The Bridging of Emotional Capital
From the above analysis, this research finds that it is challenging to convert any of the surrogate’s portfolio of Bourdieu ’s capital from one to another, meaning that surrogates are more inclined to remain in Sen’s capability poverty. Therefore, understanding how surrogates support and sustain themselves mentally and psychologically across the contracted pregnancy is imperative. Being the variant of social capital from feminists’ critique, and specifically confined with affective bonding within private sphere, the emerging and accumulating of “emotional capital” (Nowotny, 1981: 148) is the key.
Judging from the disadvantageous circumstances that surrogates inhabit, such as their tendency to be poor11According to Wilkinson (1995), the emotional wellbeing is much easier to be taken care of in privileged circumstances, while people living in poverty are easier to suffer due to the “emotionally draining experience” (Oppenheim and Harker, 1996)., emotional capital serves as the resource for women to respond to and even confront against barriers in adversities (Reay, 2004). As the capital-forming process itself is self-reflexive and self-struggling, it can be regarded as, for one, the reluctance of surrogates portraying themselves as vulnerable victims, and secondly, as mothers and wives keen to take back control of their lives (Rozée et al 2020). The denial of viewing less-privileged groups like surrogates only with dichotomous portrayals (i.e., immobility vs. mobility; power vs. resistance) is also supported by Deomampo (2013: 521), who states that poor women may argue to have the autonomy over their reproductive rights.
Understood as a form of capital to be built up over time, it provides surrogates with not only abstract feelings like care, concern, and attention (Allatt 1993) to self-reflect upon, but also competencies to self-overcome and offset the effect of the negatively accumulated cultural capital (i.e., reduce the stigmatisation), at the same time self-supporting the forming of positively obtained social capital. Nevertheless, while accumulating emotional capital, as Pande (2020: 971) cautiously points out on unintended outcomes of surrogates’ self-affirmation on sense of self-worth and dignity, the “gender inequalities” on non-or-low paid female informal workers may be reinforced, and such consequence may push even more women back into poverty.
Struggle for Agency: Relational Autonomy and Autonomy Competency in Poverty
With emotional capital, the extent to which surrogates can strive for agency and escape from poverty requires further understanding on the multi-faceted aspects of autonomy. As agency represents individuals’ means to act and of self-achievements (Gooptu, 2013), it entails the idea of “relational self-autonomy” (Millar, 2014), of which is widely used by individuals to distance or detach themselves from specific power relations for liberation, even if that indicates lived realities in much more fragile times (Graeber, 2009). For surrogates, women bodies were agencies both undergoing normalization of social experience and resistance to politics (Harcourt 2009).
As relational autonomy highlights the context of “oppressive socialisation” and the connection of agent’s self-conception and capacity within the social context (Mackenzie & Stoljar 2000: 3-4), when viewing Bourdieu’s Habitus, surrogates are leveraging the autonomy against the power of structure, in particular attempting to offset the negatively accumulated cultural capital caused by stigma. Being members of a modern and knowledgeable society, surrogates develop strategies to overcome the negative representation of surrogacy by leveraging the classic “Condemnation of the condemners (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999)” to counterbalance the social stigma attached to dirty and sinful work.
Despite being deeply constrained by socioeconomic and gender frames, as well as practices within institutions22The constraints embedded within the social context bring forth a two-way understanding of surrogates: One being intrinsically relational (i.e., their self-conceptions are constituted by elements of social context), and the other being causally relational (i.e., their nature is influenced by socio-historical conditions) (Mackenzie & Stoljar 2000: 21-22), surrogates facing a limited degree of “reproductive liberty (Roberts, 1995)” and available options (Raz, 1986) often reveal a degree of “autonomy competence (Meyers, 1987)” as a central part of the struggle for agency. Based on the oppressive social and medical settings where relational autonomy functions, autonomy competency takes a step forward in proving women as surrogates are de-facto “partially autonomous” in their lives (Meyers 1987: 627-628), corresponding also with “dynamic autonomy (Keller, 1987)” as a competency growing under “domination, denied connectedness, and defensive separateness (Mackenzie & Stoljar, 2000: 9-10)”. To escape from capability poverty, Indian surrogates living under domination with limited resilience and autonomy competency tend to leverage emotional capital to avoid being reduced to a “status of a pure alienated victim” (Falquet 2008: 53), to balance the “mother-worker identity” considering all possible conflicts of interests (Pande 2010: 969), and most critically, to disrupt gender hierarchies privileging genetic ties but not maternal bonds established by bodily substances and reproductive labour (Pande, 2009a).