Publications

Academic publications in journals, books, and book chapters

Recent
Articles

2024, Tessa Moll, "Egg donors in eGoli: Operability and aspiration in South African fertility markets". American Ethnologist. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13350

In South Africa's urban hubs, young women are increasingly participating in the global fertility market by donating their eggs. Egg providers, who supply oocytes for others’ use in fertility treatment, are a key resource in the fertility market, and they are emblematic of new forms of biolabor. Egg markets have tapped into a precariously middle-class population of young Black women in Johannesburg, where the neoliberal state has largely retreated from fostering social mobility. What role does egg donation play in the social world of young South African women? I approach this question by extending Cohen's concept of “operability,” which can illuminate how egg donation becomes a means for young women to enact modernity, or relationality beyond the postapartheid state and the horizons of their social worlds, structured as they are by the entanglements of race, class, and gender.

2024, Tessa Moll, Maurizio Meloni, & Ayuba Issaka, "Foetal programming meets human capital: biological plasticity, development, and the limits to the economization of life." BioSocieties 19, 424–451. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-023-00309-8

The disciplinary integration of biology and economy is taking new forms in the postgenomic era, transforming long-standing exchanges between human biology and economics. In this article, we first describe how an emerging area of research in development and health economics has embraced, stabilized, and expanded the emerging field of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). We map the global expansion of this literature particularly in the Global South. Via an analysis of shifting models of health in human capital, we argue that as economists draw on DOHaD theories, their increasing focus on marginalized groups in postcolonial settings produces a darker model of health deficit. Based on notions of accumulated shocks, this model questions the generalizable expansion of the economization of life and speaks to a wider and more sombre range of figures. Health models in economics reflect the double nature of biological and developmental plasticity caught between agency and passivity, change, and near-permanency.

2022, Tessa Moll, "Six days in plastic: Potentiality, normalization and in vitro embryos in the postgenomic era. Science, Technology & Human Values 47(6), 1253-1276. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01622439221090685

Part of the normalization of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) is the premise that the children born from in vitro fertilization (IVF) are no different from their counterparts conceived spontaneously. However, interest in peri-conception health and new epigenetic understandings of biological plasticity has led to some questioning the presumed irrelevance of conception in vitro, and when doing so, describing IVF children as “apparently healthy.” Taking “apparently” and “healthy” seriously, this article explores how modes of attention—ways of naming and framing embryo potentiality—shape understandings of health and normality. I contend that understanding the politics of potentiality, and how they may emerge in a postgenomic age, requires an unpacking of various modes of attention and framing. Ethnographic findings from South Africa’s fertility clinics and emerging literature on epigenetic variation in IVF conception demonstrate how, under a genetic mode of attention, IVF clinics views “abnormality” as fated, unviable, and discardable. Exploring the possibility of answering the postgenomic questions to IVF reveals structural challenges to knowing long-term health implications. Incipient attempts within the fertility clinic at managing these questions shows various strategic techniques, such as leveraging epigenetics to marketable ends and shifts to individual responsibility.

Complete list of publications

Books:

Pentecost, Michelle, Jaya Keaney, Tessa Moll and Michael Penkler (Eds.). (2024) The Handbook of DOHaD and Society: The past, present and future of biosocial collaboration. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Peer-reviewed journal articles:

Moll, Tessa. (2024). “Egg donors in eGoli: Operability and aspiration in South African fertility markets” American Ethnologist.

Moll, Tessa, Maurizio Meloni and Ayuba Issaka. (2024) “Foetal programming meets human capital: Development, biological plasticity, and the limits to the ‘economization of life’. BioSocieties, 19: 424-451.

Moll, Tessa. (2022) “Six days in plastic: IVF, potential, and risk in the postgenomic age.” Science, Technology, and Human Values (Special Issue: Reproduction in the Postgenomic Age), 47(6):1253–1276.

Meloni, Maurizio, Tessa Moll, Ayuba Issaka and Christopher Kuzawa. (2022) “A biosocial return to race? A cautionary view for the post-genomic era.” American Journal of Human Biology, 34(7): e23742.

Moll, Tessa, Trudie Gerrits, Karin Hammersberg, Lenore Manderson and Andrea Whittaker. (2022) “Reproductive travel to, from and within sub-Sahara Africa: a scoping review.” Reproductive BioMedicine & Society Online, 14: 271-288.

Moll, Tessa. (2021) Medical mistrust and enduring racism in South Africa. Symposium: Institutional Racism, Whiteness, and Bioethics. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. 18: 117–120.

Moll, Tessa. (2019) Making a Match: Curating Race in South African Gamete Donation. Medical Anthropology. 38(7): 588-602.

Pande, Amrita and Tessa Moll. (2018) Gendered Bio-Responsibilization: Travelling Egg Provision in South Africa. Reproductive BioMedicine & Society Online. 6: 23-33.

Chapters in edited volumes:

Moll, Tessa, Trudie Gerrits, Karin Hammarberg, Lenore Manderson et Andrea Whittaker. “Voyages reproductifs en provenance et au sein de l’Afrique subsaharienne : vue d’ensemble". In Voyager pour procréer au Maghreb. Expériences au sein d'une nouvelle industrie médicale. Rouland, B and I Maffi (eds.). Paris: Karthala-IRMC. Pp. 35-74.

Penkler, Michael, Jaya Keaney, Tessa Moll and Michelle Pentecost. (2024) “Introduction.” In The Handbook of DOHaD and Society. Pentecost, M, J Keaney, T Moll and M Penkler (eds.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Meloni, Maurizio, Christopher Kuzawa, Ayuba Issaka and Tessa Moll. (2024) “A biosocial return to race? Racial differences in DOHaD and environmental epigenetics”. In The Handbook of DOHaD and Society. Pentecost, M, J Keaney, T Moll and M Penkler (eds.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Ross, Fiona, Michelle Pentecost and Tessa Moll. (2023) “Epigenetics and the anthropology of reproduction.” In A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology. van Hollen, CC and N Appleton (eds.) Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Pp 458-472.

Moll, Tessa. (2022) “Subjects of scarcity: making white egg providers in South Africa.” Birth Controlled: Selective Reproduction and Neoliberal Eugenics in South Africa and India, A Pande (ed.) Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pp 314-340.

Moll, Tessa. (2021) “Reproduction, Sacrificial Life, and the Logics of Attrition in the Afterlife of Apartheid.” Birthing Techno-Sapiens: Human-Technology Co-Evolution and the Future of Reproduction, R Davis-Floyd (ed.). New York: Routledge. Pp 90-102.

Review articles:

Ross, Fiona and Tessa Moll. (2020) Assisted Reproduction: politics, ethics, and anthropological futures. Medical Anthropology. 39(6): 553-562.

Moll, Tessa, Fiona Ross and Victoria Team. (2020) Assisted Reproductive Technology: Capital, Affect, Kinship, Bodies, Faith, Mobility, and Coloniality. Medical Anthropology. Special Virtual Issue on Assisted Reproductive Technology.

Moll, Tessa. (2015) Book Review: Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship by Sarah Franklin. Anthropology Southern Africa. 38(1-2):149-151.

Other writing:

Keaney, Jaya and Tessa Moll. (2020) Fertility care in the era of COVID. Policy Brief. Alfred Deakin Institute.

Moll, Tessa. (2020) “Gloves, embryos, and DDT: Thinking with surfaces on toxicity in South Africa.” Somatosphere. Available at: http://somatosphere.net/2020/toxicity-south-africa.html/