Surrogacy and dystopian positionality: narrative reproduction between speculative fiction and chick lit

Introduction

“[T]here’s nothing in it that we as a species have not done, aren’t doing now, or don’t have the technological capability to do,” Margaret Atwood states about The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), probably the most well-known Anglophone novel about surrogacy [1]. Very early on, in 1986, Atwood, a white Canadian woman at the outset of an immensely successful career as an internationally renowned writer, thus chose to speak about “[us] as a species” in a way which can be understood as a warning against dystopian myopia. In spite of this, her novel – as well as its TV adaptation, its 2019 literary sequel The Testaments or, more generally, speculative and dystopian novels which deal with the trope of surrogacy – has rarely been contextualised within the existing globalised surrogacy industry.^[1] Instead, almost 40 years after the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale, the dystopian Republic of Gilead which the novel evokes is often compared to the situation in the United States in the Trump era as well as after the decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health case, and iconic pieces of clothing inspired by the novel have frequently featured during public protests against the curtailment of reproductive rights in the United States and other countries in the Global North.

As this article will show, this geopolitical bias in readings of surrogate fiction is the rule rather than the exception, and it is intricately linked with the question of genre. In fact, it seems that with regard to Anglophone novels on surrogacy, one reader’s dystopia is another writer’s chick lit – a constellation of genres which potentially de-emphasises exploitative forms of surrogacy already in existence. While well-known speculative and dystopian novels on surrogacy, such as The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, Joanne Ramos’ The Farm (2019) and Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017), are all set in a future North America, there is a small corpus of texts which also negotiate surrogacy but which are mostly set in India. These are Kishwar Desai’s Origins of Love (2012), Meera Syal’s The House of Hidden Mothers (2015) and Amulya Malladi’s A House for Happy Mothers (2016). Whereas some widely received fictional narratives about surrogacy are thus set in North America and negotiated in a dystopian form or read as speculative fiction,^[2] the small corpus of novels negotiating commercial surrogacy in India all contain chick-lit elements.

Building on this observation, this article argues that, firstly, an analysis of fiction on surrogacy is particularly interesting when it comes to understanding global perspectives in socio-cultural imaginaries of gendered biomedicine. Secondly, the case study reveals that more work is needed to conceptualise dystopian positionality. In fact, what the analysis of surrogate fictions demonstrates is that speculative and dystopian texts about surrogacy often invite Western-centric interpretations in which the dystopian element is mostly configured in temporal terms, whereas aspects of space and positionality tend to be neglected or universalised according to hegemonic ideas. While speculative or dystopian fiction is often read as negotiating the intersection between past, present and future [2], the implicit geographical relocation in many speculative or dystopian texts – meaning that a story which is set in the Global North features conditions similar to those already existent in the Global South – often receives much less attention. By reading the small corpus of recent fiction dealing with commercial gestational surrogacy against the backdrop of two widely received speculative novels on surrogacy, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm,^[3] this article discusses the complexities in choice of genre and setting. These complexities are highly insightful as they reveal that readings of surrogate fictions not only frequently feature temporal blind spots surrounding the historical nexus between surrogacy and slavery [3], but that they also often tend to be based on the creation of an essentialising “we” [4] in readers in the Global North. Without denying dystopian fiction’s potential of raising awareness for the high stratification of reproduction concomitant with biocapitalist globalisation, this article focuses on different manifestations of dystopian myopia in order to illustrate the great extent to which popular fictionalisations of infertility rely on forms of narrative reproduction which are not only highly gendered, classed and racialised, but also further complicated by globalised reproductive tourism. Further unfolding the generic complexities of surrogate fictions, the article then explores the extent to which the chick-lit mode in the texts on Indian surrogacy, which draws heavily on realist and ethnographic elements, blunts the critical edge of these elements by embedding them in hetero- and bionormative teleologies aligned with biocapitalist consumer market ideologies. As hetero- and bionormative teleologies thus play a crucial role in deflecting a critical representation of exploitative forms of surrogacy, the article then discusses the interconnections between generic conventions and hetero- and bionormativity. The article closes by reflecting on the problems which might arise when attempts to deconstruct heteronormative assumptions about reproduction do not simultaneously also question the – often stratifying – implications of bionormativity.

Surrogacy and narrative reproduction between speculative fiction and chick lit

Reproductive anxiety is the stuff that many dystopias are made of. From classics such as Charlotte Haldane’s Man’s World (1926), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937) to Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild” (1984) and Lilith’s Brood (1987–9), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985/Hulu adaptation 2017–) and The Testaments (2019), P.D. James’ The Children of Men (1992/Children of Men 2006), Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks (2018), Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017), Joanne Ramos’ The Farm (2019) and beyond: this list adumbrates that representations of coerced and stratified reproduction continue to trigger dystopian and speculative imaginaries, and that there is a massive rise in speculative fiction which negotiates infertility [5]. At first glance, this increased interest in infertility might appear counter-intuitive given that in the context of climate change, population control rhetoric has gained traction again. As both population control rhetoric and the trope of infertility are frequently negotiated in racialised and classist terms [6], however, the emergence of speculative fiction dealing with the seemingly contradictory topics of coerced reproduction and infertility is not surprising. In fact, what this ostensibly paradoxical simultaneity shows is that, even if the great number of contemporary texts negotiating infertility in dystopian terms are often read as reiterating current fears of extinction, these fears of extinction are not all-encompassing, but – following racialised and classist logics – are closely connected to the potential loss of white supremacy and class privilege. It is thus not human infertility at large which informs these fears, but questions about “reproductive futurity;” that is, questions about whose reproductive behaviour will shape the future in what ways, as well as the more general question of who will populate the future [5].

In texts which approach the management of reproduction and infertility from the angle of surrogacy, this tension in dystopian visions, in which the focus on human extinction as a question of racial and class hegemony relies on a disregard for the future fate of the anthropos [7], is particularly visible. As this article argues, this tension is intricately linked to both choice of genre and the interplay between temporal, spatialising and positionalising genre conventions – that is, to a stronger emphasis on temporal than on spatial and positional parameters in readings of speculative and dystopian fiction. In a much-cited definition, Lyman Tower Sargent identifies the role of both time and space as constituent elements of dystopian texts, which render “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which the reader lived” [8]. Although this definition explicitly mentions “time and space,” speculative fiction and dystopia have still been conceptualised mainly in the temporal terms of a “what if this goes on (in the Global North)”. To name but two prominent examples: in his definitions of utopia, dystopia and science fiction, Peter Fitting writes that

Like Sargent, (…) I think that it is important to distinguish the utopia (a term which I use to mean the eutopia or positive utopia) from the dystopia which follows the model of ‘if this goes on’: a future in which some aspect of the present had continued and worsened. [9]

On a similar note, Janet Fiskio defines speculative fiction as extrapolating “from current events and political and social formations and images the consequences of present policies when projected into the future.” [10]

While secondary literature on speculative and dystopian fiction abounds, these examples nonetheless display a more general tendency: conceptualisations of dystopia mostly rely on temporal extrapolation, whereas spatialising or positionalising extrapolations remain much more implicit. In itself, this focus on futurity in scholarship might already be seen as a form of narrative reproduction, and more conceptualisations of the nexus of dystopian time, space, positionality are needed. One useful starting point for these is Maria Varsam’s perceptive chapter on “concrete dystopia” and the relationship between dystopian fiction, the history of slavery and slave narratives [11]. Although Varsam’s analysis also mostly draws on temporal parameters, her theorising nonetheless provides important insights regarding the role of spatial dimensions. Varsam conceptualises a “dystopian continuum” which “(a) spans the time-space axis, (b) links fact and fiction in a non-representational mode, and (c) expands the generic category of dystopian fiction […]”. What holds this dystopian continuum together is the device of defamiliarisation, that is, a cognitive estrangement of the world which results in readers’ questioning of their own perception [12]: “defamiliarization makes us see the world anew, not as it is but as it could be; it shows the world in sharp focus in order to bring out conditions that exist already but which, as a result of our dulled perception, we can no longer see.” [11] Varsam thus concludes that

The device of defamiliarization, then, may serve in dystopian fiction as a formal strategy that creates a bridge between certain elements of reality and fiction, the historic and the synchronic, on the one hand, the ahistorical and the diachronic, on the other. This makes it possible to draw parallels between disparate historical events far removed from one another in space and time and to make connections between similar events placed in disparate contexts. Through the comparisons across time – future, present, and past – and across space, the author encourages the reader to critique the historical process and to assess what similarities and differences can be drawn. [11]

In a postcolonial context, this conceptualisation of the dystopian continuum held together by defamiliarisation is certainly convincing with regard to temporal dimensions. However, in contrast to histories and possible futures, which are prominent elements in the literature on dystopia, global geopolitics and the question of how dystopian representations of the Global North interact with the social realities in spaces beyond the Global North have received scant attention. Further differentiation regarding the spatialising and positionalising dimensions of defamiliarisation is thus necessary. These dimensions are particularly interesting as, in addition to hinging on the reader’s positionality and their own epistemic frame of reference, the process of defamiliarisation is also intricately linked with the forms of empathy which a text evokes. Thus, where on the dystopian continuum a reading of a text is situated, heavily depends on positionality and on the degree to which the text manages to evoke not only idiopathic empathy, but also heteropathic empathy. While the former is a form of empathy which is “essentially self-referential, grounded on shared reality,” the latter form of empathy also allows for “identification with an alien body or experience.” [13] When thinking about the potential of defamiliarisation as a means “of social critique via renewed perception” [11], the reader consequently needs to consider the limitations imposed by their own epistemic frame of reference and abilities for empathy. If, as Varsam writes, by means of defamiliarisation the reader is to see “the world anew, not as it is but as it could be”, they thus need to carefully consider that it is in fact not “the world” which they see anew, but one part of the world as they know it. Consequently, if “[i]n [science fiction] and utopian writing, […] the real world is made to appear ‘strange’ in order to challenge the reader’s complacency toward accepted views of history and awaken, through the ‘truth’ of fiction, a new perception of the connections between history and the present world” [11], the reader should also be aware of the potential danger of hegemonic universalisation in the process of defamiliarisation.

If one is to better comprehend surrogate fictions in times of biocapitalist globalisation, then, one also needs to reconceptualise common understandings of the geopolitical spaces in which dystopian realities are playing out. Readings of reproductive speculative fiction which focus almost exclusively on temporalities while disregarding spatialised dimensions and positionality neglect important insights which can be gleaned from such speculative texts. This observation is in no way meant as a call for a new mimeticism in readings of speculative fiction. Instead, it calls attention to the fact that definitions of what counts as speculative or dystopian fiction are still predicated on an implicit inverted mimeticism, which – building on the assumption that the world depicted is not yet existent [11] – is often connected to an unquestioned hegemonic positionality. In her consideration of what counts as speculative fiction, Johanna Pundt provides a useful comment which also pertains to this article’s discussion on the question of positionality, mimetics, dystopian fiction and the potentially Western-centric bias which results if perspective and positionality are not carefully considered:

Evaluations of a text’s suggested non-realist and/or anti-mimetic character necessitate a more critical consideration of the perspectives from which these statements are made. As Durix pointedly asks, “[h]ow can we judge the mimetic quality when we are almost ignorant of the reference?” (1998, 57). Thus, any claims following the logic that ‘speculative fiction covers any story that deliberately violates the bounds of reality as we currently understand it’ (Urbanski 2007, 8) need to address who is included in this essentializing ‘we’. [4]

Analysing the example of representations of surrogacy, this article thus serves as a warning against potential oversights which occur when certain phenomena are only conceptualised temporally: if dystopias set in the Global North are solely read as temporal “what ifs,” these readings run the risk of Western-centrism when existent phenomena are only deemed dystopian if the setting is a future version of the Global North, or if they happen to somebody who evokes idiopathic empathy in a reader who is situated in the Global North. Following such an understanding, readings of speculative and dystopian fiction potentially perpetuate what Gaia Giuliani – also alluding to an essentialising “we” – calls “the (post)colonial divide between places of disaster and places for disaster” [14]:

The former, where disaster is a foreseeable and avoidable occurrence, are inhabited by the ‘we’. The latter, where the ‘we’ believes disaster to be endemic and essentially linked to backwardness, poverty and lack of knowledge and skills, are inhabited by the non-civilised.

In the following, this article consequently focuses on blind spots in readings of two novels on surrogacy which have received wide public attention in the last few years, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm.

Positional futurities: readings of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm

While The Handmaid’s Tale can be read as highlighting the limits set by positionality and perspective, interpretations of Atwood’s – and Ramos’ – texts nonetheless often have a much narrower focus which can result in blind spots and a universalisation of hegemonic perspectivation. The first blind spot is a historical one, and it ties in with the fact that, although the nexus between surrogacy and stratified reproduction takes centre stage in both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm, references to the long historical entanglement of slavery and surrogacy in the United States are rare in both novels. The second blind spot, which will be discussed afterwards, stems from contemporary processes of writing out non-hegemonic perspectives.

Published in the years 1985 and 2019 and thus against fundamentally different historical backdrops, both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm are set in the United States and explore surrogacy as a form of stratified reproduction. Set in the future after an environmental catastrophe, The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a totalitarian state called the Republic of Gilead. In Gilead – a hierarchical white supremacist society with a soaring infertility rate – biological reproduction is organised through ritualised rape as well as forced surrogacy and aims at socially reproducing the stratified society and the privilege of those in power. Those white women who are still able to bear children are forced to become “handmaids,” that is, surrogate mother-workers serving the ruling class.

Filipina-American writer Joanne Ramos’ debut novel The Farm is set in the near future and conjures up a luxury surrogacy facility which offers those who are privileged not only a remedy for fertility problems, but also promises streamlined processes of gestation as well as the production of optimised offspring. In its negotiation of the intersection of commercial surrogacy and stratified reproduction, the novel represents the commercialisation of surrogacy through the eyes of the text’s four different focalisers: two of whom work as surrogate mother-workers, one who functions as a recruiter for the facility and one who serves as CEO of the latter. Although The Farm’s speculative gesture limits itself to assembling a number of existing elements – such as surrogacy centres and technologies of reproduction, surveillance and self-optimisation – into a luxury surrogacy facility situated in the United States, the novel has repeatedly been reviewed as one of the many recent “fertility dystopia[s]” [15], [16], [17], or interpreted either as a work of speculative fiction [18] or of feminist dystopia and dystopian realism [2].

Although both novels thus negotiate the issue of surrogacy on US-American territory, neither of them explicitly evokes the historical entanglement of forced surrogacy and chattel slavery in the United States. In US-American chattel slavery’s system of commodified reproduction, enslaved women were coerced into surrogacy through the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem. Meaning “that which is brought forth follows the womb” [3, 19], this doctrine dictated that the children of enslaved women follow their mothers’ status [20]. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the mention of the enslavement of Black people limits itself to one scene during one of the rare occasions in which Offred, one of the Handmaids and the novel’s autodiegetic narrator, is allowed to watch television – that is, once a month before the ritualised rape takes place:

“Resettlement of the Children of Ham is continuing on schedule,” says the reassuring pink face, back on screen. Three thousand have arrived this week in National Homeland One, with another two thousand in transit. How are they transporting that many people at once? Trains, buses? We are not shown any pictures of this. National Homeland One is in North Dakota. Lord knows what they’re supposed to do, once they get there. Farm, is the theory. [21]

Presented as an item in the regime’s official news programme, this mention of contemporary Black enslavement is conveyed by means of an ekphrastic and co-textual framing, which draws attention to the suppression of people and information on which the white supremacist ideology of those in power relies. In the paragraphs leading up to this quotation, Offred states that she “struggle[s] against him” [21], that is, the anchor-man, as she finds neither him nor his news programme trustworthy. She repeatedly utters her doubts as to the validity and completeness of the news shown on television. Through the ekphrasis of the news on television, the text thus not only illustrates how partial perspectivation is used as a means of control by a totalitarian racist state, but it also self-referentially highlights how the erasure of Black people serves as a white supremacist instrument of power. In order to draw additional attention to the practices of representation and their role in the history of white supremacist violence, the excerpt further alludes to the transatlantic slave trade and enslavement on the plantations, and it juxtaposes the Children of Ham – who are not represented except as a high collective number – with “the pink face” of the white individual anchor-man.^[4]

While explicit allusions to the relationship between surrogacy and slavery are thus scant in the novel, The Handmaid’s Tale can be read as complementing the allusions to the entangled history of surrogacy and slavery on the level of form – especially its intertextual borrowings of the generic conventions of the slave narrative. Ruth McElroy argues that The Handmaid’s Tale “is not only a narrative about surrogate motherhood, but it is itself enabled and structured by surrogacy, most obviously through the enabling role played by ‘race’ and by African American literary form.” [22] She adds that “[t]he formal structure of The Handmaid’s Tale is made possible by the surrogate enabler genre or intertext of African American slave narratives and spirituals, as evinced by the use of hymns, underground railroads and the first person narrative itself.” [22] However, such a reading of the novel as a neo-slave narrative – in which white women experience a kind of oppression which resembles the historical dehumanisation of enslaved Black women – has also prompted widespread criticisms of the novel as an instance of white feminist writing [23]. While the novel thus provokes complex discussions regarding the role of racialisation, which necessitate further reflections on the ascription and perception of Blackness [3], the colour-blindness of the Hulu adaptation can be criticised more straightforwardly:

In 2017, Hulu series director Bruce Miller took blithe erasure of black women’s historic connection with surrogacy to the next level. Announcing that he had “simplified” the story, Miller presented an image of a society with no race, class, or history: a society in which “fertility trumps all.” His interpretation of Gilead, he said, is “diverse” and “postracist”; there, the value of this thing “fertility” is somehow completely abstract. [24]^[5]

Thus excluding the questions of race and class, the series disambiguates the very gaps and ambiguities in the novel which can be said to allow for different – and differentiated – interpretations.

If the novel The Handmaid’s Tale can be read as self-referentially emphasising racial omissions, the inverse is the case in The Farm. Although The Farm explicitly negotiates the role of racialisation in surrogacy, African Americans are present absences in the novel. In fact, there is only one scene in the novel which refers to the long historical entanglement of slavery and surrogacy in the US. In this scene, Mae, the CEO of the eponymous surrogacy facility, dreams about a number of different services, ranging from an egg and sperm bank over embryo storage to “on-demand antibiotic and allergen-free breast milk or, even, wet-nursing” [27]. Embedded in Mae’s accumulative sales-pitch rhetoric, her slight hesitation when it comes to offering “even” wet-nursing suggests that she anticipates that – not least due to its intricate connection to the history of slavery in the US – this practice still constitutes a taboo (in fact, Jane, one of the surrogate mother-workers, loses her previous job as a baby nurse because she cannot prevent the client’s baby from suckling at her own breast). Save for this singular opaque allusion to the historical implications of wet-nursing, the novel as a whole, while explicitly addressing the racialised logics which underlie surrogacy, omits negotiating the historical origins of commodified reproduction in the US.

This omission is particularly noticeable in the present absence of African-American surrogate mother-workers in The Farm, and it further manifests itself in the categorisations of the surrogate mother-workers into “Hosts,” “Premium Hosts” and “Accessible Premium,” a taxonomy which is also deeply classist. While Mae states that the “majority of my Hosts are native to Hispanic countries, various Caribbean islands, and the Philippines, although we do have a smattering from Eastern Europe and other parts of Southeast Asia,” the “Premium Hosts” have to be “pretty,” college-educated and “Caucasian” women [27]. The new category of “Accessible Premium” Hosts – devised because of the high demand for white surrogate mother-workers – consists of “lower-middle-class Caucasians” [27]. As this list shows, African-American surrogate mother-workers are not mentioned, and they make hardly any appearances in the novel as a whole [27]. At the diegetic level, this near absence can be explained by Golden Oaks’ racialised logic of supply and demand: whereas there is no shortage of poor BIPoC surrogate mother-workers, there is less supply of and more demand for so-called “Premium Hosts.” Although The Farm thus highlights how in a globalised world, it is migrant women who perform alienated clinical labour, the text does not consider the historical continuations between the commodification of reproductive capacities under slavery and transnational surrogacy today [3, 5]. By failing to address the historical importance of African-American women to the practice of surrogacy, the novel consequently replicates the writing out of this particular group.

Writing out in the positional present

In itself, the process of writing out – that is, the erasure of surrogate mother-workers – is extremely important in the context of surrogacy, not just historically, but also with regard to positionalities in the twenty-first century.^[6] As Deepika Bahri shows for the case of transnational commercial surrogacy in India [28], up until the official ban of transnational commercial surrogacy in 2015, this form of assisted reproduction crucially relied on writing out the surrogate mother-worker. By emphasising the unscrupulous criteria in the selection of the “more or less interchangeable” “regular Hosts” [27], The Farm implicitly evokes those selection criteria [27] which sociologist and ethnographer Amrita Pande identified as informing the Indian surrogacy industry. These are docility, selflessness and solicitude [29] – and are thus criteria, which, in addition to precarity, reduce the likelihood of a surrogate mother-worker’s resistance against erasure and exploitation. At the same time, and as the following scene shows, the process of writing out as depicted in The Farm does not only forego to self-referentially address its own process of writing out the fate of Black women, but, with regard to who receives empathy for being written out, it also hinges on contemporary positionalities of privilege. The following section will discuss this intricate relationship between the narrative reproduction of privilege and writing out in more depth by comparing two scenes which depict ultrasound examinations, one in The Farm and one in A House for Happy Mothers, one of the novels about surrogacy in India.

Whereas the writing out, or in Elly Teman’s more positive framing, “stepping aside” [30] of surrogate mother-workers during an ultrasound is a common motif in both primary and secondary literature on surrogacy and not limited to surrogate mother-workers who are racialised [28, 30, 31], the different degrees of defamiliarisation evoked by the two scenes in The Farm and A House for Happy Mothers nonetheless yield interesting insights when it comes to understanding the generic complexities in the readings of both novels. In The Farm, the scene highlights how Reagan, one of the “Premium Hosts,” is ignored during her ultrasound, while the commissioning mother, who is joining online, is continually addressed:

Are you at your laptop, Mom? Get ready to see Baby in 3-D!

Reagan cranes her neck but cannot see the ultrasound screen. She is about to ask the nurse to tilt it toward her when Dr. Wilde speaks: “Agreed, Mom. It’s a whole different ball game.”

She pauses, head cocked and listening, then continues. “Yes, Mom. About Baby. It’s a bit over two inches in length as of today, the size of a small lemon. And this here, this is the amniotic sac. Dr. Wilde traces something on the ultrasound screen with her fingertip. Reagan tries to push up on her elbows to get a view, but the nurse frowns at her, and Reagan grudgingly reclines. She can see nothing – not the baby nor the sac, nor can she hear the Client’s questions. […]

Reagan stares up at the skylight, feeling strangely unnerved. […]

[Wilde pokes Reagan’s abdomen to make the baby move, then asks the client:] “Have you thought more about whether you want to pursue genetic testing?” Dr. Wilde reviews the pros and cons of an amnio. She reassures the Client that the chances of miscarriage are slim – the needle is so very fine, they use an ultrasound to guide them – but the odds of an issue, given the age of the egg, the sperm, the family history, well … Statistics follow. On the one hand, on the other. Mom, have you considered a CVS? [27]

Told from the perspective of the alienated surrogate mother-worker, this scene contrasts Reagan’s desperate wish to be included in new forms of kinship relations with how technologies of foetal imaging have changed common understandings of pregnancy and motherhood. By foregrounding how – despite her obvious interest in the process – Reagan is disregarded both during the ultrasound and in the discussions of further procedures, this passage emphasises how technologies of foetal imaging “displace the woman as the patient of care and substitute the fetus” [5]. Interestingly, though, and as Wilde’s answers to the client’s questions indicate, this scene illustrates that medical attention does not just shift from the surrogate mother-worker to the foetus, but to the commissioning mother as well. The scene thus demonstrates how the displacement of the gestating woman as the patient of care intensifies with the further fragmentation of reproductive roles in surrogacy, “through which commissioning parents think about ‘their’ child as facilitated by a reproductive services industry of which the surrogate mother is only one component” [5]. In The Farm, the alienation which this fragmentation of motherhood in commodified clinical labour entails is consequently illustrated by means of one of the “Premium Hosts”: it is through the focalisation of a privileged white woman that the text evokes a sense of defamiliarisation.

Instructively, there is a very similar scene in diasporic Indian writer Amulya Malladi’s surrogacy novel, A House for Happy Mothers (henceforth quoted as Happy Mothers). In this novel, Asha, an Indian surrogate mother-worker living in dire poverty, gestates a baby for Priya, a wealthy Indian-American who is unable to carry a child herself. Throughout the novel, this exchange is legitimised by the fact that Asha’s own son, who is repeatedly characterised as a very intelligent child, will then be able to receive a better education. As in The Farm, the fragmentation of motherhood evoked by the scene depicting the ultrasound is rendered through heterodiegetic narration and internal focalisation by the surrogate. Through the latter, the reader gains access to the surrogate mother-worker’s thoughts as well as to her reactions to the other characters’ actions and direct speech – which she only partially understands due to language barriers:

The ultrasound made the [commissioning] mother cry some more. This time Asha didn’t look at the picture on the screen; she felt it wasn’t her right.

“Oh, look at her tiny feet!” Sushila [the commissioning mother’s mother] exclaimed.

The mother put her arm around Sushila and put her head on her shoulder. She said something in English.

Asha felt unnerved looking at the two women. This baby was theirs, she realized as panic fluttered inside her. Her baby was theirs.

The mother moved away from Sushila and put her hand on Asha’s shoulder. “Thank you,” she whispered, her voice thick with emotion.

Asha didn’t answer, just blindly looked away from the monitor. This was their baby. She had known it all along, but she supposed that there had been a tiny part of her that fantasized that the baby somehow, some way, could be hers. Now with the mother standing there, staking her claim, her fantasies dissipated and she felt beyond foolish. [32]

Written from Reagan’s and Asha’s perspective, both scenes create empathy for the surrogate mother-workers.^[7] Interestingly, however, The Farm is read as a work of dystopian or speculative fiction, whereas Happy Mothers is written in a realist mode which, as will be shown below, frequently mirrors the findings of ethnographic research on surrogacy in India. In addition, there is a stronger questioning of surrogacy in The Farm than in Happy Mothers. In general, the scene in The Farm – although written in a similar register as the one in Happy Mothers – focuses much more on medical aspects, while the scene in Happy Mothers foregrounds both the surrogate and the commissioning mothers’ reactions to the ultrasound. On the one hand, the scene in The Farm engenders a stronger sense of defamiliarisation by means of a speech representation in which – despite her apparent interest in being involved – the surrogate mother-worker is excluded and treated without any respect. Moreover, in this speech situation, the fragmented digital conversation mirrors the fragmentation of motherhood. The scene further intensifies its cynical caricature of fragmented motherhood by highlighting the power differentials between the invisible and physically absent commissioning parent and the surrogate mother-worker, who finds herself in such a low physical position that she is unable to see the ultrasound. On the other hand, however, it is noteworthy that it is one of the “Premium Hosts” who serves as the focaliser in this scene, and not Jane, a poor immigrant surrogate mother-worker and protagonist of the novel. At least to a certain extent, then, the defamiliarisation in this scene thus also depends on the surrogate mother-worker’s positionality as a privileged white woman who is relegated to a lower position in this scene – both literally and physically. Whereas in the scene in The Farm, a text read as speculative or dystopian, a privileged white surrogate mother-worker thus feels entitled to but is hindered from having a look at the ultrasound, in Happy Mothers, a novel which relies on a realist mode to convey how an extremely poor Indian woman is pressured into surrogacy, Asha is presented as having internalised her inferior position: she does not feel it is her right to see the ultrasound and turns away from the monitor.

Although Happy Mothers tries to use internal focalisation as a means of writing in the surrogate mother-worker, and although the text also includes other critical voices in order to provide a broader picture of commercial surrogacy, the novel as a whole nonetheless prioritises the perspectives of the privileged. As the commissioning mother, Priya, serves as the main focaliser in the novel, the privileged perspective of those at the consuming end of surrogacy is foregrounded in a way which does not only blunt the critical edge of the ethnographic elements in the novel, but which even creates a complicity between these ethnographic elements and biocapitalist market logics. The extent of this complicity becomes particularly visible in the fact that the prioritisation of privileged perspectives imbues even those parts of the novel which are not focalised through Priya. This is particularly striking in the novel’s ending, which affirmatively reproduces the skewed discourses of gift-giving and global sisterhood often instrumentalised in surrogacy to the detriment of the surrogate mother-worker [33]. With Asha serving as the focaliser, the ending first suggests that “[m]aybe Asha had given them [the commissioning parents] a gift that they couldn’t get themselves, a gift they pined for, but they had given Asha an even bigger gift – a future for her son.” [32] Then, the heterodiegetic narrator adds the closing remarks that “they [the commissioning mother and the surrogate mother-worker] had given hope to each other, and this was what brought them together, closed that gap between them, eliminated social and class differences, made them sisters, mothers – made them equals.” [32] The novel’s ending thus first puts thoughts into Asha’s mind which reframe the surrogacy transaction she has just finished in terms of two strategies which were used to subdue surrogate mother-workers in India – that is, as an act of gift-giving, and as the selfless act of a surrogate mother-worker who “has to be a good mother to her own child before she can be a mother-worker for someone else’s baby” [29]. By turning the surrogate mother-worker into the receiver of the “even bigger gift” and highlighting that she is a selfless mother, Happy Mother closely mirrors those narrative strategies which ethnographic research has identified as crucial in commercial surrogacy in India. Moreover, the novel reiterates these strategies by transforming “the picture of the angelic gift-giver, which one sees in the global north and Israeli context, to a needy gift-receiver.” [33] Indeed, while a scene in the novel in which Priya gives Asha a pair of earrings [32] is reminiscent of one of the few non-fictional relationships between a commissioning and surrogate mother which Amrita Pande identifies as having continued after the official end of the surrogacy arrangement [34],^[8] the novel’s ending – in which Priya sets up a scholarship for Asha’s son – also follows the narrative strategy of reframing surrogacy as an act of charity [36]. Not only does the novel’s ending thus downplay the clinical labour of the surrogate mother by transforming her into the receiver of an “even bigger gift,” but by suggesting that the surrogacy arrangement took place between two equals who are likely to stay in touch after the baby is delivered, the novel evokes ideas of global sisterhood which further downplay the massive socio-economic differences between the commissioning mother and the surrogate mother-worker.

What this brief comparison between the two novels generally shows is that, in contrast to the portrayal of surrogacy in The Farm,^[9] in Happy Mothers, the many similarities between the language in the novel and the narrative strategies at work in commercial surrogacy arrangements in India buttress a realist mode which heavily relies on linguistic effects of reality. These linguistic effects uncritically reproduce the language of surrogacy arrangements and fail to question its systemic functioning. In fact, the realist mode in the novel serves as a narrative means of lending credibility to a story which suggests the commissioning mother’s interest in the fate of the surrogate mother-worker as a measure against the concrete dystopia of real-life conditions in the Indian surrogate market. Despite its marginal writing in of the surrogate mother-worker, Happy Mothers thus employs the realist mode as a means to superficially question reproductive inequalities, while at the same time reproducing the very discourses which are instrumental in surrogacy but detrimental to surrogate mother-workers. In this way, the novel can be read as furthering perspectival biases while superficially challenging them.

Gendered genres between hetero- and bionormativity

While The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm’s narrativisation of the drastic means devised to uphold hetero- and bionormative as well as highly stratified family structures are read as speculative and dystopian fiction, Origins of Love (henceforth quoted as Origins), The House of Hidden Mothers (henceforth quoted as Hidden Mothers) and Happy Mothers clad their negotiation of commercial surrogacy in chick-lit elements.^[10] Whereas speculative negotiations of reproduction do not only receive much public attention and are the subject of extensive academic research,^[11] the issue of reproduction is less featured in the analytical discussion of the other genres of literature which negotiate the theme of surrogacy. Nonetheless, there is insightful research on the connections of reproduction and conceptions of time and space as well as on the intersections of narrative and sexuality in the field of gender and queer studies. Thus, Jack Halberstam first conceptualised the notions of queer time and place [37] as the “nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time,” and “queer time” as “those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” [37]. Halberstam thus describes how “[t]he time of reproduction is ruled by a biological clock for women and by strict bourgeois rules of respectability and scheduling for married couples,” and goes on to deconstruct the naturalised beliefs and scheduling of “repro-time,” “family time” and “time for inheritance” [37], all of which are geared towards productivity. Elizabeth Freeman describes this “use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” as “chrononormativity” [38], and Judith Roof directly links such an understanding of the scheduling of life to narrative teleologies: “Narrative’s apparent rendition of life experience, then, is already an ideological version of (re)production produced by the figurative cooperation of a naturalized capitalism and heterosexuality.” [39] Building on these observations about the indistinguishability of narrative and heteronormativity, Sam McBean furthermore theorises the potential of “queer narrative dead ends – or the moments that sit outside of the economy of heterosexual reproduction” “to interrupt […] the continued ways that heterosexuality is linked with narrative futurity.” [40] Also focusing on futurity, Lee Edelman calls the perpetuation of the current social order through heteronormative reproduction “reproductive futurism” [41].^[12]

This theorising on the interplay between narrative and reproduction from queer studies proves insightful for the study of chick lit. Chick lit is a genre which often features elements such as over-consumption, dieting and the search for “Mr Right,” and which, in its dominant inflection, is usually defined as containing plots of female self-empowerment [42] in the wider context of an apolitical postfeminism [43]. So far, the main focus in chick-lit criticism has not been on reproduction. However, Aaron Matz’s claim that the telos of the Victorian Bildungsroman is reproduction and not just – as often assumed – marriage [44], can also be applied to chick lit. In fact, as Devereux argues, chick lit steers not only “to romantic union but to reproduction, not just to boyfriend but to babies.” [42] In surrogate chick lit, the implicit reproductive futurity found in the genre at large is reified from the beginning: here, the genre-typical quest for Mr Right is replaced by the quest for a baby. From the beginning, surrogate chick lit thus renders explicit that “chick lit is already implicitly mommy lit – or, to think about it in another way, mommy lit’s prequel” [42], and that the implicit teleology of chick lit is “to take chick heroines to the brink of domesticity and motherhood as an end” [42] as well as to “mov[e] women from nonreproductive sex to reproduction” [42].

With regard to the relationship between racialisation, positionality and space in chick-lit criticism, Devereux notes that “chick lit is a genre that has been from its beginnings insistently local – that is, set in a ‘real’ or at least recognizable place whose identity and geography are crucial to the chick narrative.” [42] Moreover, as Butler and Desai note, chick-lit criticism relies not just on the construction of a middle-class female protagonist, but on an implicit whiteness as well: “Typically, critical readings of chick lit either focus on novels written by and about white American and British women, or collapse the differences among distinct subgenres.” [43] However, in order to do justice to “the genre’s explosive globalization – both in terms of dominant American and British chick lit being consumed outside of the U.S. and UK, and in the creation of chick-lit genres in multiple languages and national contexts throughout Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe” [43], there is a need for intersectional chick-lit criticism which can capture how, unlike “white-dominated chick lit” [43], BIPoC inflections of chick lit often interweave the protagonist’s negotiation of gender with questions of race, class, ethnicity and nationality [43].

At the same time, and although chick lit “has seen exponential growth in India” since the beginning of the new millennium [45], it should be noted that the novels at hand are produced and circulated mainly in the Western literary market. Written by two diasporic Indian writers, both of whom had already been established in the Western literary market at the time these novels were published, Happy Mothers and Hidden Mothers can be considered as geared towards a predominantly Western audience – a circulation which mirrors how the surrogacy industry in India was streamlined mainly for international customers [46]. Published by Simon & Schuster, Origins is the second novel of Indian author Kishwar Desai. Desai had also already been known in the global Anglophone literary market – not least because she won the Costa Book Award for First Novel in 2010. Out of the three novels, Origins is not only the most critical of surrogacy, but, with its chick-lit elements and detective plot, it also stands out as a genre mix.

While Happy Mothers and Hidden Mothers feature Indian-diasporic female protagonists who become the commissioning mothers of surrogate babies in India, the protagonist and autodiegetic narrator in Origins is a social worker who investigates abuse and exploitation in the surrogacy industry. Moreover, while Origins can be read as a piece of “popular genre fiction [which] can actually forward and/or incite critical race and transnational feminist critiques and understandings of feminist subjects” [43], Happy Mothers and Hidden Mothers portray reproduction in ways which are very much in line with genre-specific conventions of “produc[ing] a (trans)national racialized feminine subject embedded within neoliberalism, heteronormativity, and racism” [43]. The interconnectedness of genre conventions and reproduction becomes particularly visible in how these two novels – by negotiating surrogacy by means of a genre which is “an exemplary site of neoliberal feminist subject-making based on the notion of ‘choice’” [43] – extend generic imaginaries of how the heroines wield agency mainly by participating in global consumer culture. In Happy Mothers and Hidden Mothers, the protagonists are thus middle-class subjects who have the means to act as part of this consumer culture.

As the two novels consequently combine aspects of commodification and reproduction, it is not surprising that their teleologies are very much aligned with biocapitalist and bionormative logics. This becomes startlingly clear in how Hidden Mothers ends. In British-Indian writer Meera Syal’s novel, Shyama, who is not able to gestate children herself anymore, takes the young and exceptionally beautiful and intelligent Indian surrogate mother-worker Mala back to the UK with her and her own, that is, Shyama’s, boyfriend Toby. Throughout the novel, it turns out that Mala is not only the baby’s gestational mother but that, in addition to Toby’s sperm and unbeknownst to any of the three, Mala’s own egg was used to create the embryo in vitro. Not only are Toby and Mala thus the biological parents of the baby, but they also fall in love and form a family. As illustrated in the – highly exoticised – final scene, there is consequently a restoration of bionormative, heterosexist, neoliberal family-making and social reproduction, even if this entails the use of reproductive technologies and exoticised personnel:

Toby […] settled [the baby boy] carefully into the swing and gave it a little push. More, higher, she [Shyama] thought she could hear him say […]. And then she [Mala] joined them, a sudden brushstroke of colour in the dun landscape in a sari of pink and blue, a basket under her arm. An exotic flower transplanted to this harsh soil, but she seemed to have taken root and thrived. Mala raised her free hand to wave at the boy. She kept waving each time he swung forward […]. [47]

Even though Happy Mothers does not include this rebiologising plot twist, the two novels are very similar. Both do not feature the genre-typical autodiegetic narrator [48]. Nevertheless, it is not only paratextual elements such as their pink and violet cover designs which align the novels with chick lit, but a quest for hetero- and bionormative fulfilment. What is central in the novels is thus the quest for a baby, a quest which expands the search for Mr Right.^[13] Both texts open with their protagonists, middle-aged Indian-American and Indian-British women, respectively, in the midst of infertility treatments, and end with a baby. Because of their teleologies, which steer towards the constitution of the bionormative family as their structurally prominent endings, both texts most starkly illustrate a more general tendency in surrogate fictions. Far from imagining the subversive potential of reproductive technologies [49], all the novels analysed in this paper envision surrogacy in ways which reinstall normative familial relations or kin structures. At the same time, Happy Mothers and Hidden Mothers can also be read as normalising the trope of the “happy surrogate” not just for international customers and the Indian diaspora, but also for Indian nationals. Given that since an official advertising campaign in 2004, medical tourism was considered as an export in India [33], this normalising of the happy surrogate mother-worker as undertaking the nation’s clinical work in an international context was crucial for the acceptance of the industry. Against the backdrop of the contradictory policies of, on the one hand, an aggressive anti-natalism targeting lower class and caste people in India, and, on the other, an unrestrained international fertility tourism [36], the creation of the figuration of the “happy surrogate” can thus be seen as a means of transforming “a reproductive body formerly considered ‘wasteful’” into profit [46].^[14] While the title of Malladi’s novel is the most obvious evocation of the “happy surrogate” and the novel’s reliance on the discourse of gift-giving discussed above also works towards the trope, it is mostly the endings of both Happy Mothers and Hidden Mothers which normalise the figuration of the “happy surrogate”: in Happy Mothers, Asha is presented as a happy mother to her own gifted son, whose education is now provided for; in Hidden Mothers, Mala is not only presented in idealised domestic terms, but is also said to have “thrived.” In addition, the parallels between the “happy” and “empowered” surrogate mother-worker which the novel draws are not only very much in line with the generic conventions of chick lit, but also with discourse which normalised surrogacy in India [50].

Unlike these two novels, Indian author Kishwar Desai’s book is more critical of stratified reproduction and pro-natalism more generally. While the other two texts feature bionormative endings, Origins not only foregrounds the fate of a HIV-positive surrogate orphan, it also advances a pro-adoption and anti-surrogacy stance. Towards the novel’s end, this stance is openly expressed by means of a rhetorical question: “Why bother to bring more babies into a world which already had plenty of them who needed love and good homes?” [51] The novel’s final scene, which reiterates but also rewrites the formation of a nuclear family, only slightly softens this clear indictment of neo-eugenic uses of surrogacy. In addition, although Syal’s and Malladi’s novels also include sections in which the exploitation of surrogate mother-workers takes centre stage, Origins widens the genre-typical individualist focus on empowerment which informs the other two texts and instead creates a textual hybridity in which chick-lit elements serve as a means of conveying a detective plot with a systemic message. Moreover, while in Happy Mothers and Hidden Mothers, the characters are mostly limited to the families, friends and reproductive staff involved, Origins features a much greater variety of characters, timelines and sociological breadth. Consequently, Desai’s novel evokes a much wider social panorama which does not only decry the exploitative practices in surrogacy at large, but which also challenges the bionormativity inherent in the other two novels.

Conclusions

You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you. [52]

The wrong of happiness is that it participates in the localization and containment of misery, the misery of those who cannot inhabit the apparently empty sign of happiness, who cannot populate its form. To walk away from such happiness is to be touched by suffering. [53]

The issue of perspective has, of course, always been a complicated one in the history of dystopia – after all, “[b]ecause of the range of visions, one writer’s eutopia is another writer’s dystopia, an issue that remains problematic in the history of interpretation of texts ranging from Plato’s The Republic to modern-day works” [11]. When it comes to representations of surrogacy, however, it seems that one reader’s dystopia is another writer’s chick lit. If one reflects on the implications which can be drawn from the condensed comparison and close readings in this article, what can be gleaned with regard to the question of positionality in genres of narrative reproduction? As mentioned above, Varsam suggests a category called “concrete dystopia” – in analogy to Bloch’s concept of “concrete utopia” [11] – in order to better account for material realities in dystopias. To further differentiate the issue of dystopian positionality in postcolonial texts and contexts, it might moreover be helpful to expand the concept of “paratopia” – that is, “a new form of dystopia which, though sharing the principles of the genre, presents worlds which exist very much beside our own, as near or soon-to-be places.” [2] As this experimentation with new terminologies as well as the close readings in this article suggest, more work is needed to conceptualise dystopian positionality. This is especially the case given that, as a result of reproductive tourism, globalised reproductive biographies further complicate the positionalities which the generic complexities in readings of surrogate fiction seem to perpetuate. Furthermore, as the readings of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm have shown, the generic complexities in surrogate fiction only partly stem from issues related to geographic location; they rely much more on the positionality of those who are affected – both in terms of fictional characters and real-world readerships. However, the writing out of surrogate mother-workers is a common strategy in real-world surrogacy arrangements, so that the knowledge about their fates might be skewed. As a consequence, the didactic potential of dystopian defamiliarisation might limit itself to forms of idiopathic empathy, which might, in turn, reinforce impressions that extremely exploitative forms of surrogacy do not exist yet. If read in such a way, dystopias tend to turn into ustopias – but not in accordance with Atwood’s use of the word as a combination of

Utopia and dystopia – the imagined perfect society and its opposite – because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the other. In addition to being, almost always, a mapped location, Ustopia is also a state of mind, as is every place in literature of whatever kind. [23]

Instead, such readings can quickly turn into “us-topias” – that is, dystopian readings which focus on idiopathic empathy only, and which are complemented by texts on related phenomena but written in individualising inflections of realism which gloss over or even embellish forms of exploitation and suffering which the potential readership does not immediately identify as part of a perceived ‘us’.