Marx in utero : a workers’ inquiry of the in/visible labours of reproduction in the surrogacy industry

What can the work of Marx can tell us about surrogacy, and vice versa, what can the work of surrogacy tell us about Marx? My research on commercial surrogacy in Georgia offers an interesting case study to re-assess the relevance of Marxist research frameworks, as it uncomfortably disrupts capitalist dualisms of production vs reproduction, family vs market, gift vs commodity and waged vs unwaged work. Today, Georgian surrogates are paid for putting their reproductive biologies and gestational bodies to work in the (re)production of babies, family happiness and surplus value in the surrogacy industry. Yet, neither in classic political economy accounts nor in its Marxist counterpart, are they seen as ‘real’ workers. On the contrary, surrogates and their ‘labour of love’ are made invisible and relegated to the hidden abodes of reproduction. In this chapter I use the work of Marx, and his disobedient feminist ‘granddaughters’ to analyse and politically translate the invisibility of reproductive work in the global surrogacy industry