Between 2002 and 2016, when commercial surrogacy was eventually banned in India, surrogacy grew to a multi-million dollar industry and earned India the moniker, the world’s “baby factory.” Drawing on interviews with surrogate mothers, egg donors, and garment workers in Bangalore, as well as straight and gay couples in the U.S. and Australia, this talk locates surrogacy as an activity that invokes both gift giving and market exchange. The speaker suggests that in the new kinds of embodied labor, such as surrogacy, egg and sperm donation, the two worlds of market and non-market are co-constitutive, and complicate notions of commodification, altruism, alienation, and intimacy.

Sharmila Rudrappa is the director of the Center for Asian American Studies, and professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches and writes on bio-markets, labor, and reproductive justice. Her most recent book is Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India (2015, NYU Press).