Abstract
This ethnographic study of commercial gestational surrogacy in a small clinic in western India introduces the concept of “everyday forms of kinship”—kinship ties as the product of conscious everyday strategy, and, at times, as a vehicle for survival and/or resistance. The surrogates’ constructions of kinship as a daily process disrupt kinship theories that are based solely on biology. So, too, do they disrupt the patrilineal assumptions made in studies of Indian kinship. Kinship ties instead find their basis in shared bodily substances (blood and breast milk) and shared company, as well as in the labor of gestation and of giving birth. By emphasizing connections based on shared bodily substance and by de-emphasizing the ties the baby has with its genetic mother and the men involved in surrogacy (the genetic fathers and the surrogates’ husbands), the surrogates challenge established hierarchies in kin relationships—where genes and the male seed triumph above all. Simultaneously, by forming kinship ties with the baby, the intended mother, and other surrogates residing with them, surrogates in India form ties that cross boundaries based on class, caste and religion and sometimes even race and nation. By focusing on the notions of blood (shared substance) and sweat (labor) as basis for making kinship claims, this study both extends anthropological literature that emphasizes the non-procreative basis of kinship and feminist works that denaturalize kinship ties and make visible the labor involved in forming kinship ties and maintaining a family.
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Notes
In the absence of any formal laws regarding surrogacy in India, the clinic follows some “informal rules” for selecting surrogates: the woman should not be above the age of 40, should be medically fit with a healthy uterus, she should be married and should have borne at least one healthy child (Personal Interviews 2007).
This paper is part of a larger project exploring parallels between surrogacy in India as “labor.” Additional parallels between surrogacy in India and gendered forms of labor that I have explored in other papers include (1) Surrogacy as dirty labor (2) Surrogacy as bodylabor and (3) Surrogacy and factory labor.
In her pioneering work, Micaela di Leonardo (1987) introduced the concept of “kin work” to refer to the “conception, maintenance, and ritual celebration of cross-household kin ties” (1987, p. 442). Leonardo’s concept of kin work made visible an array of tasks culturally assigned to women. Kinship ties cannot be treated as the epiphenomena of production and reproduction or as part of leisure activities. The creation and maintenance of kin ties is work and largely women’s work. Maintaining contacts and a sense of family, Leonardo argued, takes time, intention, and skill and should be recognized as work.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my dissertation advisers and mentors, Millie Thayer, Robert Zussman and Joya Misra at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Elizabeth Hartmann at Hampshire College. I am indebted to Michael Burawoy and Arlie Hochschild for their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback. Finally, heartfelt thanks to the women who shared their surrogacy stories with me. Funding was provided in part by the International Dissertation Research Fellowship (Social Science Research Council) and The University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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Pande, A. “It May Be Her Eggs But It’s My Blood”: Surrogates and Everyday Forms of Kinship in India. Qual Sociol 32, 379–397 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-009-9138-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-009-9138-0