Affect and Exploitation in the Reproductive Market
There is no doubt that the decisions that go into the creation of families are at once very personal, and at the same time linked to broad and inequitable social structures including race, class, sexuality, religion, ability, and geopolitical location (i.e., global North vs. global South). How do people articulate the challenges they face when they try to stay tuned in to both registers—the personal and the political? There is a seeming dearth of first-hand accounts from people who might be called “critical adopters”—those who take up reproductive technologies and other forms of “assisted” reproduction (adoption) to make or get children, but do so while explicitly taking the political economy of reproduction into consideration. In this issue, Karen Winkler, a white, American feminist professor, therapist, and long-term activist who is also the adoptive mother of a child from Guatemala, responds to essays by Jessaca Leinaweaver and Claudia Castañeda (also in this issue) that are critical analyses of the racial, class, and global political hierarchies engaged in transnational and transracial adoption. As a package, these three essays begin one of the conversations between critics and “users” that we think have to happen for feminist analysis to really transform reproduction. (There are also few accounts from children whose birth or families of rearing were facilitated by these technologies; that is just one of the many directions that we can see, but have not yet taken in this issue.)
Thinking about the affective dimensions of reproduction is crucial in working out real solutions to the challenges that people face in building and maintaining their families, not simply abstract or idealized versions of complete and unfettered reproductive freedom for all. I think we might look to Aimee Carrillo Rowe’s article “Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation” for some clues on how to proceed. Carrillo Rowe’s title is an imperative for us to “long”—for the people we love but from whom we are separated, for the multiple places we belong but where we are not now located, and so on. Carrillo Rowe writes:
We are always already being hailed by our various (be)longings from the moment of our birth, from those moments well before our births: moments of conquest and settlement, moments of miscegenation and antimiscegenation, of mixing and blending and resistance. We tend to overlook the ways that power is transmitted through our affective ties. Who we love, the communities that we live in, who we expend our emotional energies building ties with—these connections are all functions of power. So the command of this “reverse interpellation” is to call attention to the politics at stake in our belonging, and to envision an alternative. 1
By emphasizing a “politics of relation” rather than a “politics of location,” Carrillo Rowe hopes that we might hold ourselves accountable to the way we live out our own privileges, by fundamentally inclining ourselves towards the “others” with whom we wish to be in alliance. The “politics of location” to which she refers (and which she rejects) is too easily a rather static accounting of relative privilege, as well as a reiteration of the fundamental separateness of people who are sorted out by various social hierarchies. Carrillo Rowe’s formulation is useful because instead of looking for a quantity of “power” or “oppression” as a static sum of resources that any person might hold, she points us to the processes through which power is transmitted—and she especially points to the role played by affective ties as relations of power. Carrillo Rowe’s approach might be a useful beginning for someone who wants to use reproductive technologies in an ethical and just manner.
Likewise, critics who are trying to parse the specific power relations involved in given transactions would do well to recall that people are rarely if ever perfectly privileged nor utterly without agency. As Jennifer Nash argued in her 2008 piece, “Rethinking Intersectionality,” clear thinking about the intersection of multiple vectors of power involves considering not just multiple subordination, but the complex interplay of both subordination and privilege. 2 For example, in the arena of reproductive technology and justice, infertility itself is often stigmatized, especially for women, and perhaps especially by those in a woman’s intimate network: her partner, family, community. Seen in this context, the use of technologies is not often a simple, commercialized exercise of privilege for those who can “afford” to buy other people’s precious reproductive material. Instead, the use of technologies can involve a drastic re-ordering of buyers’ potentially scarce resources, in order to follow what may be experienced as both a deeply personal longing, and a cultural and/or familial imperative with dire consequences attached to failure. Rebecca Haimowitz and Vaishali Sinha’s documentary Made in India, excerpted in this issue, follows a lower middle class heterosexual couple from Texas whose infertility leads them to hire a surrogate in India to gestate their embryo. The film’s sympathetic portrayal of the “intended parents” does not obscure the chasm between them and the surrogate they hire, a chasm marked by relative wealth, race, education, and place in the global political economy. But Haimowitz and Sinha take pains to dismantle the abstract idea of privileged Western jet-setters that might be conjured up by the term “reproductive tourism” by showing the slim economic margin on which these “tourists” operate: it involves selling their house and working multiple jobs, among other things. The viewers, along with the filmmakers, are also able to see the narrow and distorted grounds on which the “receiving parents” negotiate the terms of their exchange with the surrogate. The surrogate negotiates with a clinic, which in turn negotiates with a broker, who is hired by the intended parents. Somewhere in this chain of agreements, the surrogates’ compensation package dwindles: the pay described by the broker is more than three times what the surrogate herself says she received (even though she ends up bearing twins); the clinic administrator refuses to clarify the amount that the surrogate is paid, saying that the information “is proprietary.” The “receiving couple” feels confused and manipulated and can’t get the information to determine who is manipulating them: the surrogate, the brokerage, or the clinic.
Family values are one thing, but the market values of family-building practices are another entirely. Certain ideas about the exploitative nature of commercialized reproduction make the issue very much a twin to sex work—when people sell what we as a culture believe is not supposed to be sold, we may be especially inclined to see exploitation as an explanation. This treads on the ‘holy’ territory of the sexual “gift economy” (as Waldby notes in this issue), the commercialization of human flesh and intimate bonds. But what affiliations and obligations are enforced by demanding that sexual relations and reproduction both be transacted only within the “gift economy” rather than in a market where values are more directly negotiated? As Susan Markens’ analysis of surrogacy narratives in this issue points out, the recurring themes of “altruism” versus “commercialism/exploitation” are used to sort “good” from “bad” surrogates in popular narratives of surrogacy. Likewise, Kalindi Vora’s ethnographic work on surrogacy in India shows how stories about surrogacy toggle ambivalently between a discourse of altruism, and one of “social work,” which highlights surrogacy as an arrangement that improves surrogates’ lives. Rather than viewing surrogacy as either exploitative or empowering and altruistic, it seems useful to acknowledge that surrogates’ stories suggest that surrogacy is all of these things: altruistic, empowering, exploitative, and a way to make a better life for themselves and their families. In other words, it’s a lot like other forms of labor. We should therefore interrogate the impulse to see transactions in the reproductive market as always and inherently more degrading than other forms of transaction, negotiation, and even physical labor that people perform, instead paying close attention to the real circumstances of people who enter this reproductive market and offer their bodily services and even bodily tissues.
In this volume, Iris Lopez offers a refreshing new analysis of the experiences that Puerto Rican women in New York have had with sterilization. Refusing to see these women simply as either dupes or “free agents,” Lopez steers towards what she calls an “integral analysis” that incorporates a wide range of contextual factors into understanding how women exercise agency within constraints, making the best of the often difficult and oppressive circumstances they face. Such an integral approach could be an important corrective for much of the extant analysis of exploitation in the reproductive market.
Conversely, we should also avoid the urgings of those who would suggest there is inherently less exploitation here than in other industries, because the actors involved are motivated by benevolence, love, longing for children, and altruistic concern for infertile couples or orphaned and abandoned children. In their important analysis of what they call “the baby business,” Debora Spar and Anna Harrington argue that market practices and lack of regulation obscure the commercial interests and the huge financial flows involved in the global reproductive market. 3 I would suggest that this opacity may make it seem that the “consumers” / “receiving parents” are the ultimate beneficiaries in reproductive transactions; indeed, decrying the practice of “buying babies” implicitly points the finger of blame at intended parents rather than at the commercial entities (clinics, pharmaceutical companies, medical tourism firms) and affluent professionals (research scientists, clinicians, administrators) who build personal and family fortunes on this enterprise. When our analysis stops here, with these “middle people” in the “reproflow” (to use Inhorn’s term), we demonstrate our cultural distaste for the intersection of love and intimacy with money and overt trade—the companies escape the blame, perhaps, because they aren’t the ones mixing love with money.
The thrill of the reproductive justice movement is, for me, both its capaciousness and the way its practitioners combine a recognition that justice is indivisible with the equally crucial recognition that justice is about power. This is not a simple “feel good” alliance under a banner of diversity, but the kind of tough demand to face others in a human and empathic way. This means addressing reproduction not just as what we (whoever that may be) “need” to meet our own aspirations for love and family, especially children, but how our aspirations are caught up with one another, sometimes in symbolic ways, and sometimes in very material, and even bodily ways. What does this mean for building ethical alliances on the global level, as well as the radically local, face-to-face and body-to-body transactions of modern reproduction? It means recognizing “we are all in this together”—but some of us are standing on others of us, and some of us are squished very much in between. Our “choices” are not independent of one another, and we need new means to be accountable to that fact, new alliances that will help us face it in loving, responsible, and humane ways. We offer these pieces in hope that the history, analysis, and images here will bring us closer to that possibility.
