The Baby Makers: Representing Commercial Surrogacy in Film and Television

Abstract

This essay attempts to define the genre of the surrogacy thriller as a prominent form for recent representations of commercial surrogacy. Placing this genre into a history of film representations of surrogacy and into a wider history of representing women’s work on film, it argues that the genre appears to intervene in debates about gestational labour. On the surface, these films appear to attack both mothers and surrogates alike for their participation in paid employment. However, along with other representations of surrogacy, these films also display a mingling of the language of care with the language of the economy in ways that trouble the easy separation of these two spheres. Potentially, this combination makes possible a critique of gestational labour which would make the nature of women’s work visible and available to resistance. In the form of the thriller this potential seems muted. However, through a reading of James Bridges 1970 film, The Baby Maker, this essay suggests that a space for this critique is possible in the depiction of surrogacy as work which combines both physical and affective labour.

Keywords:

• surrogacy
• gestational labour
• emotional labour
• thrillers
• social reproduction

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 India banned non-citizens from hiring commercial surrogates in 2015 and then banned all commercial surrogacy in 2018 (Saran and Padubidri 2020). At the same time Thailand and Nepal passed laws against surrogacy, and Cambodia formally banned commercial surrogacy in lieu of official legislation (Lewis 2019: 3).

2 When the Bough Breaks, is set in Louisiana where the surrogate remains the legal mother until she relinquishes this right.

3 The similarity of When the Bough Breaks to Fatal Attraction is also pronounced. Its climactic struggle between surrogate and wife moves from the kitchen, past a lingering shot of the knife block, to the nursery where the wife, Laura, finds the mutilated corpse of the family cat in the baby’s crib.

4 Mary Desjardins reads the Hollywood film Baby Boom as a surrogacy narrative (Desjardins 1992), arguing that Baby Boom challenges the gains of feminism by seeking to repress fears of women’s choice. This finds an echo in representations of commercial surrogacy where working women outsource gestational labour rather than undergo pregnancy themselves. See Joanne Ramos’ The Farm (2019) for example. This is also implied by Lewis’ critique of the structural inequalities of surrogacy which reads gestational labour as a kind of outsourcing (Lewis 2019: 77).

5 Gondouin et al. reach slightly different conclusions about China Girl, arguing that Puss occupies the role of white saviour whose ‘postcolonial, reproductive justice-oriented critique … is easily dismissed as the intellectual meltdown of a bodily and emotionally detached white male’ (Gondouin et al. 2018: 127). While this view has merit, the reversal of the surrogacy thriller’s narrative trajectory does, arguably, make the force of Puss’ critique stronger than they infer.