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We have invented new types of mothering and are just beginning to feel their effects on society. Surrogacy has a long history and as a means of employment, it has opened up many unquieting biological and legal questions. Similarly, egg donation and post-menstrual pregnancies enable people to become biological mothers when such options had been closed until a few years ago. The new technology of egg freezing promises a life of freedom to young single women. These technologies are popularized and romanticized, but they are not without significant perils.

The prevailing model of contract law presumes that fully informed decision-makers exercise free and voluntary choices to further their conscious preferences and goals. The model makes sense in the context of commercial relationships. But family contracts—prenuptial agreements, separation agreements, adoption agreements, surrogacy contracts, and contracts between intimate partners—are another matter. Psychoanalysis invites us to examine the ways in which the prevailing free choice model fails to acknowledge the troubling influence of unconscious factors on the formation and breach of intimate contracts. As this chapter explains, psychoanalysis uncovers the subjective drama of intimate contracts: the role of fantasy and memory in constructing present reality; the need to replay and to master old traumas; the ambivalences, conflicts, and paradoxes of unconscious life. Psychological phenomena in the form of unconscious fantasy, transference, repression, attachment, regression, splitting, and resistance can color, distort, and undermine the parties’ decisions to enter into, and later abide by, intimate contracts in ways that go well beyond the ordinary commercial setting. By studying prenuptial agreements and surrogacy contracts carefully, this chapter sheds new light on the ways law can and should take psychoanalytic insights into account when regulating the formation and enforcement of these intimate agreements.

This Conclusion explores how the imperative “to eat well” has been an undercurrent, a connecting thread, linking disparate arguments about food and formation within the figures and texts explored. Gastronomy inevitably carries with it a set of social, physiological, and intellectual valences regarding the power of nourishment in human development. The simplicity of the phrase “eat well” obscures the complex of ideologies in which a community gathers and to which its individuals are held accountable. The phrase thus evokes a process of growth and development, at once essentially materialistic and profoundly symbolic. What else is gastronomy, then, but a kind of socializing curriculum, a system for incorporating ambient cultural values into one’s own person? A meal materializes the porous boundary between our individual bodies and the social body in which we participate. Drawing upon theorists such as Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, this conclusion considers whether the trope of milk and solid food might be wrested from its traditional and more restrictive use in regulating bodies and minds. Is it possible to imagine a new Pauline gastronomy that focuses not on power exerted but rather on the vulnerability shared between eater and feeder?

I take up Derrida's metaphorical question, “Does one invent the child±” (from the mid-1980s). Given recent advancements in genetic engineering and cloning, this question takes on a more literal hue. So-called designer babies threaten to turn parents into patents in ways that assume we can control reproduction. Derrida's “deconstructive genealogy” presents a challenge to the notion of parent as patent and suggests that even in the face of changing technologies, we cannot control the chance elements of reproduction, even within the most reliable machines. Here, I turn the notions of parent and patent against themselves, which opens up alternative meanings of both, and again enables one nail to take out another. Furthermore, technologies that raise anew the question of maternity merely highlight the ways in which both maternity and paternity are always uncertain, matters of chance, and assume a problematic notion of testimony. In the end, I argue that current debates in bioethics over genetic engineering assume that we can master reproduction through technologies (whether we approve of that or not) and disavow chance, which is always operative in the machinery of life, particularly in the reproduction of life.

Life Support argues that any analysis of biocapital must engage its roots in colonial labor allocation as a project of the racialization and gendering of labor. Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock define biocapital as “a form of extraction that involves isolating and mobilizing the primary reproductive agency of specific body parts.” I argue that this form of accumulation and production can be seen in its historical context of colonialism and its antecedents as a system of continuing the transmission of what I call vital energy—the substance of activity that produces life (though often deemed reproductive)—from areas of life depletion to areas of life enrichment. Thus, rather than focusing only on biological science and biotechnology as sites for producing value, this study looks for the social logics within biological and labor markets for evidence of how capitalist accumulation continues to rely on reproductivity. This approach to biocapital reads narrative accounts of outsourcing as transmitting vital energy from producers to consumers, which is evidenced in the latter’s improved ability to thrive and perpetuate individual and community life.

“Limits of Labor: Affect and the Biological in Transnational Surrogacy and Service Work” looks at how affective and biological labor such as that found in call center and surrogacy work are indices of new forms of exploitation and accumulation within neoliberal globalization, but also rearticulate a longer historical colonial division of labor.

This chapter uses ethnographic narratives and Arjun Raina’s dramatic monologue A Terrible Beauty is Born to look at how the technologies and training that create the call center agent as a subject of labor and capital also produce an artificial surplus of affective commodities that can then be transmitted elsewhere through the labor of the call center worker.

This chapter uses original ethnography to examine how information technology as an industry depends upon a reterritorializing of imperial labor legacies despite the assumed globality and connectedness of high tech. Racial and national difference merge to influence the kind of work available for high-tech workers in Bangalore, making India largely illegible as a site of innovative and globally-connected products.

This chapter draws from original ethnographic research conducted in 2008 at a fertility clinic in Northern India to examine how Assisted Reproductive Technologies expand options for childless couples with financial resources to pursue low-cost surrogacy and for laboring-class Indian women to sell the use of their bodies to gestate these children for higher wages than they could otherwise earn. At the same time, IVF technologies expand the increasing number of commodity forms of human life and human vital energy, they allow the Indian surrogate’s womb and its biological functions to be abstracted from the rest of her life and made excessive to her non-reproductive existence.

Medical research on human bodies for the purpose of drug development, and the use of technology to assist human reproduction are not new phenomena. However, the marriage of medical technology with commercial interest in a globalising world has led to a reinvention of the status of the body as a resource. Today, the global traffic in body parts and their renting and selling is unprecedented. This is throwing up new challenges, especially ethical and legal challenges. Clinical trials and surrogacy are two sites where these challenges are playing out. This chapter explores themes that emerge from the work of Sama, a Delhi-based resource group working on issues of gender and public health through research, advocacy, and inter-movement dialogue.