8 Keeping it in the Family: Debating the Bio-Intimacy ... 193well as the affects of love and care. Berlant ( 1998 , 2008 ) views intimacy
from another angle, when she argues that intimacy should be under-
stood as some sort of genre, involving hegemonic scripts that circulate
in the public sphere and migrate to the private as a feeling of belonging
(Berlant 2008 : ix). Likewise, intimacy involves the migration of private
feelings into the public sphere, when certain identities and belongings
become scripts that form public worlds, making the (public) world fit
certain intimate configurations (like the script for heterosexual romance
and the desire for the nuclear family) and leaves other configurations
(like non-normative relations including turning reproduction into a
commercial transaction) non-intimate or callous. In this way, Berlant
argues, ‘intimacy builds worlds’ ( 1998 : 282). The participants in an
intimate public (characterised by the migration between public and pri-
vate) are ‘perceived to be marked by a commonly lived history; its narra-
tives and things are deemed expressive of that history while also shaping
its conventions of belonging; and, expressing the sensational, embodied
experience of living as a certain kind of being in the world, it promises
also to provide a better experience of social belonging’ (Berlant 2008 :
viii). In UT as well as commercial surrogacy cases, for instance, the ina-
bility to carry and give birth to an ‘own’ child moves from the private
realm of despair to the public realm of reproductive rights and access.
Reproductive and transplantation technologies entangle with bio-
intimacy in several ways. At the most basic level, UT and surrogacy
are technologies that re-enact the ability to create an intimate other—
an ‘own’ baby. While biotechnologies are hybrid assemblages that draw
upon, yet also enact and create (new) social and affective relations
(Rose 2007 : 16), they simultaneously, we argue, build their legitimacy
by drawing upon existing recognisable familial bio-intimate relations,
affects, reproductive intent, and medical achievements. UT, for exam-
ple, is not simply a medical breakthrough; it is profoundly an interna-
tional career-maker to the researchers involved, while it additionally
enables recognisable bio-intimate subject positions such as mother
(defined here as the woman that gives birth), godmother, and grand-
mother. In the case of commercial surrogacy, the bio-intimate encoun-
ter between the surrogate and the intended parent(s) is managed by
strengthening the bio-intimate relation to the genetically related child,