#surrogacy: Confronting the coloniality of Twitter and contemporary transnational surrogacy practices in India

Abstract

"#surrogacy: Confronting the coloniality of Twitter and contemporary transnational surrogacy practices in India" begins to think about how the racial histories of modernity provide a lens to consider transnational surrogacy in India. My thesis aims to unpack the complex dynamics that exist between contemporary commercial surrogacy practices, social media, archiving, and Western colonialism. This conceptual project is divided into three parts (historical, conceptual and empirical) to allow for a nuanced examination of colonial archives, the embedded colonial 'logic' and tropes in these archives, and the continuities of colonial and racialized histories that permit for an understanding of how and why India became the first transnational hub for commercial surrogacy. My scholarly work examines surrogacy and the racialized and gendered 'markings' of colonialism, as they intersect with modes of technology and transnationalism in the twenty-first century. Specifically, I seek to expose how Indian women's bodies are ever tied to colonial processes seen through transnational surrogacy transactions. This thesis spans historical moments as well as geographical and spatial locations as a means to necessarily articulate and conceptualize the coloniality of both surrogacy and Twitter. Here, the histories of transatlantic slavery, South Asian colonialism, and South Asian postcolonialism are pushed together to identify the dynamic workings of these tensions that allow us to think through our historical and colonial present. Namely, I am situating contemporary transnational surrogacy practices alongside the histories of racial violence, motherhood, and technology. The historical, conceptual and empirical frameworks being employed here encourage, and necessitate, broader and more complex thinking around transnational surrogacy practices. To extend the thinking around contemporary transnational surrogacy is my intention; to position surrogacy practices within the processes of racialization and colonization necessarily illuminates the often-overlooked histories and positionalities that frame the reproductive transactions.