Indian “Native Companions” and Korean Camptown Women: Unpacking Coloniality in Transnational Surrogacy and Transnational Adoption

Abstract

The article argues that transnational adoption and surrogacy from South Korea and India are shaped through US and British imperial and colonial histories in Korea and India respectively. We focus on the reproductive labor of “native companions” in early British India and kijich’on (camptown) women in post–World War II Korea. The management of native women’s sexuality was crucial for maintaining social order, political stability, and for consolidating capitalism through the commodification and devaluation of colonized reproductive labor. The configuration of historical legacies is unpacked through the idea of coloniality, the constitutive dark side of modernity, which reproduces subalternity and exploitation of racialized bodies. The reproductive labour of Korean birth mothers and Indian surrogate mothers is formed and shaped by the colonial and imperial formations of gender, sexuality, kinship and family, in which white supremacy and exploitation of Indian and Korean women was at the core. We argue that these formations are re-configured in the present through three mechanisms that enable contemporary practices of adoption and surrogacy: the transformation of waste into profit, the erasure of non-white mothers, and the trope of the white savior.