Vol. 8 No. 2 (2023)
“Commercial surrogacy: a new form of gendered surplus value
More than three decades ago, Carole Pateman (1988) identified two founding institutions of the Sexual Contract and female subjection: marriage and prostitution, private and public women. The private ones ensured the offspring of the man within the framework of the marriage union and, therefore, should not and cannot be publicly accessible. The second, defined as public, guarantee the patriarchal privilege of a woman's sexual availability at any time and occasion. Faced with the private-good woman, devoted to her husband, to the family and with a public projection of her honor and dignity closely linked to the interdict of her sexual freedom, the public-bad woman was constructed as a sexualized opposite and complementary. But, as Ekis Ekman (2013) points out, the gestational industry has broken this binary to reinvent itself a new model: the good “public” woman, a supportive pregnant woman who gives up her body, her reproductive capacity, puts her health at risk and empathically assumes the physical and psychological consequences of hyperhormone, pregnancy and childbirth to fulfill the wishes of paternity/maternity of unknown persons, relinquishing custody and filiation through an intermediary company. tion of their daughters.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17979/arief.2023.8.2
Published: 2023-07-28