Im/mobility and privilege during COVID-19: Reprography of commercial surrogacy in India

In this paper I recount my relationship with the ex-surrogate Swapna during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how it comes to define my navigation of my immobility due to the lockdown. Juxtaposed with my immobility is Swapna’s forced mobility to stay afloat due to a precarious economic situation. Firmly embedded within ‘reprography’, or the reworking of the traditional ethnography through the ‘undoing’ of the ‘field’, and fieldwork-related mobility this paper is about contradictory subject positions and the reduction of women into mere reproductive beings—to challenge the same. In the process, I suggest that COVID-19 has brought to the fore how reproductive labour continues to be modelled on the endemic precarity that commercial surrogacy engenders in hiring poor Indian women as gestates. This precarity becomes further exacerbated during the pandemic, thereby creating conditions for ‘risky living’ for out-of-work surrogates.