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

Although TV critics have claimed that TV has ‘become obsessed with surrogate mothers’ (Ellen E. Jones quoted in Le Vay 2019: 8), academic work interpreting their representation remains a modest field. Kelly Oliver’s Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down (2012) discusses surrogacy in films as part of a wider discussion about representations of pregnancy and childrearing, and Lulu Le Vay’s Surrogacy and The Reproduction of Normative Family on TV (2019) is a full-length study of televisual representations of surrogacy. Aside from these notable exceptions, work which explores how surrogacy is depicted on film and television is scant. Le Vey’s extensive bibliography includes few works that discuss representations of surrogacy and she relies heavily on sociological or philosophical works to advance her arguments. Unsurprisingly, some writing of this kind turns its attention to popular film and television. For instance, Sophie Lewis’ influential Full Surrogacy Now (2019) refers to TV documentaries and to the recent adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. However, she tends not to discuss this work as television and mostly uses the texts to illustrate wider political claims; she gives relatively sparse attention to the representational significance of the texts as a particular means of articulating social attitudes.

Partly responding to this gap, this paper reads several recent film-texts about surrogacy in order to suggest a way to understand their representation of commercial surrogacy as part of wider social attitudes towards female labour. The widespread prohibition on paid surrogacy has meant that depictions of surrogacy often feature altruistic surrogates. My attention to commercial surrogacy is driven by wider interest in women’s work and the debates about female labour that form a substantial field of research. In examining films on this topic, I identify a sub-genre that I call the surrogacy thriller as one of the main contemporary forms for depicting commercial surrogacy. Drawing on readings of the 1980s erotic thriller which have emphasised the tendency of cinema to depict working women as threatening to the heterosexual nuclear family (Williams 2005: 182; Leonard 2009: 69–70), I suggest a subtle alteration to this trope. The surrogacy thriller offers a different concept of women’s work; in these films anxieties about paid surrogacy revolve around the financialization of reproductive labour, which is normally naturalised by being consigned to the private realm of a caring economy. In the conclusion I turn to James Bridges’ The Baby Maker (1970), and argue that his film more subtly addresses this transformation by locating it within the feminization of work as one of the characteristics of late capitalism.

The debate on women’s labour is an extensive field which it is not possible to fully do justice to in the present context. My general orientation takes its cue from the operaist workerist feminism of the 1970s which attempted to place reproductive labour into a broader capitalist project involving the socialization of the factory into all walks of life. In the early work of this movement, writers such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James ([1972]), and Silvia Federici (2012) argued that the removal of the work of social reproduction from the formal wage economy hid the labour relations that governed such labour. Women were prevented from appearing as economic agents because their labour was transformed into a ‘natural attribute’ (Federici 2012: 16) which cannot appear as work. In the 1990s, Federici began to consider the global relations that underpinned reproductive labour and turned her attention to surrogacy, arguing that it ‘allows women from the “advanced” capitalist countries to avoid interrupting their career or jeopardizing their health to have a child’ (Federici 2012: 72). Federici’s critique can be seen to indicate the imbalances inherent in commercial surrogacy which enables prestigious female labour by asking other women to perform the dangerous work of reproductive labour. Recognising that, in a post-feminist moment, certain kinds of female labour have become identified as the measure of success for individual women (McRobbie 2009), Federici asks us to consider the cost that this has for other women whose labour is still undervalued. This view is largely shared by Lewis who describes surrogacy as ‘gestational labour’ and suggests that ‘commercial gestational surrogacy … is a means by which capitalism is harnessing pregnancy more effectively for private gain’ (Lewis 2019: 17). In keeping with Federici’s insistence that claiming wages for housework was a necessary step towards its refusal, Lewis argues that seeing ‘surrogacy as productive care labour … opens up the realization that pregnancy workers can bargain, commit sabotage, and go on strike’ (Lewis 2019: 75).

If commercial surrogacy makes visible the labour relations of gestational labour, which might otherwise be occluded, feminist economics has also considered the nature of this work. For Federici this relates to the concept of ‘immaterial labour’ especially as developed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Federici is sceptical about their claim that the production of affects has replaced the production of physical objects, an idea that might be the kernel of what has elsewhere been described as the feminization of work. She argues that this claim ‘sidesteps the rich problematic that the feminist analysis of reproductive work in capitalism uncovered’ (Federici 2012: 122). For her, social reproduction can never be wholly immaterial as ‘its physical and affective elements are inextricably combined’ (Federici 2012: 107). Care work is physical work unlike the new forms of production which primarily produce calculable value.

As a form of labour, commercial surrogacy is self-evidently productive, but it also involves forms of care that require large portions of what Arlie Hochschild describes as emotional labour. Hochschild’s elaboration of this term intersects with Federici’s critique of the immateriality of affective labour by suggesting a complex array of demands upon workers who must coordinate ‘mind and feeling’ in order to deliver an ‘outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’ (Hochschild 2012: 20). Though she distinguishes emotional labour from traditional kinds of physical or mental work, it evidently relies upon bodily exertion and shares experiences of alienation and fatigue that characterise these other forms of labour. Hochschild identifies emotional labour as paid work that ‘has exchange value’ (Hochschild 2012: 30), which might distinguish such labour from unpaid forms of social reproduction. However, as I discuss below, the kinds of emotional labour that she identifies with commercial surrogacy might easily cross over into unpaid, ‘altruistic’, surrogacy as well. In the Preface to the 2012 edition of The Managed Heart, Hochschild briefly discusses the ‘poignant work’ undertaken by Indian commercial surrogates who must detach themselves from the child that they carry for someone else (Hochschild 2012: 10–11). In a more substantial account of Indian paid-surrogates, published in 2017, Hochschild offers a more detailed inventory of the complex emotional labour of detachment that surrogates are required to perform as part of their relation to gestational economics. She lists a string of detachments including; disavowing the bodily effects of pregnancy other than on the womb, declining connections with the intended parents and, crucially, detaching herself from any strong emotions towards the baby (Hochschild 2017: 165).

Although all these ideas about female labour are relevant to the surrogacy thriller, Hochschild’s attention to the surrogate’s detachment is pivotal to my reading of the distinctiveness of this genre. The depictions of commercial surrogacy which I examine often exhibit an ambivalent relationship to the economic relations of gestational work. In the context of increasing levels of paid employment in a late capitalist economy, a tension between unpaid and paid reproduction is apparent throughout the cultural representation of surrogacy. However, in the surrogacy thriller, unease at the move of reproduction from a domestic to a wage economy transforms the commercial surrogate into a monstrous figure while, simultaneously, re-naturalising the family as a site of unpaid female work. As evidence of the contradictions that these films encapsulate, the surrogacy thriller pathologizes the surrogates’ attachment to the children that they have carried, presenting the failure to perform the emotional labour of detachment as an unnatural excess of care. The surrogate’s monstrosity lies both in her commercialization of gestation, which marks her as an improper mother, and in her failure to perform the emotional labour that her contract requires, which marks her as an improper worker. This double index of failure is the key feature for marking out this genre from its proximate variations.

The Contours of the Surrogacy Thriller

The publicity descriptions for recent films about commercial surrogacy illustrates a strong trend towards the sensational.

A couple who are unable to conceive find a solution to their problems by hiring a surrogate mother to carry their child. Without realising they hire a mentally unstable woman who intends to destroy their marriage.

AppleTV, The Surrogacy Trap (Wills 2013)

A married couple, struggling to have a child, hires a young woman to be their surrogate, but soon discovers she has a bizarre and deadly agenda.

Amazon, The Surrogate (D. Campbell 2013)

A couple's marriage is threatened when the baby surrogate they've hired becomes obsessed and wants the husband and baby inside of her for her own.

AppleTV, When the Bough Breaks (Cassar 2016)

In each of these films the paid surrogate turns out to be murderously psychotic and contrives to use her pregnancy to displace the wife and supplant her in a fantasy of the affluent heterosexual marriage. These films sit in a tradition of horror running back to the slasher films of the 1960s and 1970s, through the 1980s erotic thrillers such as Fatal Attraction (Lyne 1987), and closely resemble The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (Hanson 1992), all of which exploit anxieties about women’s place within the family to act out their plots. It would be easy to dismiss these films as clumsy boilerplates that simply repeat the clichés of familiar genre-movies. However, these films distinguish themselves from this tradition through their depiction of a particular female labour-economy. In this respect they can be placed into a chain of media representations of feminism in which women appear to disavow the pre-existing models of female labour that their forerunners inhabited. As a piece, the surrogacy thriller represents commercial surrogates as untrustworthy and surrogacy itself as threatening to the family unit. All the films see the surrogate attempt to seduce the husband and generally imply that introducing other women into your marriage is dangerous to its stability. But more, these films also deploy storylines that appear hostile to the notion of women’s paid work, both by depicting the commercial surrogate as unnatural for profiting from childbearing and by suggesting that the work of women professionals is incompatible with gestation. In light of this depiction of women’s reproductive labour, the modern surrogacy thriller needs to be seen as part of an ongoing debate about the boundary between the social and the economic in a period in which capitalism has been increasingly adept at channelling non-work into the circuits of accumulation.

In the context of ongoing legal debates about commercial surrogacy it is unsurprising that surrogacy films frequently end up as crime thrillers. In the English-speaking world paid-surrogacy is only legal in some US States. Internationally, the option to pay surrogates, rather than simply to cover expenses, is increasingly prohibited.¹ The correlation of commercial surrogacy with criminality in fictional texts might, therefore, be understood as part of a wider unease about the practice. TV series frequently entwine illicit surrogacy-contracts with other crime narratives. In the BBC’s The Nest (De Emmony 2020), the surrogate is living under a new identity having recently been released from care after being found guilty of murder as a child. Furthermore, the intended father has built his property-development business using money from organised crime with ties to drug-dealing and money-laundering. In Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake: China Girl (2017), set in Australia, a murder investigation uncovers a network of trafficking and illegal commercial-surrogacy among Thai prostitutes. Although these commercial surrogates lack the murderous intent of the women in surrogacy thrillers, these series still create a connection between commercial surrogacy and other illegal or anti-social practices. Such media presentations coincide with a wider cultural anxiety about commercial surrogacy which renders it illegitimate.

Representing Altruistic Surrogacy

This presentation of commercial surrogacy contrasts with the representations of ‘altruistic’ surrogacy, which typically seek to emphasise underlying caring motives. For instance, in The Surrogate (Hersh 2020), Jess spends much of the early part of the film needing to justify and explain her decision to act as a surrogate for two gay friends. The film pivots on the discovery that the child she is carrying has Downs Syndrome which leads her friends to ask her to abort the foetus. Having spent time exploring local support groups for children with Downs, Jess finds herself unwilling to terminate the pregnancy and tries to find ways to raise the child on her own. Although at the end of the film she decides to have a termination, this decision results from the realization that giving birth will tie her forever to her former friends who she no longer regards as ethical people. The film works through Jess’ moral dilemma in ways that seek to establish Jess as a good person. She is employed at a non-profit organisation supporting incarcerated women, her seemingly instinctive connection with children and other mothers represents her as empathetic and caring, and she becomes a vocal advocate for disability rights. In one scene she enters a restaurant to ask how they accommodate people with impaired mobility having noticed the lack of a ramp when passing in the street. When debating her decision to keep the child with her parents, she frames this as a practical political choice, enabling her to lobby for change to the public-school system. Indeed, Jess’ role as an altruistic surrogate is really further proof of her care for others rather than a necessary device for the plot and Hersh’s film can be read less as a film about surrogacy and more a film about disability, which stages a debate about aborting a Downs child as a debate about eugenics.

Notably, Jess bemoans the assumption that she is acting as a surrogate for money, pointing out that commercial surrogacy is illegal in New York. In this respect, Hersh’s The Surrogate echoes other representations of altruistic surrogacy which appear compelled to disavow a financial motive. Nevertheless, it is common to see a language of money and work intrude into the discussion of the surrogacy process. In the documentary-series The Surrogates (C. Campbell 2021), both surrogates and potential parents repeatedly distance their experience from any financial transaction while using revealing language that suggests an implicit financialization. In the first episode, working-class surrogate Emma explains the expenses system and justifies claiming for cosmetics with the analogy of a work credit card to claim for ‘lunches with your clients and stuff’. Similarly, when she contemplates her embarrassment at asking for more expenses she justifies this by saying that ‘we [surrogates] can’t be expected to fund a pregnancy essentially that isn’t ours [air quotes]. We’re carrying it but it’s not ours.’ The relationship between compensation and ownership pushes Emma’s logic to resemble a wage economy which operates precisely around breaking the link between labour and its product. However, perhaps aware of how this logic may appear, Emma is categorical that surrogates ‘definitely don’t do it for financial gain.’ In these episodes Emma appears to engage in a kind of emotional labour that Hochschild associates with surrogacy—especially when she exhibits detachment. This could unsettle Hochschild’s insistence that emotional labour is paid work although it might alternately highlight the uneasy boundary between paid and unpaid surrogacy that appears to frame Emma’s responses. A similar slippage between the language of altruism and the language of economics is visible in an exchange between Caitlin and her manager Kate, for whom she is acting as a surrogate. Caitlin talks of her embarrassment about discussing her own family at work knowing that Kate has experienced a number of miscarriages. Kate replies, jokingly, that, ‘I don’t want you to feel that you have to rent out your womb just so you can talk about your amazing children’. Although both women stress ideas of care and empathy in this exchange, Kate’s joke hints at an implicit financialization of surrogacy. Even if no payment is made to Caitlin, her body is presented as a resource that can be utilised economically in order to achieve the desired (re)production. Kate doesn’t want Caitlin to feel that she must ‘rent out’ her womb but the joke assumes that the womb is available for rent and frames altruistic surrogacy as a financial transaction. Kate’s humour also brushes over the clear disparities in their personal finances and the hierarchy of the workplace, where she is Caitlin’s ‘boss’. Throughout the episode both women worry about the way that the surrogacy relationship troubles the work hierarchy: is Kate giving Caitlin too easy a ride? has Caitlin offered to act as Kate’s surrogate in order to become the boss’ favourite? Again, these comments are expressed as jokes but hint at an anxious boundary-maintenance of the division between care and commerce.

The Surrogacy Trap and the Motif of Replacement

The surrogacy thriller clearly takes a different path from these depictions. However, the uneasy separation of the language of economics from the language of care remains. Most obviously this takes place through a drama of replacement which is one of the genre’s key elements. The idea of substitution is inherent to surrogacy which asks one woman to perform reproductive labour on behalf of others. In this respect, commercial surrogacy is not unlike other kinds of paid employment which, in its nature, involves a financial transaction that pays one person to do the work of another. Commercialising surrogacy brings gestational labour into view and makes apparent its economic value, even if this is not an end itself. The workers in the surrogacy thriller do not appear to be sabotaging the circuits of capital in which their labour operates, and their representation tends to veer away from perceiving surrogates as workers. However, it is worth holding this concept in mind when thinking about the way that these films represent surrogacy as an economic relationship not least to leave open the possibility of a latent critique of gestational labour.

Reading surrogacy thrillers as a critique of gestational labour-relations is made difficult by a wearingly familiar backlash-politics which takes aim at surrogates and intended parents alike. In particular, the act of gestational substitution appears to catalyse more threatening notions of replacement that feed the surrogate’s homicidal desires to insert herself into the marital relationship in place of the wife. Accordingly, commercial surrogacy is depicted as threatening to the nuclear heterosexual family even while it ostensibly seeks to re-encode it by providing children to families that cannot otherwise obtain them. This pattern modifies the conclusions of Oliver and Le Vay who both suggest that depictions of surrogacy re-centre the nuclear family. For Oliver, the nuclear family is re-asserted through plot twists which sees the intended parent unexpectedly pregnant, therefore reassuring audiences of the continuing significance of ‘natural’ reproduction (Oliver 2012: 44). For Le Vay, surrogacy texts repeat standard Hollywood tropes in order to reposition working and sexualised women ‘within the domestic space, as mothers’ (Le Vay 2019: 27). She argues that this involves a rewriting of the romance genre, in which surrogacy texts focus on a quest for ‘motherhood status’ rather than for the male partner (Le Vay 2019: 26). Neither account quite captures the surrogacy thriller as a genre. Although these films appear to bolster the nuclear family, which can be completed through the production of ‘biogenetic progeny’ (Lewis 2019: 18), they rely upon a slightly different formal mechanism. Specifically, the surrogate’s ability to carry the child to term is what allows her to seek a place in the family at the cost of the infertile wife. The male heterosexual partner is identified as the object of desire and the gestating infant is often represented as a hostage that will enable this object to be obtained. Consequently, the implicit substitution contained within the act of surrogacy, unfolds into a more sustained narrative of displacement in pursuit of the heterosexual family.

The replacement motif is developed most fully in The Surrogacy Trap in which would-be parents Mitch and Christy Bennett employ Mallory Parkes as a commercial surrogate. Once pregnant Mallory begins an involved practice of imitation in which she poses as Mitch’s wife. This includes superimposing her face over Christy’s in photographs she steals from the family home, or telling strangers and healthcare professionals that Mitch is her husband. Her habit of impersonation is uncovered when her yoga teacher, Allison, turns out to be Christy’s friend who has been invited to the baby shower. This leads to a confrontation in which Allison confides in Christy that Mallory has been discussing raising a baby rather than simply birthing one and suggests that ‘the husband she has been describing [… is] Mitch.’ When confronted, Mallory experiences a bout of painful Braxton Hicks contractions and is taken to hospital. This episode symbolically underlines Mallory’s illegitimacy when Mitch describes Braxton Hicks as ‘false labour’ allowing the hospital doctor to distinguish Braxton Hicks from ‘the real thing.’ Framing Braxton Hicks in terms of falsity links this incident to Mallory’s pattern of impersonation and undermines her maternity, reminding viewers that she does not really occupy the role of wife and mother. Even though she is capable of biological reproduction, the genetic provenance of the baby that she carries trumps her claim to maternity. Furthermore, Braxton Hicks may also undermine Mallory’s status as a worker in the sense that they represent unproductive labour. Significantly, her claim to ownership is a breach of contract although this remains an open question in many US states.² The Surrogacy Trap appears anxious to marginalise the surrogate’s gestational labour by framing Mallory as fraudulent, illegitimate or play acting, in order to protect the idea that the nuclear family is rooted in genetics.

The filming of The Surrogacy Trap visually supports this replacement narrative by presenting surrogate and wife as interchangeable. This is most prominent when Christy and Mitch treat themselves to a brief vacation and Mallory breaks into their house. Scenes of sexual intimacy between Mitch and Christy are intercut with shots of Mallory in the couple’s bed stroking her stomach while exhibiting signs of arousal. The visual mirroring projects Mallory’s intent and implies the potential for replacement while foregrounding Mitch as the object of female desire. However, Mitch’s absence from the shots of Mallory is highly significant. Her solitude emphasises the degree to which her arousal is grounded in fantasy and re-encodes the heterosexual couple as the legitimate form of sexuality. In contrast to marital intercourse, Mallory’s sexual gratification can only be seen as an imitation. In an earlier scene, also set in the Bennett’s home, the film employs the aesthetics of horror to depict Mallory as an eerie intrusion into the family space. After Mallory’s episode of Braxton Hicks, Christy invites Mallory to stay at the couple’s house as a precaution. While the Bennetts prepare for bed Mallory wanders the darkened house with her face cast in a set grin, likely intended to imply an altered state. Though Mallory may be the focaliser for these scenes, the distance between Mallory and the audience is maintained by the cinematography and by the implication that her point of view is odd and dangerous. These scenes are lit using blue-tinted lighting suggestive of moonlight rather than the white or yellow lighting that is deployed in other scenes. Visually, this points towards the genre conventions of horror and renders Mallory a frightening figure rather than a nurturing one. In one scene Mallory can be seen through the distorted glass of the bathroom door while Mitch takes a shower. Diegetically, Mitch hears Mallory moving and mistaking her for his wife, calls out to Christy. Symbolically, Mallory appears as an uncanny version of herself, being visually misshapen by the glass, and simultaneously an uncanny version of Christy by being mistaken for, and visibly not, Mitch’s spouse.

Women’s Work

The link to the horror genre in this sequence is especially prominent when Mallory is shown in the kitchen lingering over the family’s knife block. The kitchen knife has become a major object of cinematic violence in horror films like Psycho (1960) and Halloween (1978), and in thrillers such as Play Misty for Me (1971) and Fatal Attraction (1987). However, it is worth remembering the knife’s role as an object of domestic labour in order to note that its transformation into an object of menace involves a considerable dose of misogyny. In Psycho, Norman Bates impersonates his mother as a rebuke against maternity; in Fatal Attraction, Alex Forrest embodies backlash politics against working women when she attempts to butcher the housewife Beth Gallagher. Suzanne Leonard has suggested that Fatal Attraction ‘seems to quote Psycho’ by having Alex attack Beth in the bathroom, (Leonard 2009: 122). However, Lyne’s film can also be read as reorientation of earlier feminist texts that sought to repudiate reproductive labour. In The Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Martha Rosler comedically enacts feminist rage by wielding everyday kitchen implements as weapons. Working through the alphabet, a deadpan Rosler uses numerous utensils in increasingly threatening ways. For the letter k, she holds a knife and slashes at the video’s invisible antagonist in imitation of the choreography of the horror film. Charlotte Brunsdon has argued that Rosler’s video takes its place in a chain of disavowals. Rosler’s work disavows forms of femininity that are limited to reproductive labour such as cooking, reified in the figure of US TV-cook Julia Child, and childcare, concentrated into the form of the alphabet primer. For Brunsdon, this spawns later rejections of feminist anger so that TV cooks such as Delia Smith or Martha Stewart ‘become wealthy in the kitchen’ because Rosler had ‘been cross there first’ (Brunsdon 2005: 114). Employing this argument, it is possible to read films such as Fatal Attraction as re-embodying Rosler’s knife-wielding feminist in backlash figures such as Alex Forrest. If The Surrogacy Trap fits into this chain it seems that Mallory is a latter-day Alex and her stroking of the knives suggests the erotic thriller in which unmarried working women become the murderous other to the secure family unit. Mallory’s gesture implies desire, which unsettles the supposed bonds of matrimony, and strongly echoes the 1980s femme fatale. This resemblance comes to fruition in the conclusion to The Surrogacy Trap which involves a fight between Mallory and Christy in which Mallory wields the same kitchen knife in an attempt to kill her married rival.³

There is, however, a problem with this reading. Unlike Beth Galloway, the wives in these films are also workers. Indeed, the fact of their work is implicated in their infertility and consequently in their need to employ a surrogate. Although never stated, the implication that Christy’s career has been a barrier to motherhood is strongly asserted in the opening scene set at a work party in which Christy celebrates a successful product campaign for the firm that she runs. While delivering a speech to her team, she starts to experience discomfort and collapses with what is revealed to be her third miscarriage, ending her last round of IVF. Towards the end of the film Christy’s return to work facilitates the abduction of her son. Although the Bennetts employ a nanny, when her car breaks down Christy takes her child to work because she has a meeting that cannot be postponed. In the parking garage she is attacked by Mallory who then kidnaps the child and goes on the run. In both scenes the film implicitly admonishes women for working by hinting that the workplace is inimical to the safety of the family.

This imagery, co-mingling work and infertility, is visible elsewhere in the film. When the couple interview Mallory as a prospective surrogate she asks them why they want to have a child. Christy replies that ‘I have been very lucky and I have achieved everything that I have put my mind to, except having a child and being a mother.’ She concludes that she doesn’t want ‘that dream of having a family to just end in complete failure’. The script presents childbirth as an ambition that is not unlike her other career goals, something that can be measured in terms of individual success and failure. However, in the context of the film’s depiction of Christy’s work as something that imperils her child both unborn and postpartum, this implicitly separates out the life of work from the life of family as incompatible alternatives: success at one appears to require failure at the other. As such, the surrogate process can be seen as a means for Christy to reconcile the two incompatible strands of her life, serving as the mechanism by which the working woman can ‘have it all’.⁴

To further underline its antagonism towards women’s employment, the film displays some distaste at the commercial elements of paid surrogacy. The problem of women’s work is made prominent when Mitch objects to choosing a prospective surrogate who has already performed the service three times before. Mitch complains that ‘having children is her job’ and says that he doesn’t ‘like the idea of … someone who is essentially a professional incubator’. The reduction of surrogates to their womb is not uncommon and in When the Bough Breaks the surrogate’s fiancé refers to her as ‘the uterus’. However, the key to Mitch’s objection is the word professional. When they interview Mallory, she admits that money is part of her motivation but she tempers this with a story of her mother who acted as a surrogate and calls the act a ‘gift’. By invoking the prospect of altruism Mallory rhetorically shifts her surrogacy from a money economy to a gift economy, which is a common formulation for feminine alternatives to monetary valuation (Marsh 2020: 106–110). This echoes a similar disavowal by surrogacy clinics which, Lewis suggests, normalize surrogacy as a job while insisting that it can never be commercialized (Lewis 2019: 63). By transforming her labour into gift-giving, Mallory mollifies Mitch’s objections to the commercial element of the surrogacy contract and symbolically aligns her later attempt to replace Christy with traditional conceptions of wives as gifts that are exchanged between male givers (Rubin 2006: 92–93).

In this context, Mallory’s attempt to oust the working mother and insert herself into a fantasy of the nuclear family could be taken to frame her as the embodiment of traditional femininity. However, this disavowal of her financial motivation cannot undo the contractual nature of the surrogacy. The economic asserts itself when the film stages the signing of the contract between Mallory and the Bennetts. Mallory subtly resists the legalistic contract by joking that ‘getting pregnant’ requires a surprising amount of paperwork. Nevertheless, the contract spells out her fee, paid in monthly instalments which renders her into the very salaried worker that she is ostensibly in conflict against. The contract also sets out the terms of her employment, including clauses naming Christy and Mitch as the legal parents and forbidding Mallory from forming or attempting ‘to form a parent–child relationship.’ This last clause chimes with Hochschild’s account of the emotional labour of commercial surrogacy, and suggests that in failing to detach Mallory has failed at her job. Like the other surrogates in the surrogacy thriller, she does not perform her emotional labour competently because she appears to care excessively for the husband and the child.

The Surrogacy Trap is unusual in giving such prominent attention to the contract. In When the Bough Breaks, for instance, the film skips over any legal process and cuts straight to the hospital where the couple’s embryo is inserted into the surrogate’s womb. However, this does not prevent the film from offering a commentary of sorts on her employment. Early on for instance, Laura, the intended mother, comments that it is ‘strange’ that ‘it’s against the law to pay someone to have sex, but you can pay a woman to get pregnant with your child’. Despite the legal differences between prostitution and surrogacy the similarity of surrogacy to sex work is a common feature of economic accounts of surrogacy which conflates the marketization of the female body in all its forms (Marsh 2020: 113). However, despite Lewis’ critique of the conditions of paid reproductive labour, none of these films is able to turn its interest in the economics of surrogacy into any kind of protest against these labour relations. This is chiefly because the codes of the thriller render the surrogate into a menacing threat that is largely seen from the perspective of the heterosexual family that she tries to attack. The surrogate stands for fears that are about the integrity of genetic reproduction rather than the conditions of labour for women outside the bourgeois family. In Doug Campbell’s The Surrogate (2013) one of the early signs of the surrogate Kate’s questionable character is her substantial personal wealth, owing to an inheritance. This contrasts starkly with Remy, the agency surrogate, who explains to her boyfriend that they ‘need the money’, despite her claim at interview that the main reason she acts as a surrogate is because she ‘really loved being pregnant’ and her ‘heart goes out to women who can't.’ The similarity of Remy’s disavowal to Mallory’s extends Hochschild’s analysis, suggesting that the denial of a financial motive is a further part of the emotional labour of commercial surrogacy. By staging the contradiction between avowed altruism and financial necessity, The Surrogate may offer a space to critique the conditions of gestational labour. However, this is shut down by the form of the thriller when Kate murders Remy in order to take her place as the surrogate. This shifts the register of the film away from the economics of surrogacy into the register of fear for the integrity of the family. In this way, these films differ from a text like Campion’s China Girl which draws viewers’ attention to the global inequalities of surrogacy industries in which the global north outsources its labour to the global south. Campion’s text works in reverse, starting with a murder investigation and ending with a video in which the Thai surrogates, orchestrated by the quasi-Leninist Puss, perform an exoticist pantomime critiquing the imperialist and sexist politics of international surrogacy-relations. Accordingly, the resistance of surrogates to their conditions of employment in China Girl takes on a political agenda that the surrogacy thriller appears to quash.⁵

Talking About Care Through the Language of Work

Despite its structural attack on paid female work, the surrogacy thriller cannot avoid registering the status of commercial surrogacy as work. This produces an ambivalence about the boundary between the public economy of paid labour and private economy of unpaid reproductive labour. In When the Bough Breaks, this exists as an intermingling of the language of work with the language of emotions or care. For instance, early in the film the boss of the prospective father, John, informs him that a colleague will oversee his casework on a forthcoming trial: ‘it’s still your baby’ the boss declares, ‘but I want a second pair of eyes.’ The colloquial use of baby as a metaphor seems particularly loaded given that the boss’ actions suggest a contested paternity—the case is John’s baby but it might be Todd’s who has been invited to share in its preparation. Todd’s work on the case might be a kind of parallel surrogacy and, tellingly, this conversation is interrupted by a telephone call from John’s wife, Laura, who informs him that she has just met their prospective surrogate. The shading of the language of work with the language of reproduction is clearly proleptic of the later plotlines that repeat the familiar motifs of replacement, violence and abduction.

Later, when the surrogate, Anna, and her fiancé, Mike, join John and Laura for dinner, Mike demurs from any conversation about the surrogacy, saying ‘that’s your business’. The transactional nature of commercial surrogacy means that this is literally true, though Mike goes on to explain that the money from the surrogacy will allow him to buy into his uncle’s roofing company. However, the colloquial use of business here suggests that its meaning is more diffuse and speaks to an intermingling of a language of commerce to encompass other more personal concerns. This takes a symbolic twist when Mike admires the money that John and Laura have spent renovating their home before spotting some poor workmanship that will damage the property. In response John tells him that he needs Mike and Anna to be serious about the surrogacy since he and Laura are down to their final embryo. This slight non sequitur is shot through with conceptions of the economic. Mike illustrates that his business is a kind of homemaking, concerned with the durability of the home as a kind of shelter and potentially invoking the etymology of the word economy derived from the Greek for household. By contrast, John deploys another sense of homemaking, in the sense of making a family, while also invoking a foundational definition of economics as the management of scarce resources. From both perspectives any clear boundary between the economic and the domestic feels hard to maintain. This continues into the scenes following the dinner when Laura contrasts the two relationships; whereas Anna just knows that she loves Mike, Laura and John ‘worked hard’ to make it last. Here again, acts of home-building are repeatedly framed as work: Laura ‘worked’ decorating the nursery, the surrogacy is ‘going to work this time’. There is nothing unusual about such language but, in context, it picks at the division between the economic and the emotional that sits at the very heart of the surrogate relationship.

At the level of the script, When the Bough Breaks suggests that it is difficult to disentangle the language of the private space from the language of the economy. What is more, this difficulty appears to stretch beyond the surrogate relationship into all the working relations, even when thinking about male employment. This is replicated at the level of the plot when Anna’s attempts to seduce John intrude into the workplace and threaten his employment and his prospect of being made a partner. A more extreme version of this occurs in Doug Campbell’s The Surrogate (2013), when Kate falsely accuses the intended father of violent abuse which results in his losing his job. This pattern amplifies the disruptive consequences of paid surrogacy which is represented as threatening men’s capacity to earn a living in the public world of work as well as threatening the private family life inside the home. The result of moving reproductive labour into the evaluative economy of wages appears to be a disruption of both the emotional economy of the home and the financial economy of work. This chimes with the instincts of theorists like Federici or Lewis who wish to economise gestational labour as a strategy for making visible the beneficiaries of this labour, and for refusing this work on such terms. However, it remains a question whether the generic form of the thriller can retain a space for this critique given that the attack on gestational labour-relations are sublimated into the visceral attack on the family in the manner of horror.

The Baby Maker

In response to this question and by way of a conclusion, I want to look back to James Bridges’ earlier film, The Baby Maker (1970). This backward glance is partly an attempt to break the inherently periodizing structure of my argument, which has implied that the surrogacy thriller is a late adaptation of the 1980s attack on women’s work in the context of proliferating female employment. The surrogacy thriller draws attention to the emotional labour performed by women and to the comingling of emotional and productive labour in care work. By looking back to the early 1970s, I propose to read these features of women’s labour without reading the attack on working-women as the necessary context. In particular, Bridges’ film appears to be presciently conscious of the changing character of work, the so-called feminization of labour, in which immaterial labour is supposed to replace material production. By placing the commercial surrogate into this context, Bridges’ film appears to trouble the distinction between the production of affect and physical production in ways that open up readings of the later surrogacy films.

The Baby Maker records the experience of Tish Gray who acts as commercial surrogate for Suzanne and Jay Wilcox and it shares several plot features with the surrogacy thriller. Midway through the film Tish moves into the Wilcoxes’ home and once there she displays behaviour that has the potential to become the kind of replacement narrative of the thriller. In one scene, Tish wakes in the night and joins the Wilcoxes in bed taking up an ambivalent role as proxy child needing the comfort of the would-be parents and as proxy wife by hugging Jay. When labour begins she displays nesting behaviour, including waking early to make Jay’s breakfast and jealously comparing her abilities in preparing fresh orange juice to Suzanne’s. This has a near mirror in The Surrogacy Trap when Mallory wakes the Bennetts by preparing breakfast as part of her on-going attempt to displace Christy. However, in The Baby Maker, it picks up on an earlier scene when Tish and Jay consummate the surrogacy-contract (in an era prior to IVF). Suzanne leaves them for the night promising to return in the morning to make breakfast, reasserting her place in her marriage by laying claim to domestic labour. Significantly, Suzanne is often shown doing the work of social reproduction—cleaning Tish’s home, decorating the baby room, or preparing meals. Potentially, Tish’s nesting places her in competition with Suzanne and, in another film, might open up the replacement narrative that animates the thriller.

Tish is also seen to struggle performing the care work of emotional detachment although this doesn’t escalate into the excess of caring that motivates the surrogates in the thriller. The final scene of The Baby Maker jumps from a close-up of Tish in the delivery room to a close-up of Tish and the baby. By framing Tish and the baby alone, the film implies that she occupies the maternal role but, as the camera pulls away, the voice of Mrs Culnik (the surrogacy matchmaker) intrudes on this intimate framing and the scene cuts to a medium shot in Mrs Culnik’s sitting room and includes Suzanne Wilcox. Tish breaks her attachment further by turning to Mrs Culnik and asking, ‘Can we get down to business?’ Although the remainder of the scene is cut through with telling looks, anxious from Suzanne, longing from Tish and paternal from Jay, it ends with an embrace between Tish and Jay in which she refuses his offer to ‘keep in touch’. ‘Business’ patently shapes this exchange and Jay, as breadwinner, hands out envelopes of money to Mrs Culnik and Tish’s fee of $2,000 is clearly announced, ‘as agreed.’ The contractual nature of that agreement reminds the viewer that Tish is at work and that her relationship with the Wilcoxes is one of labour. Anticipating Hochschild’s observation, Tish invokes the contract precisely to disavow any attachment to the Wilcoxes, including her own genetic offspring. This contrasts with the surrogates in the thriller, whose emotional labour involves denying the contract. Nevertheless, Tish still performs emotional work by reminding the Wilcoxes that this encounter is a business meeting in order to permit her, however uneasily, to detach herself from the family that she has produced.

A striking element of the depiction of Tish and Suzanne working, is that none of the male characters in the film are shown at work. The closest that Jay gets to the workplace is a scene outside his office when he is shown talking with another man, presumably a client or colleague. The fact that Jay is only shown doing the intimate soft work of symbolic interaction is entirely appropriate to his job which is described as a ‘management engineer’. This phrase beautifully crystallizes male anxiety about the feminization of work under late capitalism, retaining a semantic link to traditional forms of masculine employment while describing the work of the management consultant avant la lettre. Jay’s work is the immaterial labour of financialised capitalism and Bridges’ response to this immateriality appears to be to avoid representing it on the screen. Bridges’ representation of Suzanne and Tish’s work seems to acknowledge that this is physical work, whereas Jay’s work producing calculable value is not. In respect of Tish, Bridges consistently focuses on the working conditions of surrogacy as a form of paid employment. This includes frequent attention to her remuneration, which includes lump-sum payments upon conception and at the birth of the baby, the cost of her medical care and additional ongoing payments throughout her pregnancy that might be considered some kind of wage. Indeed, these costs are renegotiated in recognition of the conditions of the labour that Tish performs. The film is also attentive to elements of Tish’s labour that resemble more commonplace forms of work, such as managerial surveillance and the management of time. The Wilcoxes issue terms of the contract regulating Tish’s diet, and consumption of alcohol or drugs; Suzanne spies on Tish and attempts to restrict the strenuous activities that she can pursue; following an incident of spotting Tish is given exercises to perform and these are monitored and regulated with the ringing of an alarm clock, echoing the form of the factory bell. At the aesthetic level, the film displays elements of slow realism that are common to 1970s filmmaking, including a number of incidental scene-setting images and lingering shots on the main actors. These techniques are prominent in scenes depicting the work of bearing the Wilcoxes’ baby including scenes in a Lamaze class, during a sonogram and in the labour theatre. All of these scenes emphasise the affective work of Tish’s labour but also the physical (material) work that is required. The scene in the labour room is over 5 min long and focuses largely on Tish’s upper body and face. Accordingly, the emphasis is on exertion, the labour of labour.

By making Tish’s labour resemble traditional forms of work at precisely the point where those traditional forms of work are being replaced with the immaterial labour of finance capital, Bridges appears to open up the possibility that commercial surrogacy is a part of wider transformations in the nature of work. Potentially, The Baby Maker makes gestational labour visible not only to recognise women’s work as labour but also to suggest that this move will, necessarily, re-code what can be understood as work. The film troubles the boundary between the private realm of social reproduction and the public realm of paid labour by highlighting the similarities of Suzanne and Tish’s work. But it also desacralizes male work by suggesting that this cannot survive unaltered in the presence of newly economized reproductive labour. More recent presentations of commercial surrogacy appear to disavow these conclusions underneath the familiar generic conventions of the thriller. In the thriller, any troubling of the boundary between work and non-work veers towards horror in order to hide the conditions of work governing gestational labour. Nonetheless, as When the Bough Breaks illustrates, this repressed connection erupts at the most fundamental linguistic level so that the language of care and the language of the economy become irreducibly entwined. Bridges’ film makes apparent that the surrogacy thriller is not simply concerned with the fact of women’s work, in repetition of the erotic thrillers of the 1980s, but also with the forms and conditions of this work as a combination of physical, affective and emotional labour. Working through this genre, and placing it in a longer history of media representations, illustrates the centrality of labour relations in the representation of surrogacy in film and television. In doing so, I suggest, it is possible to recuperate the latent potential of this feature of these texts as critique, despite the tendency to quash this possibility by turning it into sensation.

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.