Main description:

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.

Contents:

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