Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self by Elly Teman

Author:Elly Teman [Teman, Elly]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780520259638
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2010-03-03T23:00:00+00:00

GESTATION, BODY, AND IDENTITY

As I have shown in this chapter, surrogates and intended mothers make efforts to resolve the ambiguous connotations of surrogacy through both individual and collaborative efforts. Each woman, pursuing her own personal goals, undertakes an individual “project of the body.”51 The surrogate’s body project involves ensuring that her maternal and familial identities remain untouched by surrogacy through embodied strategies of distancing, transferring, and attaching the pregnancy to the intended mother. The intended mother’s identity work involves incorporating the pregnancy identity through vicarious embodiment.

Significantly, the women in this study undertake these comprehensive attempts to resolve the categories of mother and family through their bodies in the context of a state-approved, contractual agreement that secures the intended mother’s legal right to the child. Nevertheless, neither she nor the surrogate seems to feel that this authoritative endorsement is enough. Instead, they ritually legitimate the intended mother’s maternal and kin claims by drawing on couvade practices—a premodern script for establishing kinship and paternity. Their efforts reveal how much is at stake for them in keeping kin categories clear; they also reveal how intolerable the confusion of the basic categories of body, nature, motherhood, and family is to them. Women do not ultimately resolve the anomalies of surrogacy, but they constantly work them out through their cognitive and embodied efforts throughout the surrogacy process.

The collaborative interweaving of the women’s individual body projects is also significant.52 Within the scholarship on the body as a project, the focus is often limited to the individual. In the shifting body, we witness a form of collaborative, cooperative, dual body work that depends as much on the interactions between the two women as it does on their individual efforts. Each woman’s self-project is advanced through her body-centered interactions with the other; the body is engaged as a tool in the distribution of identity between them. Through the surrogate’s practices of disembodiment and the intended mother’s vicarious embodiment, the two women jointly highlight the way that interactively making the body absent or present can affect identity. The same body that is made absent for the surrogate is channeled into making a pregnant identity present for the intended mother, extending her sense of embodied selfhood beyond her physicality. These collaborative efforts thus illustrate a case in which identity is not just constructed through the body53 or through interaction with others,54 and is not merely an individual pursuit but a “joint body project.”

A final observation can be made in regard to the significance of gestation itself. Throughout my discussion of the surrogate’s body-mapping techniques, I have stressed the women’s readiness to disregard the impact of gestation on fetal outcome. I have suggested that this may reflect the strong influence of genetic kinship paradigms on their biomedically influenced way of making sense of pregnancy; a reaction to their awareness that Judaism views the birth mother as the “real mother”; and the influence of a particular culture of pregnancy in Israel that downplays the significance of gestation. However, the practices that the

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