Abstract

The debate over gestational surrogacy is dividing feminisms inside and outside academia. In Italy and Spain, among other countries, this issue is at the centre of controversial and polarized clashes, reminiscent of those related to the issue of sex work.

In Italy, in particular, the gestazione per altri (GPA) was used as a tool of political blackmail by conservative Catholic and right-wing forces at the time of passage of the law on civil unions between persons of the same sex: in fact, the article of the bill that established co-adoption had to be eliminated, accused of encouraging the use of gestational surrogacy by gay men. At that time, the debate outside Parliament also involved several components of feminist and LGBTQ+ activism, a situation that continues to occur despite the fact that almost two years have passed. Unlike Spain and Portugal, a significant fracture occurred within the institutional LGBT movement, since the largest lesbian association in the country was against GPA, arguing that it was exploitation of women’s bodies.

In this workshop, I will use data and information collected in my fieldwork in Italy on gay parents who have used the gestational surrogacy, in the context of the project INTIMATE (www.ces.uc.pt/intimate), in order to stimulate a participatory discussion with different feminist positions on the matter.

Bio note

Tatiana Motterle is a research fellow in the project "INTIMATE— Citizenship, Care and Choice: The Micropolitics of Intimacy in Southern Europe" (2014-2019), funded by the European Research Council and coordinated by Ana Cristina Santos. She defended her PhD dissertation in Social Sciences in 2014 at the University of Padua (Italy). She worked as a research assistant in the European project "Citizens in Diversity: A Four Nation Study on Homophobia and Fundamental Rights", coordinated by Luca Trappolin She took part in national and international research projects about Female Genital Modifications and social care and work-care balance.

Leituras Recomendadas:

Nadimpally, Sarojini; Banerjee, Sneha; Venkatachalam, Deepa (2016) Commercial Surrogacy: A Contested Terrain in the Realm of Rights and Justice, Asian-Pacific Resource and Research Centre of Women (ARROW), Kuala Lumpur.
http://arrow.org.my/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Commercial-Surrogacy_Thematic-Paper.pdf

Abrams, Paula (2015) "The Bad Mother: Stigma, Abortion and Surrogacy", Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, 43: 179–191.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jlme.12231/pdf

[Recommended readings are available in open-access. If you experience difficulty accessing them, you can request them by email: gw@ces.uc.pt]

[Within the Gender Workshop Series VIII that takes place between October 2017 and June 2018]