Kalindi Vora,
"Medicine, Markets and the Pregnant Body: Indian Commercial Surrogacy and Reproductive Labor in a Transnational Frame"
(page 5 of 5)
Medicine, the Body and Power in Decolonial India
Is the process of becoming biological workers for women who
participate in commercial surrogacy a process of neoliberal
subject-making that echoes processes in the colonial period, when
Western medical discourse functioned as part of European experiments
with modernity in their colonies?[12]
The precise answer cannot be
determined without extensive research over time, and in fact might need
to be written and theorized in part by the surrogates themselves. At the
least, the context of commercial surrogacy in India raises fascinating
questions that continue observations about the role of medical
discourse, the body, and power made since the time of British colonial
rule.
Putting Indian commercial surrogacy in the context of the scholarship
on the role of Western medicine in the colonial period suggests that the
body has been and remains an independent signifier and site of subaltern
modes of being even in the clinic, and even when surrogates themselves
at least partially reproduce and utilize the rhetoric of the Western
medicalized body. The work of David Arnold and Gyan Prakash tracks the
entanglements of empire, economics, science, power, and the formations
of culture and subjectivity during British colonial rule. In his work on
epidemic disease in 19th century India, David Arnold has demonstrated
how the body, and particularly the Indian colonial body, has
historically been a site of colonization and
conquest.[13] This
observation points to the corporeality of the British colonial project
in India, but also yields the body and discourse about the body as sites
for contestations of power in Indian history. Indian transnational
surrogacy provides an important lens to view ways that specific
technologies, instruments of measure and examination, and
materializations of the body continue to manifest contested power and
subjectivities within medicine as an institution and a global market.
For example, the re-formulation of the surrogates' bodies as empty
spaces that can be cultivated to re-produce Western society and Western
lives recapitulates the colonial epistemology of land as property, where
resources, including native labor, were used to sustain the metropole.
This contemporary racialized and gendered political economic
relationship rests upon a biopolitical order undergirded by access to
technology, in this case reproductive technology.
As political and economic structures in India have been re-organized
through independence and later neoliberalization, these precedents have
been recast in interesting ways that share continuity with what Arnold
observed in 19th century colonial structures of power and governance. We
can see evidence of the effort to create neoliberal subjects in the
coaching of surrogates into a particular relationship to their body and
its abstraction through the medical gaze into parts with specific
utility to the market. Similarly, the process of imagining surrogates
as workers through the alienation of pregnant women from the process of
pregnancy is encouraged by medical discourse and technology. In pointing
to the dimensions of transnational Indian commercial surrogacy that
operate as a neoliberalized form of reproductive labor, and specifically
as a form of biological labor, I aim to contribute to a feminist
analysis of the bioeconomy called for by Catherine Waldby and Melinda
Cooper in their discussion of human oöcyte vending. They describe such
labor as unrecognized as such, due to the fact that it is comprised of
giving clinics access to the productivity of women's bodies, rather than
consisting of specific tasks.[14]
They also note a larger dynamic in
the global economy for this "clinical labor," which, when taken together
with scholarship on the trade in human organs[15]
and clinical trial
subjects,[16] points to the
outsourcing of the clinical labor with the
highest risk and undesirability to populations in the Global South.
Masao Miyoshi[17]
has pointed out how transnational corporations,
central global neoliberalizing forces, have extended and rearticulated
colonialism, and by looking at the global market for biological
labor[18]
and clinical labor,[19]
it would seem that neoliberal logics
organizing labor markets similarly rearticulate colonial logics.
The meaning of surrogacy to different participants is complicated by
their different understandings of the process itself, as well as
different understandings, experiences, and expectations of the social
relations involved and generated in the clinic. Gestational surrogates
at the Manushi clinic are subjected to the medical gaze in a way that
they have not been in prior pregnancies, and are encouraged by clinic
staff to see their own bodies and pregnancies through the medical gaze
in order to work towards separating surrogacy from non-commercial
gestation, and to see surrogacy as a way to improve their lives
materially through the financial opportunity it provides. Yet surrogates
maintain that the divine aspects of their participation outweigh
material considerations. The Manushi clinic's surrogacy practice proves
to be a valuable lens for examining the intersection of reproductive
technologies, the worldviews and self-understandings of various
participants, as well as the general neoliberal disciplining of
biological reproduction as a form of labor.
Endnotes
1. Marcia C. Inhorn and Aditya Bharadwaj,
"Reproductively Disabled Lives: Infertility, Stigma, and Suffering in
Egypt and India," in Disability in Local and Global Worlds, B.
Ingstad and S.R. Whyte, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2007): 78-106. [Return to text]
2. A. Bharadwaj, "How Some Indian Baby Makers are
Made: Media Narratives and Assisted Conception in India,"
Anthropology & Medicine (2000) 7: 63-78. [Return to text]
3. Marcia C. Inhorn, R.Ceballa, and R. Nachtigall,
"Marginalized, Invisible, and Unwanted: American Minority Struggles with
Infertility and Assisted Conception," in Marginalised Reproduction:
Ethnicity, Infertility and Assisted Conception, N. Culley, N.
Hudson, F. Van Rooij, eds. (London: Earthscan, 2008); Debora Spar,
The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the
Commerce of Conception (Boston: Harvard Business School Press,
2006). [Return to text]
4. S. 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, Rayna Rapp, eds. (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1995): 78-102. [Return to text]
5. All identifying details of names and locations
have been altered. [Return to text]
6. Marcia C. Inhorn and Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli,
"Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Culture Change," Annual
Review of Anthropology (2008) 37: 177-196. [Return to text]
7. Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A
Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001):
57. [Return to text]
8. Amrita Pande, "It May be Her Eggs but it is my
Blood: Surrogates and Everyday Forms of Kinship in India,"
Qualitative Sociology 32.4 (2009): 379-397. [Return to text]
9. Amrita Pande, "Not an Angel, Not a Whore:
Surrogates as Dirty Workers in India," Indian Journal of Gender
Studies 16.2 (2009): 141-173. [Return to text]
10. B. Katz Rothman, Recreating Motherhood
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000): 29. [Return to text]
11. The vast majority of surrogates describe
themselves as Hindu, and though there have been some Christian
surrogates, the clinic directors report that they have only had one or
two Muslim women who inquired about the process of becoming a surrogate,
and explained this by saying that they don't often have Muslim women who
are interested for reasons of spiritual beliefs about the integrity of
the body. This can also be attributed to the fact that the clinic is
located in an area with rather high Hindu-Muslim communal tensions, and
the clinic directors are Hindu; their word of mouth recruiting strategy
only reaches people who are already connected with the clinic or with
past surrogates and as such would tend to be Hindu or Christian as
well. [Return to text]
12. Kalindi Vora,"Indian Transnational Surrogacy
and the Commodification of Vital Energy," Subjectivities 28.1
(2009): 266-278; Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the
Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1999): 13. [Return to text]
13. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993): 15;
"Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague," in Selected
Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988): 391-426; Gyan Prakash,
Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). [Return to text]
14. Catherine Waldby and Melinda Cooper, "The
Biopolitics of Reproduction," Australian Feminist Studies 23
(2008): 55, 57-73. [Return to text]
15. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "Commodity Fetishism in
Organs Trafficking," Body and Society 7.2-3 (2001): 31-62;
Lawrence Cohen, "The Other Kidney: Biopolitics Beyond Recognition,"
Body and Society 7.2-3 (2001): 9-29. [Return to text]
16. Adriana Petryna, "Globalizing Human Subjects
Research," in Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices,
Adriana Petryna, Andrew Lakoff, and Arthur Kleinman, eds. (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006); Kaushik Sundar Rajan, Biocapital: The
Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2006). [Return to text]
17. Masao Miyoshi, "A Borderless World? From
Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State,"
Critical Inquiry 19.4 (1993): 725-751. [Return to text]
18. Kalindi Vora, "Other's Organs and the
Production of Life: South Asian Domestic Labor and Human Kidneys,"
Postmodern Culture 19.1 (2009). [Return to text]
19. Catherine Waldby and Melinda Cooper, "The
Biopolitics of Reproduction," Australian Feminist Studies 23
(2008). [Return to text]
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