1st Edition

Reimagining Reproduction Essays on Surrogacy, Labor, and Technologies of Human Reproduction

By Kalindi Vora Copyright 2023
    146 Pages
    by Routledge India

    This book presents an ethnographic study on gestational surrogacy in India. It frames the ethnography of the surrogacy clinic in conversation with concerns raised in the arenas of law, policy, medical ethics, and global structural inequality about the ethics of transnational assisted reproductive technology (ART) practices. Engaging ethical discourses that both advocate for and trouble the subject of reproductive rights that remains of interest in feminist studies, the volume takes up the work of critical feminist, anthropological and science studies scholarship in India, the United States, and Europe concerned with reproductive technologies.

    Based on fieldwork and archival sources, the volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of ethnography, gender, social and public policy, South Asian studies, and global public health, especially reproductive health. 

    1. Introduction 2. Medicine, Markets, and the Pregnant Body: Indian Commerical Surrogacy and Reproductive Labor in a Transnational Frame 3. Indian Transnational Surrogacy and the Commodification of Vital Energy 4. Limits of "Labor": Accounting for Affect and the Biological in Transnational Surrogacy and Service Work 5. Re-imagining Reproduction: Unsettling Metaphors in the History of Imperial Science and Commercial Surrogacy in India 6. Potential, Risk, and Return in Transnational Indian Gestational Surrogacy 7. Experimental Sociality in Transnational Surrogacy 8. Citizen, Subject, Property: Indian Surrogacy and the Global Fertility Market 9. Conclusion: After the Housewife: Surrogacy, Labor, and Human Reproduction

    Biography

    Kalindi Vora is Professor of Ethnicity Race & Migration, Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, History of Science and Medicine, and American Studies at Yale University. She is author of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourcing, Reimagining Reproduction: Essays on Surrogacy, Labor and Technologies of Human Reproduction, and co- author of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures. With the Precarity Lab, she is author of Technoprecarious