Discounted Life by Sharmila Rudrappa
Brand: NYU Press - IPS
Product Description
Winner American Sociological Association Asia and Asian America Section Best Book on AsiaTransnational Asia Finalist 2015 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems India is the top provider of surrogacy services in the world with a multimillion dollar surrogacy industry that continues to grow exponentially as increasing numbers of couples from developed nations look for wombs in which to grow their babies. Some scholars have exulted transnational surrogacy for the possibilities it opens for infertile couples while others have offered bioethical cautionary tales rebuked exploitative intended parents or lamented the exploitation of surrogate mothersbut very little is known about the experience of and transaction between surrogate mothers and intended parents outside the lens of the many agencies that control surrogacy in India. Drawing from rich interviews with surrogate mothers and egg donors in Bangalore as well as twenty straight and gay couples in the U.S. and Australia Discounted Life focuses on the processes of social and market exchange in transnational surrogacy. Sharmila Rudrappa interrogates the creation and maintenance of reproductive labor markets the function of agencies and surrogacy brokers and how women become surrogate mothers. Is surrogacy solely a labor contract for which the surrogate mother receives wages or do its meanings and import exceed the confines of the market Rudrappa argues that this reproductive industry is organized to control and disempower women workers and yet her interviews reveal that by and large the surrogate mothers in Bangalore found the experience life affirming. Rudrappa explores this tension and the lived realities of many surrogate mothers whose deepening bodily commodification is paradoxically experienced as a revitalizing life development. A detailed and moving study Discounted Life delineates how local labor markets intertwine with global reproduction industries how Bangalores surrogate mothers make sense of their participation in reproductive assembly lines and the remarkable ways in which they negotiate positions of power for themselves in progressively untenable socioeconomic conditions. show more
Condition : New
Author : Sharmila Rudrappa
Weight : 452.94
Publisher : NYU Press IPS
Language : English
EAN : 9781479825325
ISBN10 : 1479825328
Format : Paperback Softback
Date of Publication : 20241008
Place of Publication : United States
Pagination : 224 Pages
Dimensions : 155 X 229 X 20