Globalization and Transnational Surrogacy in India by Sayantani DasGupta

The surrogate in India is expected to be a disciplined contract worker who gives up the baby at the termination of the contract. However, unlike women in factories who have to be constituted as the perfect worker of managers’ dreams, surrogates have to be constituted as the perfect mother‐worker subject. She is produced, instead, in fertility clinics and surrogacy hostels.

In this ethnographic study of commercial surrogacy in a small clinic in western India, I argue that a good commercial surrogate, like a good laborer of global production, is not found ready‐made in India.

It is produced through the practices and rhetorics of the shop floor. Their ability to bring capital facilitates their capacity to negotiate powerful positions in their extended households, and solidify their social positions.įeminist analysts of women in global production have demonstrated that “good” labor is not found ready‐made. Yet, they explain that it is precisely because of their womanly bodies they can earn large sums of money in Bangalore’s reproduction industry. Many surrogate mothers describe their social degradation because of gender they have weaker positions in the home, they earn lesser wages than their husbands, and they are sexually harassed on the garment shop floor. Perversely, deepening forms of bodily commodification are experienced as deliverance from social degradation. I show that while women are exploited in the intimate industries, they do not necessarily feel disempowered. Women working in garment factories sell their eggs and become surrogate mothers, after which they cycle back to garment factories.

This article tracks surrogate mothers’ wage labor trajectories in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. From sweatshops to intimate labor: employment strategies among surrogate mothers in Bangalore, India

Globalization and Transnational Surrogacy in India by Sayantani DasGupta