Amrita Pande

• University of Cape Town

STUDY QUESTION Which decision-making factors influence family building among permanently infertile couples? SUMMARY ANSWER Ethical, legal, and financial considerations outweigh genetic relatedness in decision-making, favouring domestic gestational surrogacy, if this were possible, over international options. WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY Permanent infert...

This book addresses urgent current debates on decolonisation by offering reimagined teaching and learning interventions for obtaining greater epistemic justice in the contemporary postcolonial university. At a time when debates on decolonisation have gained urgency in academic, civic and public spaces, this interdisciplinary collection by authors...

Study question How do permanently infertile couples experience surrogacy in cross border reproductive care (CBRC) and which considerations do they have in relation to this? Summary answer The couples find surrogacy treatment in CBRC satisfying but feel forced to use CBRC, and estranged from own country, missing reproductive body, and home What is...

Research question: How did permanently infertile couples Danish experience surrogacy when going abroad and what impact did the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic have on this? Design: A qualitative study was performed between May and September 2022. The in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 permanently infertile couple...

Does the transnational process of gamete selection challenge ways of mobilizing race and whiteness? Based on a mobile ethnography of the transnational fertility industry, I argue that fertility experts and intended parents (IP) co-produce the desirability of whiteness through "racial matching" for white, heterosexual IP, and "strategic hybridizatio...

In this paper, I use a multi-scalar approach to understand the full repercussions of a national ban on the transnational practice of surrogacy in India. I use my ethnographic findings to analyse the effects of the ban on the local and the national. At the level of the local I revisit a surrogacy clinic and hostel in India, after a decade of my firs...

In this article, I discuss cross-border egg provision by young South African women as a form of traveling biolabor that is critically about embodiment, and aspirations for mobility and cosmopolitanism. The frame of biolabor challenges the frames of altruism/commodification, and choice/coercion, and instead highlights the desires of egg providers, f...

Loose women are those whose behaviour and lifestyles do not fit the gendered norm of dependency and male patronage. Despite the elusive nature of the adjective ‘loose’, loose women are often visualised as sexually unrestrained, who need to be codified andcontrolled. The looseness of this category, and yet its strategic and historical use to restrai...

New Parental leave policy in South Africa and its implications

(White) Women traveling from South Africa to all parts of the world to "donate" their eggs.

‘Unsuspecting young South African women are heading overseas to donate their eggs to infertile couples and earn a free international holiday in the process. But, at what cost?’ This was the voice-over during a news show in South Africa in 2016 that described the phenomenon of young white South African women going abroad to ‘donate’ their eggs. Thro...

This article examines new nodes of migrants' desire to disrupt the heteronormative focus on married mothers in the literature on migration and gender and the reification of normative notions of both gender and sexuality. It demonstrates that in the presence of intense raced and gendered surveillance of both private and public spaces in Lebanon, mig...

In this ethnography of Bangladeshi men living and working in South Africa, I draw on the intersection of three sets of literatures—masculinities studies, mobility studies, and the emerging body of work on migrant masculinities— to argue that migrant mobility shapes and is shaped by relational performances of racialized masculinities. I analyze thre...

When mainstream theories around globalization and outsourcing analyse the increased mobility of goods, labour, technology and capital across borders or reflect upon the changing dynamics of nation states and neoliberal policies, gender and reproduction are seldom a focus. In this chapter, I invert the frame to analyse how global processes affect an...

In this essay, I complicate the notion of commercial surrogacy as reproductive labour by highlighting two fundamentally paradoxical characteristics of this labour market. One, that a market in assisted reproduction and pro-natalism is booming in an otherwise aggressively anti-natalist state and two, that a market that literally produces humans and...

This chapter analyses how two sets of women involved in commercial surrogacy—the gestational mothers and the intended mothers—perform ‘kinning’ rituals to emphasize their kin ties with the baby. Gestational mothers emphasize the blood and sweat of giving birth, while intended mothers emphasize their genetic connection with the baby and/or the pain...

Surrogacy is a term commonly used for the practice of assisted reproduction in which a woman gestates and gives birth to a child for others to raise. The practice of using another woman to bear a child is not new. Historically women in socially subservient positions have served as surrogates. With development in technology, conception could be deli...

India’s commercial surrogacy market literally produces humans and human relationships while sustaining global racial reproductive hierarchies. The post-colonial state’s aggressive anti-natalism echoes the broader global population control agenda framing the global South’s high fertility rates as a ‘global danger’ to be controlled at whatever cost,...

Tripoli, Lebanon, June 2010: It is a typical Sunday afternoon at the Tripoli mall in North Lebanon. Most shops are closed, except for a few odd cafés where one can buy coffee and surf on the Internet. What is curious is the complete absence of Lebanese shoppers. All one can see are Filipino women, dressed up in their Sunday best. Some are smoking,...

In 2006, i came across a short newspaper article about the emergence of a new industry in India—the industry of paid birth or commercial surrogacy. People from all over the world could now hire Indian women to give birth to babies for them, for a fraction of the cost of surrogacy elsewhere and with no government regulations. After some digging arou...

In this paper I extend the literature on ‘illegal’ migrant workers by connecting the macro-level discussion on policies to the lived experiences of migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Lebanon. I analyse two seemingly contrasting categories of ‘illegal’ migrant workers. First, the MDWs working illegally and desperate to return home, who are unable to...

The Middle East is the largest destination of migrant workers in the world and has over 7.4 million migrant women; most are employed as domestic workers (Oishi, 2005, p. 43). Despite the large numbers and diverse histories of these migrations, the existing literature about migrant domestic work in this area tends to focus on the (often abusive) rel...

A recent report on migrant domestic work in Lebanon has cited psychological disorder among Lebanese “Madams” as the leading cause of violence against their migrant maids (Jureidini, 2011, www.kafa.org.lb/StudiesPublicationPDF/PRpdf38.pdf). This report typifies much of the existing scholarship on the experiences of migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in...

In this study I highlight the spatial exclusions that migrant domestic workers (MDWs) experience in Lebanon. I argue that migrant domestic workers constantly challenge such spatial exclusions by using the exact spaces that they are excluded from as the bases for a meso-level of resistances—strategic acts that cannot be classified as either private...

In this ethnography of transnational commercial surrogacy in a small clinic in India, the narratives of two sets of women involved in this new form of reproductive travel – the transnational clients and the surrogates themselves – are evaluated. How do these women negotiate the culturally anomalous nature of transnational surrogacy within the unusu...

Feminist analysts of women in global production have demonstrated that “good” labor is not found ready‐made. It is produced through the practices and rhetorics of the shop floor. In this ethnographic study of commercial surrogacy in a small clinic in western India, I argue that a good commercial surrogate, like a good laborer of global production,...

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 theor...

In this study of surrogate mothers in Gujarat, India, I introduce the concept of ‘sexualised care work’ to describe a new type of care work—commercial surrogacy—that is similar to existing forms of care work but is stigmatised in the public imagination, among other reasons, because of its parallels with sex work. I use the oral histories of the sur...