Rebecca Jordan-Young,
"Introduction"
(page 6 of 6)
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.[21]
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.[22] 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.[23] 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.
Endnotes
1. Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves:
Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1996); Quoted in Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life
Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First
Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2007):
17. [Return to text]
2. Ibid. [Return to text]
3. Loretta J. Ross,
Understanding
Reproductive Justice (Sistersong Women of
Color Reproductive Justice Collective, 2006). [Return to text]
4. Ana María García, La Operación (New
York: Cinema Guild, 1982). [Return to text]
5. Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class
(New York: Vintage Books, 1981). [Return to text]
6. Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body
(New York: Pantheon, 1997); Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the
Reproductive Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press,
2003); and Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena
Gutiérrez, Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive
Justice (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004). [Return to text]
7. Audre Lorde, I Am Your Sister: Black Women
Organizing Across Sexualities (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of
Color Press, 1985): 6. [Return to text]
8. Lorde, 4-5. [Return to text]
9. Dawn Turner Trice,
"Anti-Abortion billboard campaign opens in Englewood,"
Chicago Tribune 29 March 2011. [Return to text]
10. Loretta J. Ross,
"Fighting
the Black Anti-Abortion Campaign: Trusting Black Women,"
On the Issues Magazine (Winter 2011). [Return to text]
11. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, eds.,
Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of
Reproduction (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995):
3. [Return to text]
12. Shellee Colen, "'Like a Mother to Them':
Stratified Reproduction and West Indian Childcare Workers and Employers
in New York," in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics
of Reproduction, Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, eds. (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1995): 78. [Return to text]
13. Ginsburg and Rapp, 1. [Return to text]
14. Emily Galpern, Assisted Reproductive
Technologies: Overview and Perspective Using a Reproductive Justice
Framework (Oakland, CA: Center for Genetics and Society, 2007). [Return to text]
15. Greta Gaard, "Reproductive Technology, or
Reproductive Justice?: An Ecofeminist, Environmental Justice Perspective
on the Rhetoric of Choice," Ethics and the Environment 15.2
(2010): 103-129. [Return to text]
16. Wendy Chavkin, "Introduction: The
Globalization of Motherhood," in The Globalization of Motherhood:
Deconstructions and Reconstructions of Biology and Care, Wendy
Chavkin and JaneMaree Maher, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2010). [Return to text]
17. Rebecca Jordan-Young, Brain Storm: The
Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2010). [Return to text]
18. See also Chavkin, 2010. [Return to text]
19. See Debora Spar, The Baby Business: How
Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception
(Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2006), as well as Spar and
Harrington reprinted in this issue. [Return to text]
20. Marcia Inhorn, "'Assisted' Motherhood in
Global Dubai: Reproductive Tourists and Their Helpers," in The
Globalization of Motherhood: Deconstructions and Reconstructions of
Biology and Care, Wendy Chavkin and JaneMaree Maher, eds. (New York:
Routledge, 2010): 194. [Return to text]
21. Aimee Carrillo Rowe, "Be Longing: Toward a
Feminist Politics of Relation," NWSA Journal 17.2 (2005): 16. [Return to text]
22. Jennifer Nash, "Re-thinking
Intersectionality," Feminist Review 89 (2008): 1-15. [Return to text]
23. Spar, 2006. [Return to text]
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