“This place is no better than a jail”: The geographies of surrogate houses in India

Bhattacharjee, Dalia (2023) “This place is no better than a jail”: The geographies of surrogate houses in India. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. ISSN 0263-7758 | 1472-3433

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Abstract

The commercial surrogacy industry in India administers in a way where the women working as surrogate mothers live in surrogate houses. It is a space deliberately designed and run by either the fertility clinics or a third-party agency, where the surrogate mothers are required to stay for the entire gestation period. The surrogacy industry in India utilizes the vulnerability of couples who do not or cannot have children, in order to prepare valuable and docile bodies which can serve as a platform for accumulation of wealth. This paper draws from an ethnographic inquiry of the surrogate housing facilities functioning in two cities in India: Anand and Bengaluru. The paper will argue that the surrogacy industry in India produces geographies of carceral domesticity by deploying disciplining apparatuses governing the day-to-day mundane activities of the reproductive laborers. The medical experts often resort to the narrative that these women cannot be trusted with the safety of the babies they carry, hence, justifying their confinement in the surrogate house. Further, the possibility that the surrogate mothers may develop emotional attachments to the babies they carry, which in turn, will endanger the surrogacy arrangements, also runs through such narratives of regulation

Item Type: Article
Keywords: Carceral domesticity | Reproductive labor | Surrogacy | Emotions | Ethnography | India
Subjects: Physical, Life and Health Sciences > Environmental Science, Policy and Law
Social Sciences and humanities > Social Sciences > Social Sciences (General)
Social Sciences and humanities > Social Sciences > Geography
JGU School/Centre: Jindal Global Law School
Depositing User: Subhajit Bhattacharjee
Date Deposited: 13 Dec 2023 10:01
Last Modified: 13 Dec 2023 10:01
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231216525
URI: https://pure.jgu.edu.in/id/eprint/7040

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