International Surrogacy and the Act of Reproductive Noncitizenship

Citizenship and kinship are deeply intertwined, and are often symbiotically weaponised by states in order to police both the citizenry and the ‘legitimate’ boundaries of family life. This is particularly evident in the case of international surrogacy, where a person may gestate and give birth to a baby for ‘intended parents’ in another country where surrogacy may be difficult or prohibited. Acquiring citizenship for that baby can then be rendered problematic because heteronormative hierarchies of kinship prevent children born through surrogacy from being recognised as the child of their intended parents, and therefore from inheriting their citizenship. In this paper, my focus is on the lived experiences of surrogates in international surrogacy arrangements. Surrogates are likely to be citizens of the state in which they live, but - I want to argue - act in opposition to citizenship as it is currently constructed. By giving birth to babies for parents living in countries where surrogacy is not possible, the women engage in an embodied resistance against the heteronormative imaginaries of kinship through which citizenship functions. As such, the actions of these women offer a fruitful opportunity to explore noncitizenship - rather than as a status - as a way of understanding political acts which resist citizenship. In order to develop this claim, I draw on qualitative fieldwork with women living in Canada who have acted as surrogates for international intended parents. I argue, through engagement with these women’s experiences, that the role of the surrogate in international surrogacy may - under certain circumstances - constitute such an act of embodied resistance. This is apparent both in the conceiving, gestating and giving birth to a child for a person or couple in a different country, and in the new forms of kinship that this gives rise to - for that new family formed through surrogacy, and for the surrogate and her family. From this analysis, I aim to develop a theory of the ‘act’ of reproductive noncitizenship. An act of citizenship, as it has been widely theorised, is an action undertaken by an individual which is inherently political. Engaging critically with this conceptualisation, I argue that the women’s experiences are best understood as acts of noncitizenship - they are inherently political, but they are political in opposition to the citizenship construct.