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Feminism against Biocapitalism: Gestational Surrogacy and the Limits of the Labor Paradigm

In the theoretical literature on biocapitalism, commercial gestational surrogacy is often treated as a paradigm of the new forms of labor that have emerged with it. I begin by assessing Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby’s version of this idea in their influential 2014 book Clinical Labor. Their argument for understanding gestational surrogacy as labor can be interpreted as continuing the tradition of Marxist feminism that demands recognition and adequate compensation for women’s socially reproductive labor. My key aim is to show that once we submit commercial gestational surrogacy to a rigorous Marxist-feminist analysis, however, it becomes difficult to understand it as a form of labor. While I acknowledge some of the political advantages of the labor paradigm, I develop a sustained critique of it by focusing on its theoretical and political shortcomings. I analyze the functional role that commercial gestational surrogacy occupies in the dynamics of global capitalism and identify the aspects that distinguish it from other forms of waged care work. My main concern is not the correct application of Marx or his labor theory of value but rather the feminist political and ethical consequences that follow from the theoretical question of how we conceive of gestational surrogacy and how we theorize the processes of value production on which biocapitalism relies. The goal is to show how different theoretical understandings of gestational surrogacy have radically different political consequences for the feminist debates surrounding it.