Sunhye’s research and teaching interests are related to the politics of human (re)production in transnational Asia;

in particular, her research centers on the study of the transnational circuits of the assisted reproductive

technology (ART) industry as a site of interdisciplinary inquiry. She is currently planning to expand on her

dissertation work to focus on the Korean men involved in ART. By examining historical constructions of

masculinity in relation to fertility and sexuality in South Korea, she plans to write a book integrating such

findings with her earlier dissertation work. In addition, her future research projects will broaden examinations

of the ART industry to include other East Asian countries to explore how the concepts of Asia or Asianness

are contested in the baby-making industry for East Asian customers.

Chaired by Carter Eckert, Yoon Se Young Professor of Korean History; Interim Director, Korea Institute,

Harvard University

Abstract:

This research project examines the transnational circuits of the assisted reproductive technology (ART)

 industry in South Korea to demonstrate how the concepts of reproductive rights and labor have been

contested, negotiated, and reconstructed by various actors?including infertile couples, gamete donors,

gestational surrogates, state agents, and medical professionals?across national boundaries. In order to

 analyze the transnational circuits of the ART industry, I use the term “baby miles” to show the great

 distances people, capital, and technology travel as they interact in the baby-making process.

This study envisions reproductive ethics as part of a transnational feminist agenda by examining the ethical issues

raised by the complicated relationships between intended parents and gamete donors/surrogates.

Although feminist scholars and bioethicists address issues of how intended parents practice their reproductive

 rights and how egg providers/surrogates’ bodies are commercialized and exploited as they navigate the transnational ART industry,

very little exists in the way of an integrated framework that allows us to understand the interdependent relationships between

intended parents and gamete providers/surrogates, even thoughboth are “users” of ART technologies as well as “patients” of

medical procedures. Furthermore, while current research successfully examines the ethical problems of

the transnational ART industry, it unintentionally reinforces the binaries between Asian women as exploited objects and

White Westerners as liberated subjects. In order to address these issues within the current literature, I position this project to

dispute the unilateral understanding of ART by focusing on the complex relationships between Korean intended parents

 and non-Korean gamete providers and surrogates. Drawing on three years of multi-sited ethnographic research

conducted in Seoul, Bangkok, Taipei, and Kiev, which included in-depth interviews as well as participant observation,

I argue that while the increased baby miles create unprecedented legal, social, and ethical issues, prohibiting commercial

baby-making industries and returning to a “local baby” is not a solution as it reinforces both the ideology that motherhood

is “natural” and the stratified reproduction system.