“I am the baby's real mother”: Reproductive tourism, race, and the transnational construction of kinship Laura Harrison Department of Gender and Women's Studies, Minnesota State University, Mankato, 109 Morris Hall, Mankato, MN 56001, United States article info synopsis Available online xxxx This essay examines what I call “crossracial gestational surrogacy,” a practice in which prospective parents of one race contract with a woman of another race to carry their child. I situate surrogacy within transnational circuits of reproductive labor, particularly “reproductive tourism” from the United States to India. This essay examines how Western notions of race and genetic determinism are mapped uneasily onto surrogacy in India, including the ways in which Indian surrogates resist or complicate these discourses in creating their own narratives of surrogacy. The essay also interrogates the question of agency; while many critique reproductive tourism in India as yet another example of the wealthy elite exploiting the labor of poor women of color, or celebrate it as an empowering transnational example of women-helping-women, the reality is far more complicated. Moreover, intended parents benefit from the racial and economic “differences” between themselves and Indian surrogates. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction Reproductive tourism—international travel for fertility and reproductive services—is an increasingly common phenome- non. Also known as “fertility outsourcing,”“rent-a-womb,” and “procreation vacations,” reproductive tourism encompasses a range of practices that occur globally, including egg donation, in vitro fertilization, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and commercial surrogacy. While many service providers and consumers build a pseudo-philanthropic discourse around the practice that focuses on the trope of “women helping women,” these processes naturalize and justify an economic arrangement that is fraught with inequality. Reproductive tourism is often a deeply racialized endeavor that relies on class disparities between those who provide reproductive services and those who consume them in order to create a family built around genetic ties. One illuminating example of this inequality is in the practice of what I call “crossracial gestational surrogacy,” in which intended parents commission a surrogate of a different racial background than their own. The surrogate, then, has no genetic connection to the developing fetus (Ragoné, 2000, p. 65). 1 This essay focuses on crossracial gestational surrogacy in India; here I analyze the discursive and cultural construction of this specific form of reproductive tourism. I connect socially constructed notions of race and genetic essentialism that travel alongside the reproductive tourist with the more benign discursive trope of “women helping women.” Crossracial gestational surrogacy has proliferated in recent decades due to technological advancements in the reproduc- tive technology industry, as well as prevailing popular discourses of race. Many intended parents do not hesitate to choose a gestational surrogate of a different race because consumers of reproductive technologies are encouraged by popular scientific discourse to compartmentalize gestation and genetics, believing that the qualities that determine the identity of their future child are locked into their genes. This genetic essentialism, in which cultural meanings of the gene conflate with the scientific or biological, “reduces the self to a molecular entity, equating human beings, in all their social, historical, and moral complexity, with their genes” (Nelkin & Lindee, 1995, p. 2). The role of the surrogate is minimized when DNA is framed as the sole arbiter of the “true self,” (Nelkin & Women's Studies International Forum 47 (2014) 145–156 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.06.007 0277-5395/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Women's Studies International Forum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif