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This article explores the intersections of power within transnational surrogacy in India, using the lens of geography to examine surrogate women’s and commissioning parents’ experiences and perceptions of space and mobility. The author analyzes ethnographic data within a geographical framework to examine how actors embody and experience power relations through space and movement, revealing how power is not simply about who moves and who doesn’t. Rather, in recognizing the specificity of the Indian context, and how different actors inhabit and move through distinct spaces, a geographical lens reveals the shifting complexity of structures of agency and power. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in India, the author traces how both surrogate mothers and commissioning parents experience moments of mobility and movement punctuated by intervals of immobility and stillness, in distinct ways that illuminate the power relations inherent in transnational reproduction.

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Over the past decade, India has attracted would-be parents from around the globe, many seeking to build their families through gestational surrogacy. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork in India, I found that issues of nationality and citizenship for babies born via gestational surrogacy were among the most pressing concerns for commissioning parents. In this article, I consider the ways in which states and institutions define parents and make citizens, as well as how families created through surrogacy in India challenge these processes in new ways. By closely interrogating the ways that families, states, and global and local institutions define parenthood and citizenship within the context of transnational surrogacy, I show that while transnational surrogacy may challenge conventional understandings of kinship and family, it simultaneously renaturalizes state definitions of citizenship and motherhood.

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This article explores the phenomenon of transnational reproduction, in which prospective parents travel across national boundaries in order to access assisted reproductive technologies. In particular, the author examines transnational egg donation as an “intimate industry,” focusing on the ways in which such industries construct intimacy and intimate social relations among various reproductive actors. How do commissioning parents pursuing gestational surrogacy in India using donor eggs negotiate the process of selecting an egg donor? In addressing this question, the author analyzes the ways in which commissioning parents construct relations with the anonymous egg donor—the genetic parent of the child—as well as with the child conceived through egg donation, in-vitro fertilization, and gestational surrogacy, focusing especially on how doctors and commissioning parents understand notions of race, nationality, and skin color in the context of egg donation. In contrast to dominant assumptions that intended parents primarily seek donors who match their own racial/ethnic backgrounds, most commissioning parents in this study sought Indian egg donors with darker skin tones. This article suggests that while such actions appear to subvert dominant racial hierarchies that privilege white skin, revealing potential spaces of resistance to racialized preconceptions about kinship, they in fact rely on essentialized notions of race and beauty and reflect new articulations of biological race.

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