• International Solidarity in reproductive justice: surrogacy and gender-inclusive polymaternalism

    Author(s):
    Sophie Lewis (see profile)
    Date:
    2018
    Group(s):
    Feminist Humanities, Gender Studies
    Subject(s):
    Women's studies, Blacks--Study and teaching, Feminist theory, Child care, Families--Political aspects, Feminism, Reproduction--Philosophy
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    polymaternalism, reproductive technology, solidarity, surrogacy, utopia, Black feminist theory, Childcare and family politics, Environmental humanities, Reproduction theory
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6HR9S
    Abstract:
    Reproductive justice and gestational surrogacy are often implicitly treated as antonyms. Yet the former represents a theoretic approach that enables the long and racialised history of surrogacy (far from a new or ‘exceptional’ practice) to be appreciated as part of a struggle for ‘radical kinship’ and gender-inclusive polymaternalism. Recasting surrogacy as a dynamic contradiction in itself, full of latent possibilities relevant to early Reproductive Justice militants’ family-abolitionist aims, this article invites scholars in human geography and cognate disciplines to re-think the boundaries of surrogacy politics. As ethnographies of formal gestational workplaces, accounts of gestational workers’ self-organised resistance, and readings of the attendant public media scandals show (taking examples from India, Thailand, and New Jersey), there is no good reason to place these new economies of ‘third-party reproductive assistance’ in a ‘realm apart’ from conversations about social reproduction more generally. Surrogacy, I argue, potentially names a practice of commoning at the same time as it names a new wave of accumulation in which clinicians are capitalising on the contemporary – biogenetic-propertarian, white-supremacist – logic of kinmaking in the Global North. Ongoing experiments in the redistribution of mothering labour (‘othermothering’ in the Black feminist tradition) suggest that ‘another surrogacy is possible’, animated by what Kathi Weeks and the 1970s intervention ‘Wages Against Housework’ conceive as anti-work politics. In making this argument, the article revives the concept ‘gestational labour’ as a means of keeping the process of ‘literal’ reproduction open to transformation.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1425286
    Publisher:
    Informa UK Limited
    Pub. Date:
    2018-1-19
    Journal:
    Gender, Place & Culture
    Page Range:
    1 - 21
    ISSN:
    0966-369X,1360-0524
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    6 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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