The flourishing feminist literature on surrogacy has explored the role of race in structuring stark disparities of power and transnational mobility between surrogates and intending parents. In this paper, I add to this literature from a different angle: by exploring what research from the biological sciences can offer to the longstanding feminist project of valuing the labour of gestation, and troubling the race-stratified forms it often takes. Emerging research on environmental epigenetics might reshape cultural and legal understandings of race in gestational surrogacy arrangements, offering new concepts of epigenetic relatedness. As Sonja van Wichelen (2016: 174) critiques, understandings of kinship in gestational surrogacy are structured by a biolegitimacy discourse of ‘one’s own biological child’, which centres the genetic parent/s while devaluing the contribution of the surrogate.

Drawing on interviews with gay Australian fathers who conceived children via surrogacy, I argue that dominant surrogacy discourses locate race in genetics, and construct the surrogate as a non-transmissive holding environment to bring the already raced, or race-blind, foetus to term. In an effort to rethink this binary, I bring a feminist cultural studies approach together with the insights of environmental epigenetics in order to figure a transmissive womb. In an environmental epigenetics framework, gestation is a crucial window for environmental exposures that shape foetal gene expression. Here, a surrogate’s geo-political location, class and race shape her environmental exposures and thus the biology of the foetus she carries. In a biopolitical sense, the surrogate’s womb is thus a racialising force. This bears significance for two key areas of thinking: how to best regulate the transnational flow of emerging biotechnologies such as surrogacy through reconsidering the relationship between reproductive labourers and consumers, and how to best theorise race as a kinship and legal object in a postgenomic age.

Jaya Keaney is a final year PhD candidate in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her PhD explores ontologies of race in the narratives of queer parents who conceived using reproductive technologies. The project employs ethnographic methods and draws together conceptual approaches from feminist science studies, critical race theory and queer kinship. Jaya was recently a visiting scholar with the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc) in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge University, UK (Easter term, 2018). Her broader research interests include biotechnologies, postcolonial science and queer of colour critique.

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