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Surrogacy is a practice that requires the participation of multiple social actors: sperm and/or egg donors, intended parents (IPs) and gestational carriers (GCs). The data were collected during a research on US surrogacy conducted in Southern California between September 2017 and January 2020. The study involved IPs, GCs and the clinical and hospital staffs of a fertility clinic and six hospitals. In this contribution, I will read surrogacy as a sophisticated interweaving of relationships (Berend, 2016a) that is activated thanks to the support of artificial reproductive technologies (ARTs). I will analyze the surrogacy pregnancy not exclusively as an organic process, but, following Elly Teman (2009) and Zsuzsa Berend (2016a) insights, I will read it as a choral project shaped by all the actors directly or indirectly involved in it. I will show which rituals are practiced during the surrogacy pathway, and in particular, I will pay attention to some specific aspects that are invested by particular meaning such as ultrasounds, rooming-in, breastfeeding and the ‘skin-to-skin’ practice.

Russia is one of the few countries where surrogacy is both legal and regulated. Still, volatile legislation and the lack of public acceptance of the practice make surrogacy an experience that is hard to navigate. This chapter presents an exploration of the meanings Russian surrogates attach to their work, remuneration for it, and their relationships with intended parents. Drawing on 23 semi-structured interviews with surrogates, we find that while Russian surrogates frame surrogacy as a job and engage in calculations of a fair price for their services, they provide unrequited care for intended parents and their children and embed surrogacy in the context of their motherhood as a way to provide and care for their own children. In this, Russian surrogates occupy the typical position of a post-Soviet ‘mother-worker’.

In this chapter we address the problematic nature of altruistic motivation, commonly required of surrogate mothers, live organ donors, clinical research participants and health professionals. Altruism, understood as involving a desire to help others, often to a self-sacrificing degree, gives rise to various conceptual and ethical difficulties. We argue that encouraging the virtue of generosity is preferable to requiring altruistic motivation, because generosity is consistent with reciprocation as well as legitimate concern for self. A correct understanding of generosity also alleviates concerns about exploitation and commodification. Our focus in this chapter is on surrogacy, but our arguments apply to other domains as well.

This essay brings structural intimacies – theorised as the meeting of social structural patterns with interpersonal lives – to the border to consider transnational LGBTQ kinships. Specifically, the paper considers ‘the border’ and its state-driven bio-regulations as a reproductive technology that produces LGBTQ, racial/ethnic and social class inequities through the consolidation of heteronormative, bio-genetic kinship institutions and ideations of family. Structural intimacies harnesses intimacy as both subject and as an analytic lens for queering reproductive sociology that insists on re-conceptualizing institutions central to our lives. Structural intimacies move our analytic gaze from how the border structures sexuality, and vice versa, to consider the border as at once a structural and an affective domain. Structural intimacies is a conceptual tool useful for cross-disciplinary inquiry into the social and structural contexts in which reproductive technologies render meaning, as well as produce families, and to illustrate the analytic necessity of storying both content and method as integral to queer/ing scholarship. Straddling the most proximal forms of daily care and labor patterning everyday intimacies with the policies and practices of the state, the concept of structural intimacies reveals moments of encounter between state institutions with the most intimate components of a person's life and identity, in this case amplified by the bio-politics of the border.