The Metaphors of Commercial Surrogacy: Rethinking the Materiality of Hospitality Through Pregnant Embodiment

Does ectogestation have oppressive potential?

“…The normative question of how they should be in their embodied experiences infiltrate all the different stages and cycles of women's reproductive abilities and events, and this is reflected in the socio-historical, cultural imagination of women's bodies as surveyed above. As Luna Dolezal writes, pregnant women are "construed as both being and containing reproductive machines" (Dolezal, 2018). The objectifying idealization of women's bodies-as virgins, sexual objects, baby-makers-is in clear tension with the realities of embodied experiences, like copulation, menstruation, or the potential trauma of giving birth.…”