This thesis explores transnational commercial surrogacy in the context of Thailand, with the specific purpose to examine Thai women’s motives and experiences of being a surrogate mother. The study is based on two months of fieldwork in Bangkok between June and August 2014 during which interviews were conducted with eleven former, current or future surrogate mothers. The analysis take a postcolonial feminist approach, and draw upon theory of motherhood, intimate labor and stratified reproduction. The study shows how the women’s account of why they want to become a surrogate mother is influenced by contemporary cultural and moral values regarding motherhood and womanhood. By being a surrogate mother they live up to the ideal role of the nurturing mother and the dutiful daughter. Furthermore, the women’s experiences of the pregnancy and their position in the arrangement is characterized by worry, uncertainty, and mistrust. This is partly due to how their rights and opinions are deemed less significant than those of the intended parents. The women are also severely limited in their say over various aspects of the pregnancy. Even though the surrogate mothers have made conscious decisions without being persuaded by family or friends, the study shows that they are still in an exposed position within an arrangement that is characterized by uneven power relations. This is further shown by locating the surrogate mothers’ stories and experiences in relation to other stakeholders and within the larger context of commercial surrogacy in Thailand, as well as on a global level.

This thesis predominantly seeks to explore the entanglements of class, patriarchy and global capital embedded within North Indian domestic work. The thesis firstly examines how the neoliberal policies of the 1980s and 90s shattered village economies and brought about the mass displacement of tribals and landless farmers, forced to leave the land they have cultivated for generations in pursuit of employment in India’s urban centers. While male migrants often find work in the informal sector and settle in slum communities, female rural migrants constitute the immense population of domestic workers within the confines of urban middle class homes. This thesis explores the histories, past and present, of Indian cultures of servitude that have brought migrant motherhood to a crisis point. The interdisciplinary analyses of the political economy of intimate labor are supplemented by a micro-level analysis of my own positionality within a middle class urban home in Jaipur, Rajasthan to bring an alternative perspective to the multiplicity of dialogues about ethical relationships with domestic workers. This thesis ultimately aims to open lines of inquiry about the inequalities embedded within domestic work in order to bring about a radical re-imagining of one’s own participation in the layers and chains of exploitative labor.