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| Document Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| All Authors / Contributors: |
Sharmila Rudrappa |
| ISBN: | 9781479874521 1479874523 9781479825325 1479825328 |
| OCLC Number: | 1012014840 |
| Description: | x, 210 pages ; 23 cm |
| Contents: | 1. The labor market for surrigate mothers -- Reproductive interventions -- Converting social networks into labor markets -- The many meanings of surrogacy -- 2. Incorporating pregnancy and childbirth into the market economy -- Locating surrogacy in child sharing and wage labor -- Babies as commodities -- Fetuses as persons, surrogate mothers as nonpersons -- Surrogacy as a gift. |
| Responsibility: | Sharmila Rudrappa. |
Abstract:
Sharmila Rudrappa interrogates the creation and maintenance of reproductive labor markets, the function of agencies and surrogacy brokers, and how women become surrogate mothers. Is surrogacy solely a labor contract for which the surrogate mother receives wages, or do its meanings and import exceed the confines of the market? Rudrappa argues that this reproductive industry is organized to control and disempower women workers and yet her interviews reveal that, by and large, the surrogate mothers in Bangalore found the experience life affirming. Rudrappa explores this tension, and the lived realities of many surrogate mothers whose deepening bodily commodification is paradoxically experienced as a revitalizing life development.
A detailed and moving study, Discounted Life delineates how local labor markets intertwine with global reproduction industries, how Bangalore’s surrogate mothers make sense of their participation in reproductive assembly lines, and the remarkable ways in which they negotiate positions of power for themselves in progressively untenable socio-economic conditions."--pub. desc.
Reviews
Publisher Synopsis
This is an engaging and well-written ethnography that will be interesting to scholars of labor markets, reproduction, and India. I would also recommend it for teaching general sociology and methods courses. * American Journal of Sociology * This is a book many of us have been waiting for: a serious ethnography on commercial surrogacy. Sharmila Rudrappa utilizes the best social and cultural analysis to get inside the heads of the surrogates, the parents, medical professionals and the middlemen that participate in this growing international industry. Rudrappa shows there is no easy answer to the moral and ethical dilemmas raised in the brokering of reproduction. Discounted Life elicits debates on who the winners and losers are in commercial surrogacy. It is a must read for anyone interested in the field of reproductive labor and reproductive inequalities in the 21st century. -- Rhacel Salazar Parrenas,author of Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work Discounted Life makes a compelling read and will appeal to academics interested in the transnational trade of reproductive labour...A particular strength of the book is the explicit, transparent, and reflexive account of participant recruitment strategies and struggles...[T]his is a truly excellent book and a crucial contribution to the field of assisted reproduction in a global market. -- Christina Weis, De Montfort University * Sociology of Health & Illness * Discounted Lifeis compassionate, critical and somehow as heart-warming as it is heart-breaking. Most of all it is an utterly captivating look into the lives of women who made the production line of Indias surrogacy industry at a time when it was still legal and booming. * BioNews * Of all the books, articles, documentaries and discussion on this topic, this is the one. Rudrappa has gone the furthest, deepest and most thoughtfully into this troubling issue. -- Barbara Katz Rothman,author of A Bun in the Oven: How The Birth and Food Movements Resist Industrialization Discounted Lifeis a detailed ethnography on the industry of commercial gestational surrogacy in Bangalore, India. Describing the women who engage with the transitional surrogacy business as ambitious and witty instead of poor and exploited, Rudrappa offers a counter-narrative to the common discourse on Indian surrogate mothers. * Sociology of Health & Illness * Discounted Life is compassionate, critical and somehow as heart-warming as it is heart-breaking...Sharmila Rudrappa takes us into the socially and economically precarious worlds of the garment-factory workers in urban Bangalore who also constitute the recruiting ground for a lucrative global business turning poverty in India into babies for the West. * BioNews * Read more...
