Surrogacy and dystopian positionality: narrative reproduction between speculative fiction and chick lit

Abstract

When it comes to Anglophone surrogate fictions, it seems that one reader’s dystopia is another writer’s chick lit: whereas widely received fictional narratives about surrogacy which are set in a future North America, such as The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm, are mostly read as dystopian or speculative fiction, the small corpus of novels which negotiate commercial surrogacy in India (Origins of Love, The House of Hidden Mothers and A House for Happy Mothers) all contain chick-lit elements. As this constellation of genres might create the impression that exploitative forms of surrogacy do not exist yet, this article brings together postcolonial and ethnographic scholarship on surrogacy with research from gender and queer studies in order to explore the wider socio-political implications of these generic complexities. Arguing that more work is needed to conceptualise dystopian positionality, the article first shows that speculative and dystopian texts about surrogacy often invite Western-centric interpretations in which the dystopian element is mostly configured in temporal terms while aspects of space and positionality tend to be neglected or universalised. Further unfolding the generic complexities of surrogate fictions, the article then explores the extent to which the chick-lit mode in the texts on Indian surrogacy consolidates biocapitalist consumer market ideologies. In a last step, the article discusses the interconnections between generic conventions and hetero- and bionormative teleologies, and it reflects on the problems which might arise when attempts to deconstruct heteronormative assumptions about reproduction do not simultaneously also question the – often stratifying – implications of bionormativity.