Transnational Commercial Surrogacy and the (Un)Making of Kin in India
seeks to explore the multiple relationships that emerge, are constructed and rejected in the course of participating in a commercial surrogacy arrangement. Drawing from conversations with foreign couples coming to India to hire Indian surrogates through Indian fertility clinics, Indian surrogates, lawmakers, and clinicians, this book engages with multiple facets of the transnational commercial surrogacy process: the politics of foreign gay couples seeking families through surrogacy in India, identity giving processes to the babies born to foreign couples, the clinicians understanding of kinship, the networks of commerce and surrogacy agents, and the ways in which the surrogate and her husband position themselves within the arrangement. Some of the questions that the book is exploring are: What are the mechanisms by which kinship is understood and practiced in a comparative and cross-cultural milieu? How can anthropology develop a more nuanced notion of interpersonal relationships in a global, transnational setting? How does biology and the social come to be configured within kinship in transnational commercial surrogacy? In this book, transnational commercial surrogacy is seen as a fertile ground for the examination of cross-cultural engagements with kinship and technology.