Don’t Look at Us, Look with Us! A Discussion about Multisituated Perceptions on Surrogacy

Abstract

This paper asks if ethnographic inquiries about surrogacy, the practice in which a woman carries a child for someone else, can be feminist and decolonial in their ethos? It asks this question in the light of the vexed histories of ethnography as a discipline that seeks to know the ‘Other’ and discusses research strategies that ethnographers who study surrogacy developed to overcome ethnography’s colonial and masculinist historical inheritances. In doing so, the paper examines the concept of multisituated ethnography introduced by Kaushik Sunder Rajan. It discusses selected ethnographic studies about surrogacy that chart ways toward a feminist and decolonial ethos. The paper aims to locate different strategies of knowing and representing surrogacy that maintain the Other’s subjectivity and train the imagination to envisage the possibility of acting collectively with the Other.