Commercial Surrogacy in India: Manufacturing a Perfect Mother‐Worker

Abstract

Feminist analysts of women in global production have demonstrated that “good” labor is not found ready‐made. It is produced through the practices and rhetorics of the shop floor. 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. She is produced, instead, in fertility clinics and surrogacy hostels. 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. The surrogate in India is expected to be a disciplined contract worker who gives up the baby at the termination of the contract. But she is simultaneously urged to be a nurturing mother for the baby and a selfless mother who will not negotiate the payment received. When one’s mother identity is regulated and terminated by a contract, being a good mother often conflicts with being a good worker, which makes the mother‐worker identity a rather difficult one to produce. It requires a disciplinary project that works discursively, one that works through the materialization of discourses in the form of enclosures or surrogacy hostels. The production of this mother‐worker subject, however, does not go unchallenged. What we see instead is a continuum of resistance composed of discursive, individual, and collective actions that disrupt the production of a reified, unitary mother‐worker subject.