(Not) a Mother, (Not) a Worker: Rethinking Gestational Surrogacy Beyond the Binary
(2025) 58Th International Congress of Americanists — Location: Novi Sad (30.June.2025)
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- Surrogacy, in various shapes and forms, continues to provoke contested interpretations. This ranges from researchers perceiving commercial gestational surrogates as mothers and advocating for open adoption of the baby together with the intended parents - to seeing surrogates in purely market terms as ‘womb renters’. In the grey area of reproductive labour in which commercial surrogates operate, it is essential to go beyond (and against) the binaries of family vs market, love vs labour and motherhood vs work. This theoretical communication seeks to move beyond such dichotomies by situating commercial gestational surrogacy within the complex context of reproductive labour in contemporary capitalism. Drawing insights from feminist political economy, decolonial feminism, feminist ethics of care, and critical kinship studies, this presentation stresses the need to analyse surrogacy through the lens of the international gendered division of labour and explore how surrogacy practices intersect with class, race, gender, and global power dynamics. Moreover, it urges researchers to incorporate concepts of plasticity and mobility of non-genetic kin and subvert traditional notions of motherhood, embedded in the idea that bearing and gestating children make one a mother. It challenges the scholarly approach to surrogates’ experiences as collective and universal and aims to approach them as individual and versatile. Expanding on these ideas, this presentation introduces the theoretical framing of surrogacy in my PhD project Caring about Care: Investigating Work-Life Conditions of Transnational Latin American Surrogate and Childcare Workers which comparatively looks into the differences and similarities between surrogates in Colombia and childcarers in Belgium.
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Bajs, V. (2025). (Not) a Mother, (Not) a Worker: Rethinking Gestational Surrogacy Beyond the Binary. 58Th International Congress of Americanists, Novi Sad. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/260878