Abstract
After the release of new Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill in 2020, surrogate mothers in India showed greater concerns over the rights to their bodies. Despite receiving economic compensation from the intending parents, surrogates have failed to convert their income into greater well-beingness. In understanding what Sen (1999) claimed asCapability Poverty , the research investigated the concept through a dynamic interaction analysis of Bourdieu (1984)’s Capitalformation throughout the contracted pregnancy, contributing to the surrogacy literature a novel ground in depicting a more dynamic capital formation. The inconvertibility of economic capital for social, cultural, and emotional capital proved a continued suffering for surrogates, including both physical exploitations due to oppressive medical settings and psychological burdens from stigmatisation (re)produced from the traditional values and geographies of class. In debating over whether surrogates possess actual ability to exercise their agency over structure, it is essential that this research reminds once again their choices over work are not made in isolation from socioeconomic and cultural factors.
Introduction
In the Global South, informal work is often unstable and precarious, causing destabilization of the daily lives of workers (Allison, 2012), sometimes even causing stigmatization within their own society (Millar, 2014). On the other hand, these works can also provide them with financial support and social belonging, alongside time flexibility and even future aspirations to their family members. Despite being risky and dangerous, many people in middle-and-low-income countries still tilt towards informal work, avoiding direct participation of the formal economy. Thus, the precarity and exploitative labour conditions embedded within post-war Fordism era have become part of the everyday-life experience of the labouring poor (Millar, 2014), of which is also a “class-of-the-making” that is difficult to escape (Standing, 2014: 974).
Built-off of a widely accepted argument that informal workers’ choices over work are constrained by socioeconomic structure and cultural norms, with little possibility to alter through agency, this research sets the tone by recognising and probing into the importance and power of Bourdieu’s Habitus (1986) over agency. For Bourdieu,Habitus is not only a “structuring” but a deeply buried “structured” structure shaped by money (economic capital), the cultivation of practices and knowledge (cultural capital), and acquaintances and networks (social capital) (Ortner, 1998). In applyingHabitus to the escaping from precarity and poverty, this overdetermining factor shapes these informal workers’ dispositions by their conformity to the dominance of others, simultaneously limiting their ability to exercise power and agency. The fact that every-day poverty “organizes practices and the perception of practices” (Bourdieu, 1984:170) for people working in the informal economy has largely constrained the re-making of their class position, in turn limiting the coins they possess and exchange in the “game of Roulette” (Bourdieu, 1986: 241) – the capital in hand is limited.
Another important concept to clarify for this research is the type of poverty identified through Sen’s Capability Approach : “Capability Poverty” (Sen, 1999). As reducing income deprivation alone is no longer sufficient for anti-poverty actions under the multidimensional poverty analysis, targeting the difficulty in converting income into “functionings” (1999: 88) has widened the understanding of poverty in general, within which the concept of ‘capability poverty’ captures more necessities for a holistic “well-beingness” for individuals. By shifting the primary focus away from means to ends that people have reason and capacity to pursue the substantive freedoms, the discussing of capability poverty helps acknowledge the complex nature and causes of poverty, the instrumental relation between income and capability, and particularly the respective contingent consequences on different gender and social roles, in this case, the surrogate mothers.
Surrogacy is a gender-specific form of industrial contract labour that exists under a larger global medical tourism industry, and specifically in India these jobs are often rigidified within racial and class hierarchies (Twine, 2012). Despite having large amount of renumeration (Pande 2010), the invasive medical procedure may bring forth physically exploitative consequences for women, limiting their possibility to escape from capability poverty. Even with some feminists supporting the right and freedom to enter surrogacy contracts, the fact that women may have to suffer from physical risks, pain, and even death attract other rhetoric criticizing surrogacy as “industrialization of pregnancy” and the “degradation” and “commodification” of women’s bodies and reproductive labour (Twine, 2012: 16). However, regardless of a pro-or-against perspective, when viewing surrogates’ ability to exercise their agency through the lens of Bourdieu’s Habitus , their decisions are not made in isolation from socioeconomic and cultural factors, but influenced by the factors of race, class position, maternal and marital status, and their gender role in family and society.
This research hopes to argue analytically that surrogates are persistently trapped in Sen’s “capability poverty” due to the inconvertibility of Bourdieu’s economic, cultural, and socialcapital . Leveraging a secondary analysis of the existing data (qualitative interviews), this research provides a novel methodological approach – a dynamic interaction analysis of Bourdieu’s capitalformations on surrogates’ contracted pregnancy – to better understand the continued suffering for surrogates due to the inconvertibility of economic capital for social, cultural, and emotional capital.