Gendering Hybridity: The Womb as Site of Production in Globalization

Abstract

It is my contention that urgent questions about the politics of the biological body have been displaced in discussions of hybridity – a term that seems to account for the phenomenon of global mixture but routinely defers consideration of its material and physiological dimensions. In this essay I reinsert the biological body into discussions of hybridity in order to explore the growing phenomenon of international commercial surrogacy. The third world woman's rented womb emerges in this reading as an overlooked, unclaimed site of hybridity in the global division of labour, with intriguing precedents in the colonial experience, and opportunities for reviewing the incarnation of global hybridity in live bodies in the present.

• biopolitics
• gender
• globalization
• hybridity
• reproductive technologies

Notes

1 Kraidy (2005) states “hybridity has become a master trope across many spheres of cultural research, theory, and criticism, and one of the most widely used and criticized concepts in postcolonial theory” (316).

2 The move from race to culture, and from bodies to global processes, has a complicated history which I explore in Bahri (2017b).

3 Anthropologist Stocking (1987) argues Victorian social sciences were dominated by “a vague sociobiological indeterminism, a ‘blind and bland shuttling between race and civilization”. The idea of culture, he observes, “explained all the same phenomena … in strictly non-biological terms” (265; original emphasis).

4 As I argue in Bahri (2017a), Bhabha's discussion of racism and his anchoring of theory in history and archival sources are routinely overlooked in the global reception of his theory of hybridity.

5 In her work on interracial relationships, Ghosh says she targeted absence as a methodological strategy in the archive by looking “for subjects with incomplete or partial names because the lack of a complete name signaled the presence of a native female” (2006, 301).

6 Pande (2014) is a substantial contribution in this direction.

7 Freeman suggests “globalization works through many economic and cultural modes and is effected both through large powerful actors and institutions as well as by ‘small-scale’ individuals engaged in a complex of activities that are both embedded within and at the same time transforming practices of global capitalism” (2001, 1008).

8 Video and transcript of video available as of July 29, 2016 at http://www.surrogacyclinics.com/tag/indian-surrogacy-clinics/.