"India is our twins’ motherland:" transnational cross-racial gestational surrogacy and the maternal body in "IP memoirs"
- Memoirs by women (from the Global North) who have employed a gestational host (from the Global South) to become mothers are situated in a force field of intersecting discourses about gender, race and class. The article sheds light on the characteristic dynamics of this special sub-genre of ‘mommy lit’ (Hewett), labelled ‘IP memoirs,’ with a special emphasis on memoirs featuring transnational cross-racial gestational surrogacy arrangements in India. These texts do not only present narratives of painful infertility experiences, autopathographic self-blame, and scriptotherapeutic quests towards happiness, i.e. (a) child(ren), but also speak back to knotty issues such as potential exploitation, commodification, colonisation and disenfranchisement, as well as genetic essentialism in the context of systemic inequities.
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| Author: | Eva-Sabine Zehelein |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-550148 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/5917 |
| ISSN: | 2468-4414 |
| Parent Title (English): | Feminist encounters |
| Publisher: | Lectito Journals |
| Place of publication: | The Hague |
| Document Type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Year of Completion: | 2019 |
| Date of first Publication: | 2019/09/10 |
| Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
| Release Date: | 2020/07/27 |
| Tag: | IP memoir; India; autopathography; gestational surrogacy; matriography |
| Volume: | 3 |
| Issue: | 1-2, Art. 11 |
| Page Number: | 12 |
| First Page: | 1 |
| Last Page: | 12 |
| Note: | This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| HeBIS-PPN: | 467745579 |
| Institutes: | Neuere Philologien / Neuere Philologien |
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | 3 Sozialwissenschaften / 39 Bräuche, Etikette, Folklore / 390 Bräuche, Etikette, Folklore |
| Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
| Licence (German): |  Creative Commons - Namensnennung 4.0 |
