Abstract
Reassembling Motherhood: Procreation and Care in a Globalized World is an interdisciplinary edited volume that includes many well-known scholars, each of whom offers an original chapter around the changing concept of “motherhood.” Motherhood, according to these authors and editors Yasmine Ergas, Jane Jenson, and Sonya Michel, is being reassembled as a result of advances in reproductive technologies, the emergence of new markets, public policy shifts, and legal rights/claims. The effect is a bevy of altered motherhood identities, social meanings, and maternal experiences.
The authors in this edited collection are especially interested in illuminating the chains of reproduction and the global distribution of carework that together define motherhood. These chains are inextricably linked with nation-states, and they are changing cultural norms and expectations.
Sociologists will find familiar arguments in this volume with new twists introduced by social science colleagues from other disciplines. The chapters on the reproductive chain focus on a series of provocative tensions that place motherhood (and sometimes fatherhood) claims at center stage. Reproductive issues and debates serve as proxies for more fundamental questions about intersecting inequalities of nation-states, citizenship, gender, race, social class, and disabilities. Assisted reproductive technologies and other medical advances have deconstructed motherhood, women’s bodies, and the social realities of women’s (and men’s) lives. New in this collection is a focus on how these tensions play out in different cultures and countries, discussed by several anthropologists, political scientists, and legal scholars.
The chapters on global carework involve other concerns, including women’s migration to find paid employment and the reconciliation of work and family obligations. These chapters offer important (and sometimes new) empirical examples that theorize the emotional complexities of motherhood that are often lived in silence and sometimes at the margins.
The editors’ introduction illuminates how inequalities “affect the distribution of choice as well as the ways in which choice has been generated within the two chains of procreation and of care” (p. 2). For some women (and men) motherhood is more achievable as a “new panoply of choice” (p. 2). However, for other women motherhood remains restrictive or a “locus of coercion” (p. 13). After all, motherhood is an important site in which reproductive justice has yet to be achieved.
The chapters in this edited collection make contributions to several important topics that will be of interest to sociologists. Here I provide several examples that caught my attention as I read the book:
Reproductive freedom has come to mean debates over policies and laws surrounding women’s bodies and the ways biological processes are weighted and imagined. Several authors address global responses, including various supranational bodies (such as the European Court of Human Rights). The varied, restrictive EU regulations on assisted reproduction create inequalities around motherhood and produce a new hierarchy of privilege between women. The authors offer an instructive examination of country views on the biological family, women’s rights to their bodies and health, and the clash between science and religion. Another chapter discusses surrogacy as an expansion of reproductive “choice” embedded in abortion rights by examining differing maternity claims in well-known court cases. Finally, other chapters examine the inadequacy of national frameworks and the absence of international regulations around commercial surrogacy when various stakeholders are likely to come from multiple countries and the parentage of the resulting child could be problematic.
Technologies and science have also raised social and legal challenges. Chapters include discussions of embodiment, especially around surrogacy. Unsettling examples of contractual relations between several women and the commercialization of a baby are discussed in the context of a U.S./India reproductive chain. Another chapter focuses on technologies. Technologies, such as ultrasounds, are powerful examples of how visual methods sever the fetus from the womb, but also how these representations are politicized. The fetus as a being “not only in a woman but of a woman” (p. 6) is examined in several chapters—for example, around the ultrasound and the meaning of the fetus as a visual representation deconstructed from the womb. Another chapter argues that DNA tests for paternity have pinned down the once vague social and legal basis for fatherhood, while motherhood claims—once based on the child’s birth—have become ambiguous since the introduction of assisted reproductive technologies.
Mothering from a distance is a thread that runs through the chapters that focus on the various processes involved in the chain of carework. The self-evident mother-child bond is disrupted and challenged by systems beyond the mother’s control, whether through the voluntarily (often involuntarily) relinquishing of a child to be placed for adoption in Tamil or through the now-common U.S open-adoption system. Also important is the chapter on the media’s discussion in Eastern and Central European sending countries of “moral outrage” about migrant parents who leave their child behind for paid employment, often to care for someone else’s child. The chapter on the U.S. carceral state discusses the intersection of prisons and foster care. Increasingly the incarceration of poor, often black mothers is a strategy of surveillance in this neoliberal age that utilizes the foster care system to strip mothers from their children. The chapters that focus on chains of care also discuss how nation-states engage in what appear as invisible reaches into family life from afar in order to create a particular kind of mother. Overall, these chapters illustrate how various institutions and governments employ actions and policies to maintain hierarchies of gender, race, and class.
While this edited collection offers an array of outstanding (and well-written) chapters that examine how motherhood is being renegotiated, the authors do not really interrogate the discourse of choice and its illusion. The idea of choice—and the desire for it—presumes global alliances that may lead to unintended (and new) hierarchies among the “reassembled.” An essay on the limitations of “market choices” that privatization occludes would be welcomed. In short, motherhood becomes another site of inequalities at the individual level (birth and adoptive parents/surrogates and intending parents) but also, and more startlingly, through global markets and supranational unions (e.g., the Hague Adoption Convention or the European Court of Human Rights) that have undermined the authority and autonomy of practices and policies of and about motherhood in individual countries.
I recommend this book for undergraduate and graduate courses on Families and Motherhood, Contemporary Reproduction, and Global Inequalities.