Gendering Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Commercial Surrogacy and Constructions of Motherhood

Abstract

Literature on commercial surrogacy argues that assisted reproduction technologies (ARTs) problematise presumed essentialist dichotomies of nature and culture. While technologies of commercial surrogacy naturalise the medicalisation of the body, these technologies in turn also produce new knowledge about the biological facts of the body. In what ways are knowledge about reproductive labour and women’s reproductive capacities embedded in these technologies? How do these technologies invite us to imagine maternal bodies? Under regimes of stratified reproduction that inflect reproductive bodies with caste, class and racial politics, how do we read the production of the gendered body within commercial gestational surrogacy practices? The paper draws on ethnographic research conducted in Mumbai to study how technologies of commercial surrogacy interact with the normative idioms of conception. I will attempt to show how assumptions about gendered bodies and gendered roles are embedded within the material teleologies of these technologies, which in turn produce newer material-semiotic significations of the reproductive body.