Sex selection and commercial surrogacy are practices pursued in the full
glare of exposure, demystification, and critique. The female-child sex
ratio continues to decline while commercial surrogacy has become a
fledgling (trans)national industry. Both practices produce new subjects
and agents of self-directed violence, and can be tied to the inequities
of 'growth' without redistribution. Yet sex selection is usually
represented as a fixture of tradition and commercial surrogacy is recast
as a libertarian story of market empowerment.
The book attempts, first, to work through and against the common
perceptions, rationales, and imaginaries that underwrite these
practices, and to analyse the familial, social and market practices, the
state policies, the agential modes and retraditionalizing processes
which connect them. Second, it attempts to seize the formative
conjunctions in the restructuring of patriarchal familial, state and
(trans)national market regimes, and to define the confluences and
contradictions between them. The argument revolves around the
crystallization of a (trans)national reproductive formation grounded in
conception and contraception that can be mapped on the relations between
waged and non-waged domestic-procreative labor which converge in
accumulation processes in the transition to a neoliberal economy. It
considers the implications of post-Fordist redistributions of labor,
manufacture and services, as well as of familial constraint and market
emancipation. Given the transnational shaping of social reproduction,
and of social and postsocial bodies, it asks if patriarchal practices
can be defined solely on national or regional lines, and argues that
neoliberal capitalism puts both fixities and flexibilities into play.
The book shows how the implications of selective procreation extend far
beyond the domestic domain, and reformulates the ground of left-feminist
critique towards theorizing an 'open contemporaneity' that can still
account for systemic structures.
