offering
ART services.
    Contact with the practitioners was made through a network of mutual
referral (‘snowball’ technique), and the interviews were usually carried
out at the clinics. The interviews covered a wide variety of topics related
to ART practice. The excerpts cited in this article correspond to a smaller
subgroup of ten interviews in which phenotype matching was discussed
with the practitioners. The research sought ethical approval from the Eth-
ics Committee of the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University
of London. All the participants expressed consent to their participation in
the study by signing an informed consent form.
    Held within an STS-grounded research, the interviews sought to re-
cover ethnographic information regarding clinical practice, including
practitioners’ daily routines and their use of technological equipment and
medical-administrative devices (discussed below). Understood as a mate-
rial engagement of humans and devices, medical work was conceived
from the outset not as a matter of ‘ideologies’ or ‘ethics’ that could be
separated from concrete practice (see Mol 2002). Interviews did not focus
exclusively on trying to understand how practitioners thought about their
Ariza                                                                       15
work, but above all on how they worked. Participants were asked to talk
about specific aspects of their daily practices, and attention was paid dur-
ing the meetings to descriptions of how they related to the medical set-
ting, their use of equipment and bureaucratic apparatuses, and the inter-
action between different types of knowledge inside the fertility clinic,
such as gynaecology, andrology, psychology, biology and genetics.
    In line with this approach, the study also entailed the collection of a
series of materials that circulate ubiquitously within the fertility centres
and between the experts involved. These included brochures, information
leaflets and documents, medical and ethical guidelines, pieces of legisla-
tion, informed consent forms, transcripts of parliamentary debates, pho-
tographs, phenotypic data forms, diagrams, medical papers, and infor-
mation and advertisement pieces present at the clinics’ websites. The STS
approach taken here favoured the inclusion and analytical consideration
of such materials, and facilitated a focus on agencements (Deleuze and
Guattari 2002), or occasions of mutual engagement between humans and
devices whose joint production is greater than the parts (Phillips 2006).
The phenotype matching analysed here is an example of such interaction.
    Insofar as the project sought to promote the analytical inclusion of
other-than-human entities, which also participate in the clinic, analysis of
the interviews was not focused on unearthing ‘deep meanings’ from the
interviewees’ accounts. Rather, the analytical focus was on identifying
noteworthy moments of engagement between human and apparatuses,
and where symbolic signification, enabled by language, was not the sole
agential dynamics. This methodological premise is seconded in analytic
terms in the present article: while race is not the linguistic matter of the
search for phenotypic resemblance (mother/child physical coherence is
rarely described in terms of a racial issue in clinics’ institutional dis-
course), the analyses show, however, that race is indeed implicated in the
making of physical resemblance, albeit in material, less linguistically-
explicit ways, done immanently without this making being actually ‘said’.
Throughout the article, this material and semiotic ‘doing’ of race (and
kinship) is captured by terms like ‘performation’ (Callon 2007) and en-
actment (see Law 2004; Mol 2002), which refer to how things are made in
practice in ways that encompass both linguistic and extra-linguistic activi-
ties and objects, involving many forms of human-nonhuman entangling.


5. Seeing through race

    In Argentine fertility clinics, ‘race’ is scarcely talked about during dis-
cussions of making resemblance, a fact that is manifested, for example, in
the absence of racial categories from core clinical devices like the data
form analysed here. The search for physical similarity is usually justified,
rather, in terms of the importance of good mother-donor child bonding,
16                                                                   Tecnoscienza – 6 (1)

the stigma still associated with the use of donor gametes (both because a
monetary exchange is involved, and because it entails not being able to
reproduce with one’s own gametes), and the concomitant need to reduce
possible sources of detachment or lack of connection between mothers
and donor offspring. Appearance, kinship, and sometimes beauty, are al-
ways at the front: the emphasis is on how children born through medical
procedures, including donor children, resemble their parents in a generic
– not explicitly racial – way. A doctor said, for example:

         ‘Sometimes they bring us photos of egg donation babies and you say
     ‘wow, they are beautiful’. They are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, and even
     similar to their parents, I don’t know if it’s the intention that you see them
     similar...’ (Gynaecologist 2, my emphasis)

    The presence of kinship – and the absence of race – in discussions of
phenotypic similarity between donor children and their parents are also
frequently echoed in clinics’ institutional discourse. On their website,
where information on egg donation is provided, a centre explains, for ex-
ample:

         ‘How is the donor assigned to the recipient couple? The egg donation
     team (....) carries out an artisanal job in assigning the donors, based on the
     detailed observation of the physical appearance of the donor and the re-
     cipient couple (height, weight, eye and hair colour, complexion) and
     blood type compatibility’ (Clinic website excerpt)

    As the examples above make it possible to see, ‘race’ is not the discur-
sive matter of resemblance in Argentina, at least not until questions about
race are asked explicitly by the researcher. The issue of similarity, and
how its potential lack is actually made up for through clinical procedures,
is talked about in terms of morphology, of the similarity of isolated traits,
almost always with no reference to how such traits might actually socially
code for race. In the following I will argue, however, that although race is
almost entirely absent from the more explicit and intentionally directed
medical statements on the issue of resemblance, the actual clinical doing
of similarity is indeed concerned with race, in often ‘silent’ less, explicit
ways.
    To show this, in this section I will examine the use of ‘phenotypic data
forms’ by fertility practitioners. Phenotypic data forms are a simple tool
for inventorying a selected set of aspects regarding donors’ and recipi-
ents’ appearance; a record of their look at a particular point in time, used
to aid practitioners in remembering a set of characteristics. Some of the
clinics will usually match the donor first with the woman who will receive
the egg, and will in a second instance try to select a donor who has ‘some-
thing’ of the partner, for example a so-called ‘secondary trait’, like the
shape of the eyes. However, other clinics will not match with the partner
of the egg recipient at all. The phenotypic data form is generally used on-
Ariza                                                                        17
ly in the case of recipients, while information about the partners will be
recorded in less systematic ways, for example by ‘making a note’, or simp-
ly by remembering it. Some centres use forms both for donors and recipi-
ents, while some others use them only for donors or only for recipients8.
The form analysed in this section is organised as a series of headlines,
each headline corresponding to one physical feature (i.e. hair), followed
by a series of options (i.e. black, brown, blond, red) beside a checkbox.
Using the form, the practitioner will choose from this list the answers that
best describe the way a person looks.
    The categories contained in the form are meant to operate, then, as
descriptors of physical characteristics that can help the practitioner ob-
tain a rapid, and easily recoverable, register (for example, when the donor
or recipient are no longer physically present in front of the practitioner).
In a sense, forms are structured upon the premise that phenotypic traits
are observable and measurable, much in the way in which Michael Banton
(2012) argued, for example, in favour of skin colour as a more objective
criterion than ‘race’ in acknowledging human difference. In fact, ‘race’
might appear to be less objective than bodily traits, like skin colour, for
the medical gaze, which may be the reason for the avoidance of racial cat-
egories in the phenotypic data form. However, as the next paragraphs will
show, colours and other traits can be hardly disentangled from race even
in a scientific, supposedly ‘social-free’, context (for a discussion, see Fox
2012; Martiniello 2012; Telles 2012; van den Berghe 2012; Wade 2012b).
On the basis of the information that they record, the forms will after-
wards be used to assign a particular donor to a particular recipient.
    Phenotypic data forms can also be characterised as an apparatus con-
tained in an inscription device (Latour and Woolgar 1986), while the
matching as a whole can be identified as an example of the latter. Accord-
ing to its famous definition, an inscription device is “any kind of appa-
ratus [...] which can transform a material substance into a figure or dia-
gram [...] directly usable by one of the members of the office space”
(Latour and Woolgar 1986, 51). Yet key to the definition of an inscrip-
tion device is not only its capacity for transforming a ‘material substance’,
but also for bracketing off such a transformation, this is, the ability to pre-
sent its product as the substance itself. In what follows, I will argue that
both characteristics (transformation and bracketing off) are present in the
clinical arrangement that engages the work of phenotypic data forms and
medical practitioners.
    As was observed above, the phenotypic data form is a device used to
record the way persons look, with the aim of facilitating the matching of
donors with recipients. Simple as the procedure of registering a person’s
appearance may seem (the banal act of looking with some attention at
how a person ‘looks’ and checking off categories on a form), it implies
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    8
      Unfortunately, due to a lack of space I cannot give a detailed explanation
nor make sense of these different arrangements here.
18                                                                       Tecnoscienza – 6 (1)

several forms of knowledge and several translations that may not be im-
mediately evident. In fact, relying on pre-designed forms to perform
physical coordinations may not be at all a simple endeavour, if ‘simple’ is
to be understood as an activity with no mediation. I ask one of my inter-
viewees responsible for assigning donors to recipients at one clinic how
does she actually carry out the donor/recipient matching. She answers
that not all characteristics are equally important, insofar as complexion
colour is more important than hair and eye colour, pointing for the first
time to the significance that skin colour has for kin – and, I will argue, ra-
cial – reckoning in Argentina (see also Telles 2012; van den Berghe 2012).
With regard to skin colour, she tells me that the phenotypic data form she
uses classifies four categories: white, matt9, light brown10 and dark brown.
Curious about how is she able to recognise such differences, since I am
not myself so sure of being able to do so, I ask her how she chooses be-
tween these options:

         LA: And which are the categories of the skin? How do you divide
     them?
         G: white complexion...
         LA: what would that be?
         G: us. White complexion, matt complexion, light brown and dark
     brown...
         LA: aha, there are a lot...
         G: yes, brown I divide into two, light brown would be for example a
     Latino, and dark brown would be an African. In a certain sense, that is the
     idea that I have of it. But the skin is brown...
         LA: and what would matt be?
         G: matt is something in between a Latino and us. Is it that kind of skin
     that, when exposed to the sun, becomes golden. I become red. The one that
     becomes golden. It’s that skin (Gynaecologist 2, my emphasis).

     Similarly, I asked another practitioner:

         LA: Which are the categories present on the form?
         N: white, brown, very brown and black
         LA: and is it easy to distinguish between them? How do you use
     them?
         N: well, it’s difficult... yes, it is a bit subjective. Did you see my colleague
     that just entered into the room? I think she would be brown (Nurse 1)

     Much as many would want it that way (see Banton 2012), skin colour
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
     9
        In Argentine Spanish, ‘mate’ (matt, matte) may be used as a colour to de-
scribe a shade of brown, although, as it is characteristically imprecise, what shade
exactly the colour matt refers to is very difficult to establish.
     10
         The practitioner uses the term ‘moreno’ which might be better translated as
‘dark’, yet I have chosen to translate into ‘brown’ to be able to qualify it as either
‘light’ or ‘dark’.
Ariza                                                                            19
differences are not self-evident or bodily inscribed; they are produced in
technical (Latour 2002) or sociotechnical (Callon 2007, 2010)11 arrange-
ments that make them both graspable, real and, as M’charek (2010a) sug-
gests, relational. In effect, both practitioners’ explanations of how they
actually use the form show that – to be able to empirically see the differ-
ences between categories – they rely heavily on their experience as a per-
son, a member of a wider social group and not strictly of the medical pro-
fession, to understand and deploy the categories given on the form. To
function as entities with meaning, formal classifications like white, matt,
light brown and dark brown need to be inscribed in/through a sociotech-
nical arrangement whereby they are racialised (‘light brown [is ...] a Lati-
no’). They become understandable by way of being read as markers of ra-
cial identity, making race real (Strathern 1992) insofar as it can actually be
seen in people’s bodies. This process can further be understood as the
deployment of a form of racial thinking amid scientific practices, and
whereby the existence of racial differences that cannot be proven through
science (Hunt et al. 2013, Ossorio 2006) is paradoxically reinstated
through scientific practices.
    What does the above tell us about the use of the phenotypic data form
in the clinic? I argue that it is a potent example of how race becomes a
key element in the rendering of empirical colour differences, and thus in
the making of family resemblance. In effect, the categories present on the
form are not capable by themselves of providing a definitive and uncon-
troversial reckoning of a person’s look. Formal as they are, deprived of
quality or examples, the colour divisions demand that they are ‘agenced’
(Deleuze and Guattari 2002) with the practitioner. This agencement en-
tails their being made sense of according to some classificatory system.
This classificatory system is race, which is further actualised by the ar-
rangement in which phenotypes are matched. But why is this so?
    The answer lies in what the form represents in the context of its use in
Argentine ART practice. In fact, forms are an abstraction of data which
appears in a continuum in a population; a continuum that, for example in
the case of complexion, covers the infinite colour gradation between
‘white’ and ‘black’12 (see also Fox 2012). Yet because the form’s purpose
is in a sense to enable ‘recordability’, speed up the matching process and
reduce the empirical complexity of a person’s phenotype, it relies on spe-
cific losses of information, precisely those related to the continuum of
colours (Ariza 2014). It is in this sense that forms can be understood as a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
     11
       Following these authors, I characterise the arrangement in which form and
practitioner are engaged as technical or socio-technical precisely because it relies
on an interaction between humans and apparatuses.
    12
       I do not dwell here on the conventional character of terms like ‘white’ or
‘black’ to describe the colour of human skin. I point out, however, how such con-
vention may partake of the formal (abstract) character of the colours on the form
that I am analysing here.
20                                                           Tecnoscienza – 6 (1)

categorisation, a representation of information through division and dif-
ferentiation. Forms enable, hence, the formalisation of skin colour differ-
ence; they have a performative character in that they contribute to per-
form such distinctions (for a similar argument on colour scales, see Fox
2012). Yet given the colour continuum in a population, the difference
that the form produces is a kind of abstract difference, ultimately hard to
identify unless related empirically.
    According to the above, the form records in a highly abstract way a
person’s physical appearance, divesting her appearance of singularity (the
specific position in the population colour scale, shapes, etc.) and convert-
ing it into a specified abstract, the particular combination of general and
repeatable qualities. Thus, insofar as the categories on the form are ab-
stract, generic forms that summarise a set of traits but in no way the sin-
gularity of a person, those categories need to be interpreted, related to the
broader, more-than-medical experience of the practitioner, in order to be
deployable during the matching process. As suggested above, ‘race’ is a
key element in the translation that takes place between the abstract cate-
gories of the form and their actual use in the clinic. Race is a system that
allows the formal colour differentiation of the form to be found empiri-
cally, literally by being seen through race.
    Moreover, this seeing entails the making and reinforcing of racial dif-
ference as ‘material substance’, a process that is, however, scarcely evi-
dent, that is, bracketed off, as if people were indeed racially differentiated
in nature. In fact, because the making of difference is enabled through a
sociotechnical arrangement designed to register bodily differences, race is
enacted as a fact of nature, further working as a reinforcement of Western
notions of kinship being in part biological (Edwards 2000; Scheneider
1984; Strathern 1992; Wade 2012a). By helping to establish differences
between people on the basis of their phenotypic appearance, the ar-
rangement in which both the form and the practitioner interact produces
‘white [as] us’ and ‘light brown [as] a Latino’, that is, race as the given
matter of bodies whose ‘coherence’ is only retrospectively sought out.
This performation also entails the (re)production of bodily colour differ-
ence between people as a characteristic of the Argentine population. By
producing family colour coherence as part of the production of kinship
links and filiation, the population as a collective body is enacted as de-
fined by difference and neatly discriminated divisions that speak of dis-
tinct kinds of people.


6. Scientific arguing, racial doing
   As shown above, the production of physical likeness between mothers
and donor children in Argentina entails the racialisation of body colours;
a process whereby race makes possible the matching of phenotypes, and
Ariza                                                                                  21
becomes produced as a material substance ineluctably inscribed in bod-
ies. In the following pages I give different examples of the ways in which
race is implicated in the making of resemblance. I suggest that while in
the Argentine fertility clinic the necessity of phenotypic (racial) coherence
is argued in scientific terms, race provides a telling example of the ways in
which nature works. This mutual emergence of race and science (as a dis-
course on nature) entails the making real of kinship by way of avoiding
racial in-coherence, that is, by making racial coherence visible. This re-
instates classical Euro-American understandings of race and kinship as
partly biological and partly social (Edwards 2000; Schneider 1984;
Strathern 1992), further proving the embedding of science in the social
(see Latour 1993). Continuing our discussion of her daily matching rou-
tine, the issue of body colour reappears in our talk with one of the practi-
tioners. I ask her who taught her how to look at the donor, since I gather
her job requires a lot of attention to detail. She clarifies:

         G: at the donor and at the recipient. Because maybe the recipient
     doesn’t ask for her donor to have white skin, but you see that the recipient is
     of this colour [points to the colour of her own skin] and you say ‘I can’t as-
     sign a donor with brown skin to this recipient’. So then (...) I make a note
     somewhere that she [the recipient] is very fair, so that I know when the as-
     signation time comes that I can’t give her a dark donor...
         LA: so even if you are not asked to, you do it...
         G: yes, it is a matter of logic (Gynaecologist 2, my emphasis).

    By arguing in terms of (lack or presence of) ‘logic’, the practitioner
denies here the possibility of assigning a donor with brown skin to a fair-
skinned recipient. She appears to imply that assigning together two per-
sons of different colours (and in that sense, not matching at all) will give
out – or increase the possibilities of giving out – an unwanted result: the
‘wrong’ colour in the offspring. Similarly, another doctor answered:

         LA: Do you think that the matching is important?
         G: I think it’s important (...) for a social reason, and that is the thou-
     sand-year-old separation between Whites and Blacks (...) you can’t give two
     very blond persons the ova from a dark-skinned13 donor because they will
     have a dark-skinned son (Gynaecologist 1, my emphasis).

   What is implied in these clarifications? What is the ‘logic’ that needs
to be clinically upheld? I argue that the practitioners’ explanations are

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    13
       The word used by the practitioner to refer to people of dark skin is ‘Mo-
rochona’, in this case a superlative of the Spanish word for brunette or dark, mo-
rocha. As with the diminutive case below (‘morochita’), the use of a superlative is
indicative of the attempt to introduce a further connotation into the original
word, probably to dilute the possible negative connotation of making a differenti-
ation between those who are morochos and those who are of white skin.
22                                                                 Tecnoscienza – 6 (1)

indicative of a conflation between forms of racial and scientific reasoning
where race and science are aligned and made to support each other. Fur-
thermore, I suggest as a future line of enquiry that this alignment appears
particularly important in the case of patients with white phenotypes, and
in the context of a lower frequency of ‘mixed’ couples in comparison with
‘colour-coherent’ sexual partnerships.
    Regarding my first claim, in effect, both practitioners’ answers above
are significantly structured around the imperative ‘I/You can´t [assign a
Black donor to a White recipient]’, a form of argumentation that is indic-
ative of the ways in which race emerges as a classificatory system that re-
inforces the clinical upholding of natural laws, while the necessity of ra-
cial coherence is argued in scientific terms. On the one hand, as both
quotations illustrate, from a scientific point of view it lacks ‘logic’ to as-
sign a dark-skinned donor to a White recipient because ‘they will have a
dark-skinned son’, an unlikely result unless the partner of the woman is of
dark skin (I dwell on the significance of the hypothetical assumption re-
garding the Whiteness of the partner in the paragraphs below). This lack
of logic appears to be argued on the basis of what is thought to be the ge-
netic law of the recessiveness of certain traits: genetically speaking, dark
eye and hair colour are considered to be dominant over blondness and
blue eyes. Hence, while the inheritance of a trait like skin colour is a
complex genetic process that entails the interplay between several genes
and proteins, and not just one gene, this complexity appears simplified in
the practitioners’ accounts. Justified in terms of the domi-
nance/recessiveness logic, the refusal to attribute dark to white has more
predictable results, ultimately serving better the protection of white phe-
notypes. One of the practitioners has referred to the genetic laws of inher-
itance at one point in our talk:

         In the general population, blondness and blue eye-colour are much
     less frequent than dark with brown eyes, because genetically it is like this
     because it is expressed as recessive (Gynaecologist 2).

     In refusing to assign a dark donor to a White recipient, the doctors
enact the dominant/recessive genes logic for the case of skin colour, thus
avoiding overruling in artifice the laws thought to be given in nature, that
is, that white combined with dark will likely produce a person of darker
skin than the mother. These answers exemplify the ways in which racial
coherence (and more specifically in this case, Whiteness) are upheld on
the basis of a scientific reasoning, insofar as the matching choices are un-
derpinned by a simplified version of knowledge about the domi-
nance/recessiveness of certain traits. It is in this sense that one could say
that the doctor is performing her scientific role: from a biological point of
view, the progeny cannot have traits (like Whiteness) that are not present
in the parents, while certain traits are recessive combined with others, so
it would lack logic to assign a dark donor to a White recipient, insofar as
Ariza                                                                                   23
a dark offspring would be contradicting nature’s given laws. Hence, while
scientific arguing on one side, and the achievement of racial coherence on
the other, may be said to be two different kinds of practices (one pertain-
ing to the rational discourse of ‘science’, the other one to ‘culture’), the
examples above show that they come together at this particular case, that
is, when the egg recipients are White. If the patients to be treated are of
“white” skin, science is put in service of obtaining racial coherence
(namely, the continuity of Whiteness), while this may be less the case
when the patients are of darker skin:

         LA: Do you pay more attention in avoiding to assign a dark donor to a
     white recipient than in assigning a white donor with a dark patient?
         N: Yes (...). I try... if the donor is White I know that a dark patient will
     not have a problem with me giving her a White [donor] (Nurse 1)

    Importantly, this enactment of nature as having certain intrinsic laws
works to materialise race (and Whiteness) as a biological and inheritable
aspect of the relation between mothers and offspring. This materialisation
has the effect of enacting donor children as biological offspring of their
mothers. As part of a scientific milieu concerned with the organic as a set
of given elements and laws, race is reinforced as an inheritable cluster of
traits, something that is genetically bestowed on children by their progen-
itors, and something that cannot be biologically acquired unless present
in the mothers. This reinforcement not only enacts the idea that nature
has its own intrinsic norms (only those traits present in the parents are
inherited; certain traits are genetically dominant over others). It also helps
to sustain the socially relevant fiction that children born from donor gam-
etes are genetically linked to their mothers14, while ultimately working to
protect ‘white’ as the colour passed on to children from mothers who
have a light skin.
    On the other hand, the hypothetical assumption regarding the White-
ness of the partner signalled above is also telling: it speaks of the presup-
position, in giving a guesswork-like example, that a White woman’s part-
ner will be White, insofar as it is only given this condition that assigning
dark to white lacks any logic. This assumption hence evinces (White)
partners’ racial coherence as a norm, formulated in the manner of a hypo-
thetical presumption regarding people’s preferences in choosing a sexual
partner. The assumption that the partner will be White points, however,
in a different direction to that concerning the enactment of race as a bio-
logical fact: Why is, in effect, such colour coherence expected between
partners? I argue that one way of making sense of this assumption about
the Whiteness of the partner is acknowledging it as a part of a material
understanding of race as cultural inscription, as a form of belonging that
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    14
       And, by extension, that children are also biologically linked to the relatives
of the mother (grandparents, siblings).
24                                                                  Tecnoscienza – 6 (1)

is different to the mere possession of biological traits. In effect, there is no
‘natural’ pre-requisite to select a partner whose biological constitution,
understood as an inherited set of qualities, is similar to oneself – yet there
may be social aspects related to taking part in a shared culture that may
influence such a selection, including the ‘naturalisation’, or passing as
rooted in nature, of such criteria about whom to associate with. Here, the
assertion that ‘it is a matter of logic’ to avoid assigning dark to White
makes patent an enactment of race as a cultural element of identity. This
performance of race, and of the necessity of racial coherence, is better
expressed in the second quotation given above, which explains that the
reasons for attempting to maintain parents/children colour continuity
have to do with the ‘thousand-year-old separation between Whites and
Blacks’, an assertion that points in the direction of a material understand-
ing of race as culture.
    Other testimonies from doctors further point to how the matching ac-
quires sense in relation to widespread forms of phenotypic and ethnic
appreciation based on ideas about race as culture, where such apprecia-
tions enact potent and frequently open forms of discrimination. As one
practitioner said:

          G: Well, [phenotype matching] is the issue of donation (...) There are
     women who have deeply entrenched the issue of descent and the colour of
     skin, and the colour of the hair and of the eyes, and maybe they come from
     Italians or from Jewish or from whomever it is, and they won’t accept that
     their baby doesn’t have the same characteristics as them (Gynaecologist 2,
     my emphasis).

    As the preceding quotations show, if race is enacted as a culturally (as
well as a biologically) inheritable aspect of identity, it may well be that in
Argentina the failure to pass on certain biological traits is seen as a failure
to pass on identity and cultural belonging. This supports Charis Thomp-
son’s finding that “genes have social categories built into them” (2005,
181). Moreover, in a country traditionally pervaded by narratives of the
prevalence of European Whiteness, the inheritance of biological features
different from those on which belonging to a family and to Argentine Eu-
ropeanness and/or Whiteness are thought to be grounded, may be re-
garded as a ‘giving up’ on the prominence that white phenotypes have.
    In effect, the following quotations suggest the specific sense that such
‘giving up’ might entail. This points to how it may be precisely the pres-
ence of an unacknowledged part of the population, the Indigenous non-
European component, that acts as a threat to what is regarded by sectors
of the population as Argentine (and specifically porteño15) Whiteness. It
may be in fact that the mestizo phenotypes that carry the stigma of rural
migration, lack of education and development want to be avoided, lest

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
     15
          Meaning people from the port, people from the capital city (Buenos Aires).
Ariza                                                                                   25
they are passed to the unborn child if present in the donor. As two practi-
tioners said:

         There are patients that (...) explicitly ask for similar phenotypic fea-
     tures in the donor, that she is not, let’s say, if I am blond and blue-eyed that
     the donor is not a darky-haired16 from the Altiplano17 (Embryologist 2, my
     emphasis).

         LA: so there is a lot about this social thing about the colours... but do
     you think that this preoccupation happens in both senses, those who are
     of white skin that [the donor] is not of dark skin, and the other way
     around as well?
         G: I don’t know if the other way around as well. At least couples who
     are more morochones do not transmit so much the anxiety of ‘what are you
     choosing?’ (Gynaecologist 1, my emphasis).

    These extracts show not only the work of a racial classificatory system
where belonging both to a family and a wider social group, and counter-
ing the potential stigma of donor parenthood, seem to depend on the co-
herence between mothers’ and offspring’s physical appearance. They also
point again to what I have signalled as a future line of enquiry: the rele-
vance of the matching especially in the case of white phenotypes, and its
strategic – albeit probably not intentional – naturalisation as a form of en-
suring the transmission of Whiteness when this trait is present in the par-
ents.
    A final example further sustains the claim that race is enacted as a bio-
logical and cultural aspect of kinship in the medical making of family filia-
tion, and how this enactment, which entails making kinship real through
race, is based on the conflation of science and race. Trying to find out
more about how assignations happen in the clinic, I asked about rare cas-
es and if patients ever demanded specific things to the practitioners:

         LA: Has it ever happened to you that a couple or a woman comes and
     they ask for characteristics that she doesn’t have?
         G: yes, it happens...
         LA: that she does not look like that and she asks for.... And what do
     you do in those cases?

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
     16
        ‘Morochita’ in the original. The use of the diminutive form (‘morochita’
from ‘morocha’, dark-skinned) is probably intended as a derogatory form, used in
an ironic tone by the practitioner, who is reproducing the recipient woman’s
voice.
     17
        The Altiplano refers to the high plateaux of Bolivia and Peru, whose popu-
lation composition is markedly of quechua and aymara origin, phenotypically vis-
ible in dark skin, eyes and hair, and less common in Buenos Aires. The Altiplano
figures here by extension as a synonym of the Northern provinces of Argentina,
whose population by geographical proximity is also in high proportion of quech-
ua and aymara origin, and typically subdued in economic terms.
26                                                                     Tecnoscienza – 6 (1)

          G: well, you try to dissuade her, or you tell her that she will have to
     wait. But in general we don’t pay attention to that, we don’t pay attention
     to that...
          LA: but do you tell her that you will not be looking for something like
     this?
          G: we try to tell her and we try to make sure that her main doctor con-
     vinces her before she reaches the point of matching, because she is coming
     to look for a baby, she is not coming to look for a prototype of anything (...) I
     personally don’t agree. Because she is coming here to look for a baby. You
     can’t ask for something that you are not (...) If I am dark-skinned, black,
     very black, with frizzy hair like Black people have, and I am seeking a baby
     that is of German descent, what is the point...? To feature in a debit card
     ad? No, it doesn’t exist18 (Gynaecologist 2, my emphasis).

    Here, the practitioner recounts the scolding answer that patients may
get if they express desirability for a child with characteristics that they do
not have. Once again, white racial coherence is sustained on scientific
claims: genetically speaking, a person cannot inherit genes – like those
that produce a ‘German’ phenotype – that her ancestors do not have. Yet
this genetic impossibility (‘You can’t ask for something that you are not’)
condenses as well a moral reprimand and command: lest the baby be-
comes a prototype and, one may further argue, a disconnected being, ra-
cial coherence needs to be sustained. Science cannot do what nature
would not: sustaining this imperative entails making racial (White) coher-
ence visible, and doing this, making kinship real, making ‘babies’ rather
than just scientific products.
    As the above makes clear, the search for (white) colour coherence
sometimes allows for the emergence of different valuations of body col-
ours (‘if I am blond and blue-eyed that the donor is not a darky-haired
from the Altiplano’). The implication is that body elements that culturally
code for race, like the colour of the skin, are the object of an ordering
(but also dividing) activity through which some are cast off (‘darky-
haired’) in order to preserve others (‘blond and blue-eyed’). Such exclu-
sions and preservations work in Argentina on the basis of a set of presup-
positions: that race is a form of cultural belonging partially encoded in
genes, and that therefore some neat separations need to be scientifically
preserved (‘you can’t give two very blond persons the ova from a dark
skinned donor’), ultimately contributing to the culturally significant
preservation of white phenotypes.




!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
      Affirming that ‘something doesn’t exist’ is a native Argentine (mostly porte-
     18

ña) expression to convey that something is morally reproachable, or that it is, for
some reason, unacceptable.
Ariza                                                                        27
7. Conclusions

    In this article I have explored the ways in which race is enacted in
medical practices that aim at helping persons procreate with the use of
donor gametes. In doing so, I have argued in favour of acknowledging
some of the ways in which race enters, and helps to sustain, a regime of
visibility whereby family links need to be made visible in order to count as
such, in order to be real. This ‘necessity’ is not given in social or medical
discourse, however. In effect, in Argentina the institutional and more
widely political presentation of ARTs is constructed around the idea that
the latter help to make pregnancy and parenthood possible for those who
wish it. In this discourse, procreative will features as a key justification for
the use of ARTs, the necessity for, and right to, its public funding, and for
permissive legislation, among other demands. And procreative will is an-
other form of talking about kinship: those who wish to procreate are will-
ing to establish family relations; they want to be entangled. This world of
voluntary acts, willingness and decision appears thus to be irretrievably
linked to kinship: to wish to be connected (with one’s children) is almost
like already being so; a bond has already been established by the intention
itself.
    However, this world is rarely articulated in terms of race. Donor con-
ception is institutionally and more widely culturally predicated as a mat-
ter of right and decision; yet it is also in other ways connected to stigma,
secrecy and shame, which derive from being incapable of reproducing
with one’s own gametes; from the lack of biological continuity with the
offspring; and with issues associated with exchanging gametes for money.
Donor conception is frequently spoken also as a matter of psychological
well-being: if one cannot procreate with one’s own gametes, one first
needs to ‘accept this’, then ‘accept a cell from another woman’. Then, one
may be ready to bond with the (donor) child.
    It has been my argument here that the discourse of decisional ‘bond-
ing’ from which race is almost erased speaks subtly of a certain insuffi-
ciency, that of social labels like ‘mother’, ‘parents’ or ‘offspring’ (them-
selves linguistic embodiments of ‘kinship’) to actualise, or be able to ma-
terialise, the kinship that they are meant to express. Because to call some-
one ‘mother’ or ‘daughter’ when there has been donor conception ap-
pears not to be enough if the kinship described by the word cannot be ac-
tually seen, if it is not apparent. This insufficiency is, of course, immanent,
and almost never an explicit topic. Yet my analyses have shown that in
the ‘doing’ of techno-scientific kinship through the matching of pheno-
types, such insufficiency is at stake, actually instigating its own reparation.
Race plays a key role, I have contended, in the mending of what are en-
acted as donor conception ‘damages’: the dangers of a lack of bonding,
the presence of money, the potential appearance of physical dis-similarity.
It does so, again, in immanent ways, rarely being said, yet actually being
28                                                               Tecnoscienza – 6 (1)

done. This doing is part of, and enables, different forms of visibility, in
ways that show the significance, in Argentina, of keeping to a family by
way of keeping up the appearance of biological kinship. The first analyti-
cal section of the article argued that the socio-technical arrangement in
which race is deployed helps to make body colours visible, allowing the
seeing of colours in their empirical, bodily appearance. In fact, it is race
that provides the lens through which otherwise abstract skin colour dif-
ferences become real, a concrete experience. By providing the lens
through which formal colour differences can actually be seen clearly and
distinctly in people, race becomes inscribed in people’s bodies, and thus
produced as a biological matter. This production is made possible by the
sociotechnical interaction between the form and the practitioner, which
taking place in an inscription device, both produces race as a ‘material
substance’, and brackets off such production. In the second section, I
have pressed metaphors of visualisation in a different sense. Examining
how medical practitioners argue through scientific idioms the need for
racial coherence, and how simultaneously race provides not a random,
but a very meaningful example of the workings of nature, I have suggest-
ed that it is the avoidance of racial in-coherence, and more specifically of
the discontinuity of white, that helps to make kinship visible, and in this
sense to make it real.


Acknowledgements

    This article was made possible by the generous contribution made towards my
doctoral studies by the Alßan Programme of the European Union (project num-
ber E07D403209AR), and by the following schemes and institutions in the UK:
the Overseas Research Student Award Scheme, the Central Research Fund of the
University of London, the Allan and Nesta Ferguson Charitable Trust, and the
Foundation for the Sociology for Health and Illness. I am also very grateful for
generous reading provided by Celia Lury, Marsha Rosengarten, Ana Gross,
Mariano Fressoli, Daniel Jones and Mauro Turrini and the anonymous reviewers.
Finally, I thank especially Ignacio Mancini for providing an invaluable biblio-
graphic assistance with this article.


References

Ariza, L. (2014) Fotografías, registros médicos y la producción material del
    parentesco: acerca de la coordinación fenotípica en la reproducción asistida en
    Argentina, in A. Cepeda and C. Rustoyburu (eds.), De las hormonas sexuadas
    al Viagra. Ciencia, Medicina y Sexualidad en Argentina y Brasil, Mar del Plata,
    EUDEM, pp. 173-206.
Banton, M. (2012) The Colour Line and the Colour Scale in the Twentieth Century,
   in “Ethnic and Racial Studies”, 35 (7), pp. 1109-1131.
Ariza                                                                            29
Becker, G., Butler, A., and Nachtigall, R. D. (2005) Resemblance Talk: A Chal-
   lenge for Parents whose Children were Conceived with Donor Gametes in the
   US, in “Social Science & Medicine”, 61 (6), pp. 1300-1309.
Callon, M. (2007) What Does it Mean to Say that Economics is Performative?, in
    D. A. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa and L. Siu (eds.), Do Economists Make Mar-
    kets? On the Performativity of Economics, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University
    Press, pp. 311-357.
Callon, M. (2010) Performativity, Misfires and Politics, in “Journal of Cultural
    Economy”, 3 (2), pp. 163-169.
Carsten, J. (2000) “Knowing Where You've Come from”: Ruptures and Continui-
   ties of Time and Kinship in Narratives of Adoption Reunions, in “The Journal
   of the Royal Anthropological Institute”, 6 (4), pp. 687-703.
Coons, S. J. (2009) Have We Witnessed the Rise and Fall of Race-Specific Drugs?,
   in “Clinical Therapeutics”, 31 (3), pp. 620-622.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2002) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizo-
   phrenia, London, Continuum.
Duster, T. (2007) Medicalisation of Race, in “The Lancet”, 369 (9562), pp. 702-
   704.
Edwards, J. (2000) Born and Bred: Idioms of Kinship and New Reproductive Tech-
   nologies in England, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Fox, J.E. (2012) Of Colours and Scales, in “Ethnic and Racial Studies”, 35 (7), pp.
   1151-1156.
Franklin, S. (2000) Life Itself. Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary, in S.
   Franklin, C. Lury and J. Stacey (eds.), Global Nature, Global Culture, London,
   Sage, pp. 188-227.
Franklin, S. (2003) Re-Thinking Nature-Culture. Anthropology and the New Ge-
   netics, in “Anthropological Theory”, 3 (1), pp. 65-85.
Garay, R. (2008) El destino de ser madres: la ideología de la maternidad como
   soporte discursivo de las nuevas tecnologías reproductivas, in M. Tarducci (ed.),
   Maternidades en el siglo XXI, Buenos Aires, Espacio Editorial, pp. 29-56.
González Burchard, E., Ziv, E., Coyle, N., Gomez, S.L., Tang, H., Karter, A. J., et
  al. (2003) The Importance of Race and Ethnic Background in Biomedical Re-
  search and Clinical Practice, in “The New England Journal of Medicine”, 348
  (12), pp. 1170-1175.
Haraway, D. (1997) Modest-Witness@Second-Millennium.FemaleMan-Meets-
   OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience, London, Routledge.
Hunt, L.M., Truesdell, N.D. and Kreiner, M.J. (2013) Genes, Race, and Culture in
  Clinical Care. Racial Profiling in the Management of Chronic Illness, in “Medi-
  cal Anthropology Quarterly”, 27 (2), pp. 253-271.
Inda, J.X. (2014) Racial Presciptions. Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics
   of Life, Farnham, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing.
30                                                               Tecnoscienza – 6 (1)

Lakoff, A. (2005) Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychia-
   try, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, New York and London, Har-
   vester Wheatsheaf.
Latour, B. (2002) Morality and Technology. The End of the Means, in “Theory,
   Culture & Society”, 19 (5/6), pp. 247-260.
Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1986) Laboratory Life: the Construction of Scientific
   Facts (2nd edition), Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.
Martiniello, M. (2012) Beyond Race and Colour Lines and Scales in the Twenty-
   First Century?, in “Ethnic and Racial Studies”, 35 (7), pp. 1137-1142.
M'charek, A. (2008) Silent Witness, Articulate Collective: DNA Evidence and the
   Inference of Visible Traits, in “Bioethics”, 22 (9), pp. 519-528.
M'charek, A. (2010a) Fragile Differences, Relational Effects: Stories about the Ma-
   teriality of Race and Sex, in “European Journal of Women’s Studies”, 17 (4),
   pp. 307-322.
M'charek, A. (2010b) The Mitochondrial Eve of Modern Genetics: of Peoples and
   Genomes, or the Routinization of Race, in “Science as Culture”, 14 (2), pp.
   161-183.
M'charek, A. (2013) Beyond Fact of Fiction: On the Materiality of Race in Practice,
   in “Cultural Anthropology”, 28 (3), pp. 420-442.
Mol, A. (2002) The Body Multiple. Ontology in Medical Practice, Durham and
   London, Duke University Press.
Nordqvist, P. (2010) Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Family Resemblances in Lesbian
   Donor Conception, in “Sociology”, 44 (6), pp. 1128-1144.
Ossorio, P.N. (2006) About Face: Forensic Genetic Testing for Race and Visible
   Traits, in “The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics”, 34, pp. 277-293.
Phillips, J. (2006) Agencement/Assemblage, in “Theory, Culture & Society”, 23 (2-
    3), pp. 108-109.
Rabinow, P. (1992) Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Bioso-
   ciality, in J. Crary and S. Kwinter (eds.), Incorporations, New York, Zone
   Books, pp. 234-252.
Rabinow, P. and Rose, N. (2006) Biopower Today, in “Biosocieties”, 1, pp. 195-
   217.
Reardon, J. (2004) Decoding Race and Human Difference in a Genomic Age, in
   “differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies”, 15 (3), pp. 38-65.
Rheinberger, H.-J. (2000) Beyond Nature and Culture: Modes of Reasoning in the
   Age of Molecular Biology and Medicine, in M. Lock, A. Young and A. Cam-
   brosio (eds.), Living and Working with the New Medical Technologies: Inter-
   section of Inquiry, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 19-30.
Rodriguez, J. (2011) A Complex Fabric: Intersecting Histories of Race, Gender and
Ariza                                                                         31
    Science in Latin America, in “Hispanic American Historical Review”, 91 (3),
    pp. 409-429.
Schneider, D.M. (1968) American Kinship: a Cultural Account, Englewood Cliffs,
   N.J., Prentice-Hall.
Schneider, D.M. (1984) A Critique of the Study of Kinship, Ann Arbor, University
   of Michigan Press.
Stepan, N.L. (1991) The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin
    America, Ithaca, Cornell University Press.
Stepan, N. (2001) Picturing Tropical Nature, London, Reaktion.
Strathern, M. (1992) After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century,
    Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Szkupinski Quiroga, S. (2007) Blood Is Thicker than Water: Policing Donor Insem-
   ination and the Reproduction of Whiteness, “Hypatia”, 22 (2), pp. 143-161.
Tarducci, M. (2008) Maternidades y adopción: una introducción desde la an-
   tropología de género, in M. Tarducci (ed.), Maternidades en el Siglo XXI, Bue-
   nos Aires, Espacio Editorial, pp. 15-27.
Telles, E. (2012) The Overlapping Concepts of Race and Colour in Latin America,
    in “Ethnic and Racial Studies”, 35 (7), pp. 1163-1168.
Thompson, C. (2005) Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproduc-
   tive Technologies, Cambridge, MA and London, MIT Press.
van der Berghe, P. L. (2012) Colours vs. Race: a Distinction or a Difference?, in
   “Ethnic and Racial Studies”, 35 (7), pp. 1174-1176.
Wade, P. (2002) Race, Nature and Culture: an Anthropological Perspective, Lon-
  don and Sterling, VA, Pluto Press.
Wade, P. (2004) Human Nature and Race, in “Anthropological Theory”, 4 (2), pp.
  157-172.
Wade, P. (2012a) Race, Kinship and the Ambivalence of Identity, in K. Schramm,
  D. Skinner and R. Rottenburg (eds.), Identity Politics and the New Genetics:
  Re/Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging, Oxford, Berghahn Books,
  pp. 79-96.
Wade, P. (2012b) Race and Skin Colour as Analytic Concepts, in “Ethnic and Ra-
  cial Studies”, 35 (7), pp. 1466-4356.
Winickoff, D.E. and Obasogie, O.K. (2008) Race-Specific Drugs: Regulatory
   Trends and Public Policy, in “Trends in Pharmacological Sciences”, 29 (6), pp.
   277-279.
