"At least I am not sleeping with anyone": Resisting the stigma of commercial surrogacy in India

Feminist Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 292-312

  Pande, Amrita ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79551596195     PISSN: 00463663     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Examples of this view are Gillian M. Goslinga-Roy, "Body Boundaries, Fiction of the Female Self: An Ethnographic Perspective on Power, Feminism, and Reproductive Technologies", Feminist Studies, 26 (Spring 2000): 113):113-40;
2. Helena Ragone, Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart (Boulder: Westview, 1994) ;
3. and Elly Teman, "Bonding with the Field: On Researching Surrogate Motherhood Arrangements in Israel", in Dispatches from the Field: Neophyte Ethnographers in a Changing World, ed. Andrew M. Gardner and David M. Hoffman (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2006), 167-81.
4. Lori Andrews, "The Aftermath of Baby M: Proposed State Laws on Surrogate Motherhood", Hastings Center Report 17 (October/November 1987): 31):31-40;
5. Elizabeth Anderson, "Is Women's Labor a Commodity?" Philosophy and Public Affairs 19, no. 1(1990):71-92;
6. and Janice Raymond Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle over Women's Freedom (San Francisco: Harper, 1993).
7. Susan Franklin and Caroline Roberts, Born and Made: An Ethnography of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) ;
8. Charis Thompson, Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007) ;
9. Susan Markens, Surrogate Motherhood and the Politics of Reproduction (Ber keley: University of California Press, 2007) ;
10. Elly Teman, such as "The Birth of a Mother: Mythologies of Surrogate Motherhood in Israel" (Ph. D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2006)
11. and "Knowing the Surrogate Body in Israel", in Surrogate Motherhood: International Per - spectives, ed. Rachel Cook and Shelley Day Schlater (London: Hart Press, 2003), 261-80.
12. I have written several articles as part of a larger project on commercial surrogacy in India that draw on my field research in Anand, Gujaret. See especially Amrita Pande, "Commercial Surrogate Mothering in India: Nine Months of Labor?" in Quest for Alternative Sociology, ed. Kenji Kosaka and Masahiro Ogino (Mel bourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2008), 71-88
13. and "Commercial Surrogacy in India: Manufacturing a Perfect Mother-Worker", Signs 35 (Summer 2010): 969):969-92.
14. See also Amelia Gentleman, "India Nurtures Business of sur rogate Motherhood", New York Times, 10 Mar. 2008;
15. and Abigail Haworth "Surro gate Mothers: Womb for Rent", Marie Claire, 10 Aug. 2007.
16. Examples of the radical feminist argument include Gena Corea, who describes a reproductive brothel in The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 276;
17. Raymond describes the growth of reproductive clinics in developing countries that specialize in sex determination, in Women as Wombs (143-44) ;
18. and Barbara Katz Rothman in "Reproductive Tech nology and the Commodification of Life", in Embryos, Ethics, and Women's Rights: Exploring the New Reproductive Technologies, ed. Elaine Hoffman Baruch, Amadeo F. D'Adamo Jr., and Joni Seager (New York: Haworth, 1988), 95-100 ("Can we look for ward to baby farms, with white embryos grown in young and Third world wom en?"100).
19. But see also Jyotsna Agnihotri Gupta, "Towards Transnational Feminisms: Some Reflections and Concerns in Relation to the Globalization of Reproductive Technologies", European Journal of Women's Studies 13, no. 1(2006):28.
20. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1963) ;
21. on infertility, Catherine Riessman, "Stigma and Everyday Resistance Practices: Childless Women in South India", Gender and Society 14, no. 1(2000):111-35;
22. Rose Weitz, Life with AIDS (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991) ;
23. Joseph Schneider and Peter Conrad, "In the Closet with Illness: Epilepsy, Stigma Potential, and Information Control", Social Problems 28, no. 1(1980):32-43;
24. on nonmedical conditions, Blake E. Ashforth and Glenn E. Kreiner", 'How Can You Do It?' Dirty Work and the Challenge of Constructing a Positive Identity", Academy of Management Review 24, no. 3(1999):413-34;
25. and William E. Thompson, "Handling the Stigma of Handling the Dead: Morticians and Funeral Directors", in Deviant Behavior 12(1991):524-44;
26. and on "dirty work", Everett Hughes, "Work and the Self", in Social Psychology at the Crossroads, ed. John H. Rohrer and Muzafer Sherif (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951).
27. Gresham M. Sykes and David Matza, "Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency", American Sociological Review 22, no. 6(1957):664-70;
28. and Goffman, Stigma.
29. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). For feminist research that draws on Scott's thesis
30. see especially, Ngai Pun, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in the Global Workplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) ;
31. and Michele Ruth Gamburd, The Kitchen Spoon's Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka's Migrant Housemaids (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
32. Padma Bhargav, "Gujarat Becomes the Preferred Medical Tourism Destina tion", Canada Free Press, 7 Dec. 2006, www.canadafreepress.com/ 2006/india120706.htm.
33. Krishnan Vidya, "Baby Biz: India Set to Trump Global Surrogacy Laws", Indian Express, 20 Oct. 2008.
34. Michele Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), 44.
35. Ashforth and Kreiner, "How Can You Do It?" 423.
36. Scholars of deviant occupations have also noticed the discursive strategy of "appealing to higher loyalties." For example, see William Thompson and Jackie Harred, "Topless Dancers: Managing Stigma in a Deviant Occupation", in Deviant Behavior: A Text-Reader in the Sociology of Deviance, ed. Delos H. Kelly (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996).
37. See especially Grace Chang, Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Factory (Cam bridge: South End Press, 2000) ;
38. and Melissa W. Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2006).
39. Monica Das Gupta, "Selective Discrimination against Female Children in Rural India", Population and Development Review 13, no. 1(1987):77-100.
40. According to Hindu mythology, Krishna was the eighth child of Devaki, sister of the cruel demon-king Kamsa. Narada, a sage, predicted that Kamsa would be killed by his nephew, so Kamsa killed his sister's first six children. The eighth child, Krishna, was secretly exchanged for a cowherd's daughter. Krishna was brought up by the cow - herd's wife, Yashoda, and most stories surrounding Lord Krishna in his infant years are about the loving bond shared between him and his surrogate mother, Yashoda.
41. Lila Abu-Lughod, "The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women", American Ethnologist 17, no. 1(1990):42.