In August 2008, a biomedical intervention providing free drugs to school aged children to treat two endemic diseases –schistosomiasis haematobium and soil-transmitted helminths - in Morogoro region, Tanzania, was suspended after violent riots erupted. Parents and guardians rushed to schools to prevent their children taking the drugs when they heard reports of children dying in Morogoro town after receiving treatment. When pupils heard these reports, many of those who had swallowed the pills began to complain of dizziness and fainted. In Morogoro town hundreds of pupils were rushed to the Regional Hospital by their parents and other onlookers. News of these apparent fatalities spread throughout the region, including to Doma village where I was conducting fieldwork. Here, protesting villagers accused me of bringing the medicine into the village with which to “poison” the children and it was necessary for me to leave the village immediately under the protection of the Tanzanian police. This thesis, based on eleven months fieldwork between 2007 and 2010 in Doma village and parts of Morogoro town, asks why was this biomedical intervention so vehemently rejected? By analysing local understandings and responses to the mass distribution of drugs in relation to the specific historical, social, political, and economic context in which it occurred, it shows that there was a considerable disjuncture between biomedical understandings of these diseases, including the epidemiological rationale for the provision of preventive chemotherapy, and local perspectives. Such a disjuncture, fuelled by the reports of fatalities and the pupil’s fainting episodes brought about considerable conjecture both locally and nationally, that the drugs had been faulty, counterfeit, or hitherto untested on humans. Among many of the poorer inhabitants of Morogoro town, there was suspicion that this had been a covert sterilization campaign. From an official perspective, such conjecture was dismissed as mere rumour, proliferated by “ignorant” people. However, from an anthropological perspective, these ‘rumours’ reveal profound local anxieties including a pervasive fear that poor Africans are being targeted for covert eugenics projects by governments in the industrialized world. The thesis also shows that many of the assumptions embedded in global policies seeking to control neglected tropical diseases are mistaken. Indeed, it is suggested that it is unlikely that schistosomiasis haematobium and soil-transmitted helminths will be controlled so long as policy makers persist with the idea that one policy, designed by staff working for the World Health Organisation – with minor modifications added in Dar es Salaam - can be rolled out uniformly, irrespective of the political, social and economic context in which the programme occurs.

The dissertation studies feminist knowledge production through translation in the context of post-communist Eastern Europe. It focuses on one case study, the Serbian translation of the American feminist health classic Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS) through the lens of the politics of translation and reproduction. The translation, Naša tela, mi (NTM), was published by a group of feminist activists from the Autonomous Women’s Centre (AWC) in Belgrade, Serbia in 2001. By focusing on this one case study, my dissertation offers an in-depth analysis of the political, social, linguistic, and feminist dimensions implicated in the transfer of a Western feminist project from one geopolitical location to another, to a post-socialist, post-conflict Eastern European country in the 1990s. Against the background of the Yugoslav wars and the influence of ethno-nationalism in the 1990s, I examine the development of domestic and transnational feminist networking, including the Belgrade feminists’ work with victims of domestic and sexual violence and refugees. I assess the extent to which NTM serves as oppositional discourse to the changing politics of reproduction and pronatalist discourses around abortion and fertility in Serbia in this period. Furthermore, I analyze NTM’s contribution to local feminist knowledge on women’s reproductive health, rights, and sexuality. I emphasize the importance of the local context, including the history of abortion access and traditional gender relations. Methodologically, the dissertation is based on interview data, archival documents, and comparative textual analysis. The dissertation draws attention to feminist knowledge production across uneven geopolitical borders, translation flows across the East-West divide, and the role of English in transnational feminist networking. The dissertation brings together the politics of translation and the politics of reproduction and calls for further studies into the role of translation in transnational feminist patterns of knowledge production.

Gamete donors are actively searched by companies dedicated to assisted reproduction in the Spanish State, and advertising is not only legal but rather common. This thesis provides an overview of the main themes that arise from the analysis of mostly visual materials used to promote ovum donation in public spaces in Barcelona, and critically links them to current debates in intersectional feminist cultural studies of technoscience, bodily theory and visual studies. Conceptual and affective tensions between characterisations of women’s bodies, reproductive function and desires are identified and brought forward in terms that imply tropes of sacralisation, reification of cells/organs/tissues, and fragmentation of the bodily reality. It is argued that egg donation advertisements use an imagery that deeply connects with practices well rooted in Western biomedical traditions when it comes to female bodies, physiology and reproductive function, and that such practices are to be understood against the backdrop of neoliberalism. The analysis supports the idea that the publicity discourse of the assisted reproduction industry in Spain actively engages in a legitimation of the desire of biological parenthood as a right, in ways that value lives conceived in different circumstances and geopolitical contexts in radically different ways, and that can be interpreted as paving the way to prosurrogacy and/or eugenic positions. Future research is encouraged and directed towards exploring issues of agency, particularly in vulnerable groups such as migrant, poor, uneducated or racialised women. Further research is needed in order to build the foundations of a feminist ethical reflection on reproductive technologies and particularly of ovum donation.

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