192 C. Kroløkke and M.N. Petersen
to acknowledge how gifting and commodification frequently interweave
(Kroløkke 2018 ) and instead, we turn to bio-intimacy as an analyti-
cal strategy. In fact, we concur with Hoeyer ( 2013 : 20), when he notes
that a bodily exchange ‘involves more than material redistribution; it
revolves around construction of relations—it not only reflects economic
value but is also entangled with social relations’. For example, in media
debates, the uterus gets positioned as both gendered recyclable material
and idle space. Key to its disposal and recirculation, in UT cases, the
uterus may be seen as unusable matter while it, in cases of surrogacy,
becomes vacant. In both cases, the uterus is transformed into having,
however temporary, bio-intimate (re)productive value.
In developing the concept of bio-intimacy, we build upon femi-
nist scholarship and further complicate the gift/commodity frame-
work that surrogacy and transplantation often finds itself within. We
view surrogacy and UT as involving processes of ‘artefactualisation’
(Parry 2007 ) and ‘thingification’ (Lash and Lury 2007 ) encapsulated in
what we develop as a bio-intimacy economy in reproductive services.
Artefactualisation takes place when, as noted by Parry, body parts are
extracted and become ‘partly technologized and a degree of physical and
legal severability is introduced between the donor and the cyborgian
entity to which the process gives rise’ (Parry 2007 : 1136). Extraction
technologies enact a distance between the body part and the donor,
enabling organs, for example, to become artefacts and mobile matter
that are on their way into the ‘brave new bio-resource economy’ (Parry
2007 : 1135). In a similar move, albeit with a very different empirical
vantage point, Lash and Lury ( 2007 ) use the concept of ‘thingification’
to illustrate how material objects become global cultural symbols ena-
bling not only commodities but also persons to enter commodity states.
In their framework, matter becomes mediated as artefacts as well as, at
times, made into ‘things’.
When uterine exchanges are seen as bio-intimate encounters,
they assist in developing a theoretical response to the ways that these
exchanges are imagined as well as enacted. Intimacy is often construed
as a state of being in proximity either through physical closeness, relat-
edness, or through emotional alignment. Thus, intimacy gets posi-
tioned in the private sphere and related to the (heterosexual) family as
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