In recent years, a growing body of work has emerged within Marxist-feminist scholarship on social reproduction which focuses explicitly on biological reproduction, epitomised in the concept ‘gestational labour’.1 ‘Gestational labour’ refers to the reproductive labour of pregnancy– theorised both at the level of the individual, but also as the only way in which labour-power is produced and a precondition for the generational replacement of the working class. While maternal labour is frequently considered a form of affective labour, gestation is much less likely to be considered in this way in Marxist-feminist analyses. This is in part because of a wariness of attributing subjectivity to the foetus, or to suggest that gestation is commensurable with maternity. However, and as this paper seeks to demonstrate, capitalism is encroaching on spaces of pregnancy and fertility, with a new affective dimension at the forefront. In this paper I am less interested in the physical aspects of gestational labour and instead explore capitalism’s role in emerging forms of affective labour, and how these shape foetal and maternal subjectivities at earlier and earlier moments in pregnancy. Increasingly, gestational labour is positioned as maternal labour wherein its affective and intersubjective dimensions are called upon.

This paper is split into four parts. In part one I consider the theoretical terrain, providing an overview of the ways in which ‘affective labour’ and ‘emotional labour’ have been used by scholars to date, with a particular focus on its use within Marxist-feminist framings. It is worth noting here that, while I outline their different uses, in my own theorising I use the terms affective labour and emotional labour interchangeably. I then introduce the concept of ‘gestational labour’ as a subset of reproductive labour. In part two I look to surrogacy to consider different ways in which gestational labour includes aspects of affective labour, wherein surrogates are expected to both suppress and induce feelings in relation to their pregnancy at different points in the process. Here, where pregnancy is directly mediated by the market, the production and performance of affect in relation to gestation helps to denaturalise these feelings as necessarily innate, ‘natural’ and tied to a particular gender. In part three I look at pregnancy that takes place outside of surrogacy contracts, to ask whether we find similar examples of affective labour taking place when the labour of pregnancy is not directly mediated by the market. Looking to new technologies that have been introduced in the last two decades to encourage foetal subjectivity and gestator-foetal relations, pregnant people are being called upon to perform affective labour in increasingly early moments of their pregnancies. In the conclusion I look to the limits of an affective labour framework when it comes to gestation and maternity.2

I Clarifying the terms of the discussion: social reproduction, affective labour and gestational labour

Affective labour and social reproduction theory

The term ‘affective labour’ was coined by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in the early 2000s to describe a shift from an industrial form of capitalism in which the production of tangible commodities was the main source of value, to a new paradigm that prevails today in which the production of services and information has outgrown more material commodities, otherwise known as an ‘informational economy.’3 In this ‘informational economy’, information, knowledge, communication, relationships and affects come to dominate, bringing about a seismic shift in the nature of labour, which Hardt, Negri along with Maurizio Lazzarato term ‘immaterial labour’ in that the production of services results in no material or tangible goods.4,5 Within this analysis then, ‘affective labour’ refers to the production and manipulation of affects, its products ‘a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement or passion.’6 While there have been critiques about the ubiquity of this kind of labour and its effects on value-production, as Johanna Oksala writes, this kind of labour has become increasingly important, ‘workers are expected to mobilize emotional and social skills for professional goals, resulting in the blending of the private and the public, the informal and the formal, skills and resources… affective labor is increasingly outsourced, and the domestic, private realm is marketized.’7 Certainly, information, affects and social bonds are now frequently expropriated by capital to generate surplus value, although in Hardt and Negri’s analysis, as Stella Sandford has argued, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain distinctions between productive, unproductive and reproductive forms of labour – all is seemingly subsumed under capitalism’s logic, a problematic I return to later in this paper.8

For Hardt and Negri, domestic labour is a model example of affective labour. While it requires material labour like cleaning and cooking it also produces affects, care, bonds and relationships. Here, a social reproduction framing proves useful. Popularised in the 1970s and 1980s through a range of feminist critiques of mainstream Marxism, social reproduction feminism’s origins are most often associated with the International Wages for Housework movement.9 In these critiques social reproduction refers to the production and reproduction of labour power– the vast swathes of oft-times unpaid labour that enables capitalist accumulation to take place, including affective and emotional forms of reproductive labour. This labour, the work of maintaining and caring for the workforce, is often gendered, racialised and devalued within capitalist societies, and frequently made invisible through its naturalisation.10 In early social reproduction debates, known as the ‘domestic labour debates’, feminists were primarily focused on whether or not reproductive labour was productive of surplus value for capitalism.11 While it faded out of popularity as the various strands of the Wages for Housework movement dissipated into the 1990s, over the past decade there has been a renewed interest in social reproduction, with new and ever-expanding articulations and uses beyond the domestic labour debates developed in response to changing historical and political settings. Since the 1980s, across the world, we have seen increasing divestment from states in social reproduction and the increased commodification of reproductive tasks under neoliberalism.12 Historical and economic changes placed social reproduction in the context of a vastly expanded service sector, globalisation and global supply chains.

This renewed engagement with social reproduction is marked in 2017 by an edited collection of essays on ‘Social Reproduction Theory’ edited by Tithi Bhattacharya.13 Here, Bhattacharya along with other contemporary Marxist-feminists posit a more expansive account, deploying social reproduction as a ‘theory’ through which the reproduction and replenishment of labour for capitalism can be analysed.14 Debates also continue as to whether or not reproductive labour is productive of surplus value. Rather than analysing particular gendered tasks associated with the private household (cooking, cleaning, childcare), the most insightful social reproduction analyses attend to whether the tasks in question are directly or indirectly mediated by the market, paying close attention to geographic and historical specificities, particularly as capitalism is continually restructuring itself as it tries to commodify more and more reproductive activities.15 Endnotes, a Marxist collective, argue that the descriptor ‘reproductive sphere’ in opposition to ‘productive sphere’, historically used to refer to the realm in which social reproduction takes place, is insufficient.16 Instead, Endnotes propose two descriptive terms, that while somewhat clunky, help to elucidate the nuanced characteristics of reproductive labour and its spheres with historical specificity, particularly when it comes to value: ‘directly market-mediated’ sphere and ‘indirectly market-mediated’ sphere. This also helps to address one of the feminist critiques that has been levelled at Hardt and Negri’s ‘affective labour’ framing. For example, Oksala argues that their framing collapses different forms of affective labour into one, ignoring differences between productive, unproductive or reproductive forms (290). Through Endnotes framing, affective labour can take place both in the directly market-mediated sphere as in the case of a waged nursery worker in the private sector soothing the tantrum of a small child wherein the affective labour is commodified, waged and productive; and in the indirectly market-mediated sphere, as when that child is soothed by its own parent – here where the soothing takes place spatially, or the way in which the child is soothed is of little importance, rather, it’s the sphere in which they take place (within the capitalist mode of production) that determines whether or not they produce value.

While some forms of reproductive labour do produce something tangible, much socially reproductive labour involves the caregiving and interacting that creates and maintains social bonds, whether it is directly or indirectly mediated by the market. While this can be broadly understood as ‘affective labour’ via the analyses made above, there are more specific concepts that have been developed to address the role of emotions and feeling in relation to gender and work. In 1979 sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the phrase ‘emotional labour’ to describe a particular kind of labour involved in service work.17 Here, ‘emotional labour’ refers to waged work which ‘requires one to induce or suppress feelings in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’ (7). Hochschild uses the work of air hostesses to make her argument, but we could just as easily turn to childcare, elder care, and other forms of waged care work to illustrate this need to induce or suppress feelings as part of a job.18 More recently, Alva Gotby has extended Hochschild’s theorising to the indirectly market-mediated sphere, coining the phrase ‘emotional reproduction’ to describe ‘the everyday work that we do for our family members, friends, co-workers, and others – cheering up those who are feeling sad or lonely, creating emotional warmth… the unseen everyday effort that goes into keeping most of us relatively emotionally healthy, and maybe even happy.’19 In this way, the care and nurture a nanny shows towards a child she is paid to look after is described as ‘emotional labour’, while following Gotby, the care and nurture a mother shows to her own child would be described as ‘emotional reproduction’.20

Both Hochschild and Gotby show that historically women have largely been responsible for this ‘work of creating good feeling’ (xi) whether waged or unwaged. Indeed, the relationship between waged and unwaged emotional labour exists in a dialectical relationship, so that waged care or service work that requires emotional labour and particular affects on the part of the worker, is frequently badly paid and undervalued precisely because it is naturalised when it is unwaged – capitalism relies on the notion that women are innately predisposed to caregiving.21 The naturalisation of feminised labour, particularly affective or emotional labour, makes that labour appear both unskilled but also invisible as labour. What’s more, the personality and subjectivity of the worker tend to subsume the work. As Gotby writes, ‘women’s emotional labour is thus constructed as natural expression of their spontaneous feeling, something that is in turn used to further exploit this labour.’22 Gotby argues that emotional reproduction creates gendered subjectivity– reproductive labour, particularly emotional aspects of it, reproduces both the workforce but also the self. Similarly, Oksala writes that ‘when the work requires the worker to supply not only intellectual and manual skills but also emotional capacities, something very different is drawn into the labor process’ (291). This ‘something different’, Oksala argues, following Hochschild, is the worker’s ‘sense of self.’23 Hochschild argues that the requirement of emotional involvement in the expenditure of labour-power (here she is talking about waged work), leads to a heightened sense of alienation from the self, what Marx refers to as ‘species-being.’ Oksala writes, ‘they are selling emotions that require drawing resources from a source of the self that we usually honor as deep and integral to our individuality’ (291)– which Gotby would argue also takes place in the indirectly market-mediated sphere. In this framing, it becomes increasingly difficult to locate a maternal subject (or indeed any subject who cares) who is not completely subsumed within their role in capitalism, a point I return to in the final part of this paper.

While Hochschild does not explicitly use the term ‘affective labour’, and Gotby argues that ‘emotional reproduction’ provides clearer bounds that ‘affective reproduction’, in this paper I use affective labour and emotional labour interchangeably to broadly describe the invisibilised work, both waged and unwaged, of producing and managing emotions in and between others, historically positioned as women’s work and frequently naturalised and undervalued. Affective labour includes comforting, nurturing, listening, caring and protecting, and plays a crucial role in shaping gendered subjectivities.

Gestational labour

In recent years, a growing body of work has emerged within social reproduction which focuses explicitly on biological reproduction, epitomised in the concept ‘gestational labour’. Originally coined by midwife and philosopher Mary O’Brien in the 1980s and revived more recently by feminist writer Sophie Lewis, gestational labour refers to the reproductive labour of pregnancy– theorised at both the level of the individual, as well as at the level of the social whole.24 Gestational labour is the only way in which labour-power is reproduced, and a precondition for the generational replacement of the working class. In Lewis’ analysis gestational labour refers both to the labour of surrogates who gestate babies for others across global fertility chains in the directly market-mediated sphere, and the labour involved in so-called ‘normal’ pregnancy, when someone gestates their own baby.25

While, as we have seen, other forms of reproductive labour have been considered through the lens of affective labour, pregnancy tends not to be analysed in this way– in part because scholars are keen to stress the hard physical embodied work of pregnancy, which has historically been overlooked in Marxist feminist analyses.26 What’s more, at least provisionally, the foetus does not yet explicitly confront the parent as one in need of emotional or affective care, their subjectivity (which is at this point is entirely the creation of the gestational parent and/or those around them) is yet to be bound up in what Lisa Baraitser calls ‘extreme affective states’ – the foetus cannot throw a tantrum, it does not need to be comforted and soothed.27 To think through gestational labour as affective labour is to ask who the emotional or affective labour is directed at. As I explore in what follows, the answer to this is multiple, shifting and dependent– at times the affective labour involved in pregnancy is directed at partners, family and friends (or the intended parents in the case of surrogacy); at medical professionals; towards the foetus itself; or in the form of ‘self-care’ as part and parcel of the reproductive labour of pregnancy. In this paper I am less interested in the physical aspects of gestational labour, but rather in the affective aspects of it, which are increasingly being positioned in ways that make gestational labour more comparable to the category ‘maternal labour’ – understood as a form of affective, invested and intersubjective care between a parent and their child.28

II Surrogacy as affective labour

A useful lens through which to explore the affective labour involved in pregnancy can be found in surrogacy – the process whereby a person gestates and gives birth to a baby for another person or couple, the surrogate may be genetically related to the foetus, although today it is more likely that the genetic material comes from the ‘intended parents.’ While laws and legislation enabling or banning surrogacy in different jurisdictions is constantly changing, usually it takes place via clinics within a global fertility industry driven by financial incentives.29 Surrogacy, along with egg donation, is rarely considered a form of labour in the bioeconomy, even within Marxist analyses.30 As Melinda Cooper and Catharine Waldby write, while egg and sperm vendors and gestational surrogates provide the living tissues and in vivo labour that sustains the post-industrial biomedical economy, the productive labour of the experimenting scientists is recognised as the point at which surplus value is created.31 Instead, surrogacy, even when it is financially compensated, is frequently considered through altruistic or donor framings in order to ‘protect’ surrogates from exploitation, which ironically Cooper and Waldby argue ‘leads to atavistic forms of labour contract and desultory forms of compensation’ (8). This framing of surrogacy as a ‘labour of love’ rather than work done for financial incentive is key for its market success, enabling clinics to keep wages low while easing the minds of intended parents – aligning surrogacy, as Heather Jacobson argues, with nonmarket notions of feminine caregiving and sacrifice.32

In Jacobson’s work on gestational surrogacy in California in the United States, where for the most part surrogacy is organised through contractual arrangements, she finds ‘emotional labour’ a crucial part of the job. Using Hochschild’s framing, Jacobson argues that in addition to physical and administrative labour, surrogate labour also involves ‘emotional labour’, wherein surrogates ‘often work hard to cultivate relationships with their IPs [intended parents], which involves managing their own emotions. They must also manage relationships between their family members and those of their IPs’ (64–65). While many of the surrogates who Jacobson interviews do not view their surrogate pregnancies as work, nearly all of them comment on the emotional strain in language that frequently equates it to a job: ‘I mean this is very emotionally taxing, physically and mentally’ (66). Another surrogate describes ‘trust’ as a key affect involved in the surrogacy arrangement, trust which is ‘evidenced through respect and pleasant relations’ a key part of the market exchange (112). Zsuza Berend finds similar emotional work taking place in the United States in her analysis of www.surromomsonline.com, the largest surrogacy forum and support website. Here Berend finds surrogates sharing examples where their role involves nurturing not only the foetus but also future parents – with emphasis placed on creating the right bond with a “match” when finding intended parents, where ‘emotional compatibility’ is particularly prized.33

This affective labour is not always straightforward. While surrogates in Jacobson’s study were expected to demonstrate good feelings towards their foetus, at the same time they were keen to stress in interviews that they did not want to keep the babies they were gestating, indeed ‘part of their work as surrogates involves communicating this idea to their IPs and to others’ (97). Jacobson describes how surrogates worked hard to calm fears in IPs ‘by using specific language when talking about the pregnancy to others to signal their emotional distance from the babies’ (97). This does not necessarily mean a complete emotional cut-off, rather many surrogates ‘spoke of the love they have for their surro-babies as being similar to their love for their nieces or nephews, or for the children of their good friends’ (97–98). Here a delicate balancing act is performed, wanting to demonstrate care and empathy towards the ‘surro-babies’ they are gestating, without crossing a boundary. In other examples surrogates report disappointment at a lack of emotional connection with intended parents who ‘understood their relationship in more transitory, businesslike terms’ (108) – in these examples, Jacobson documents surrogates hiding feelings of sadness or disappointment. Part of the work of surrogacy then, involves the ‘suppression or reframing of feelings and emotion’ (112) – whether controlling the level of feeling directed at the foetus or the intended parents, affective labour becomes a key part of the job.

This is not the case for surrogacy across the market. In the Indian market, writing before the practice was banned to international clients, Kalindi Vora and Sharmila Rudrappa find both similar and different forms of affective labour at play in comparison to the US.34 In Rudrappa’s interviews with Indian surrogates, they also ‘described the emotional and intellectual labor they performed in their surrogacy contracts’, however this frequently meant ‘positioning the yet-to-come baby as an alien being to whom they had no emotional ties’ (117). And while Jacobson found the fostering of relationships between intended parents and surrogates an important part of many surrogacy arrangements in California, in India ‘much of the work of the clinic staff is invested in preventing the attachment of emotional meaning to relationships between surrogates and commissioning parents and between the surrogate and the fetus she carried.’35 Vora argues that gestational surrogacy is ‘an obvious illustration of how intimate expression, requiring the production of genuine feelings, can be completely alienated from the producer’ (41) – particularly as, at least in the Indian context, it is very unlikely that a surrogate will ever see the child they have gestated after they have given birth to them. For Vora, naming surrogacy ‘affective labour’ helpfully draws parallels between surrogacy and service work in general, but also to ‘feminist critiques of the failure of labor analysis to account for nonpublic and interior processes that contribute to capitalist accumulation’ (41).

Here, as Lewis argues, suppression of feeling is a key part of the job: ‘they are supposed to be unemotional, committed, pure techne, uncreative muscle’ (24). While the commissioning parents are positioned as the ‘intentional, authorial producers of a child’ and the doctors and technical team in clinics perform high valued work, the surrogate herself is positioned as ‘performing the passive, merely reproductive and nonauthorial work of gestation.’36 Here, the affective labour involved in pregnancy includes the suppression of feelings or emotions. In the Indian context the surrogate is positioned as a passive container, which assures intended parents ‘that their surrogate’s body will leave no trace upon its product their baby.’37 Vora argues that in the context of India in particular, with its colonial legacies, the womb is positioned as a hermetic space that prevents the transmission of race. This same argument in relation to race and reproductive progeny is made by Jaya Keaney in the context of queer Australian intended parents who make use of gamete donation and gestational surrogacy. Here Keaney finds a similar ‘prevailing genomic arithmetic’ wherein egg and sperm donors are selected based on their racial make-up – which in turn means that ‘gestation is subtracted from the realm of racialized kinship’, race, Keaney argues, functions as a system for ordering not only biological relations but also affective attachments.38 In these examples part of the work of surrogacy is suppressing these potential affective attachments.

In the above examples we see different forms of emotion and affect necessarily deployed or suppressed at different points within different contexts. In this way, arguably, surrogacy helpfully allows a reframing of pregnancy that is not so directly mediated by the market, as Alys Eve Weinbaum writes, ‘surrogacy as commodified labour power is the exceptional case that compels the redefinition of all forms of biological reproduction.’39 That a surrogate is expected to induce or suppress particular emotions depending upon the setting in which they are working helpfully demonstrates that pregnancy itself does not necessarily consist of particular innate feelings. As Vora writes, ‘the commodification of these affects also suggests how the subject of mothering work can be detached from the subject of sentimental maternity’ (136). In making visible the invisibilised affective labour involved in pregnancy, surrogacy leads us to question whether non-surrogate pregnancy might also be separable from particular gendered subjectivities, in the next part of the paper I turn to this idea in relation to new technologies that encourage particular forms of affective labour and maternal subjectivities.

III Prenatal parenting and new technologies of foetal-mediation: maternal labour at the level of the womb

Above, I wrote that the foetus does not explicitly confront the parent as one in need of emotional or affective care– the foetus does not cry, have a tantrum, need to be washed and soothed. Increasingly, however, the gestational parent is being called upon to attend to the foetus as a subject with affective states, and not only within surrogacy contracts. Arguably, and as has been well documented, this increased subjectification of the foetus can be traced back to the widespread introduction of foetal ultrasound into prenatal care. In 1987 Rosalind Petchesky argued that rapid advancements in ultrasound imaging transformed the cultural climate of reproductive politics, the foetus became a ‘public presence’, the body of the gestational parent simultaneously removed from the screen. Petchesky writes that ‘from their beginnings, such photographs have represented the foetus as primary and autonomous, the woman as absent or peripheral.’40 The uterus is positioned as a passive container and a space that needs to be overcome in order to see the baby, relying upon politically regressive conceptualisations of pregnancy to do so. For Lauren Berlant this sonographic representation generates ‘new forms of affectivity’ for mothers – new technology creates a shift in subjectivity and by extension affective labour, which in turn shapes new maternal and foetal subjects (a dialectic relation).41 The image of the screen replaces sensational knowledge, Berlant argues, with ‘the technical mastery of fetology’ (191) – a ‘fetology’ that sees the foetus materialised in a sonogram stuck to a fridge, given an ‘interim name’ or in today’s media landscape circulated online, the ultrasound image becomes ‘baby’s first picture’ – this affectivity contributes to the creation of subjectivity.42 Berlant sees this as a ‘nostalgic energy for a family that has never existed’ (191)– wherein the sonogram is part of an array of new media technologies that make visible new forms of family and foetal identity and citizenship.

Berlant is writing in 1994– fast forward to 2025 and new forms of sonographic imaging have emerged that intensify these new forms of affectivity. Here, rather than a passive container or one that is ‘absent or peripheral’ as in Petchesky and others’ analyses, the gestational parent is arguably positioned as an active consumer in their own pregnancy. While historically the image of the foetus as subject obscured the pregnant person, a shift in neoliberal subjectivity means that increasingly pregnant people are being called upon to intervene in their pregnancy and to demonstrate care, attention and nurture towards the unborn foetus, often through commodities and services that can be purchased on the market. In the last two decades we have witnessed an increasing number of 3D and 4D commercial ultrasound clinics opening across the UK, US, Europe and elsewhere globally.43 With names like ‘Window to the Womb’ and ‘Meet My Baby’, in the space of the commercial clinic, applications of the ultrasound technology are focused less on diagnostics and instead on forming relationships with the foetus before it is born.44 Barbara Katz Rothman writes that ‘displaying consumption of ultrasound technology’ contributes to the image of ‘consuming all available technologies during pregnancy [as] a sign of responsible mothering.’45 This sits within Hochschild’s argument that the market increasingly ‘reach[es] into the heart of our emotional lives, a realm previously more shielded from the market’ (11). Specifically, these commercial ultrasound clinics stress the ways in which the technology can facilitate ‘bonding’. While in the setting Petchesky describes in realm of diagnostic 2D ultrasounds the pregnant person is replaced by the foetus as subject, in these commercial clinics, ultrasound becomes another way in which the neoliberal parent materialises in the space of pregnancy– the pregnant person is positioned not as a patient but as a consumer, encouraged to purchase services that allow new forms of prenatal bonding, a form of affective labour facilitated by new scopic access to the womb.

These technologies fit with a broader trend that Elena Neiterman identifies, in which pregnant people are increasingly ‘expected to “do” pregnancy, actively performing socially established practices that signify the status of the body as pregnant’, which she describes as ‘pregnant work.’46 This can be read within broader analyses of neoliberalism and health, wherein individuals are expected to manage their health, and particularly their fertility.47 The affective labour that takes place in the spaces of 3D and 4D commercial clinics is not only about bonding with the foetus, but also constructing new families, wherein prospective parents do ‘display work’ in the space of these clinics in order to ‘do family.’48 This is emphasised by the effort often made in these ultrasound clinics to suggest ‘family resemblance’ between a parent or a sibling and the foetus– with sonographers drawing attention to specific features, such as the nose.49 This emphasis on family-making and bonding takes place not only in the private sphere but also in information provided by the NHS, who encourage bonding with ‘babies in the womb’.50 NHS Scotland go so far as to argue that establishing strong attachment and bonding is as important ‘before they’re born as when they arrive’.51 These practices fit within neoliberalism’s imperative not only for individual responsibility, but also, following Cooper for ‘family responsibility’. Cooper complicates the idea that neoliberalism necessarily privileges atomised individuals over family structures, rather she shows how neoliberalism depends as much on imperatives of family responsibility and investment in kinship obligations as it does on the responsibility of the individual.

Other technologies that enable care or bonding to take place between parent, foetus and family are also available to buy on the pregnancy marketplace. For example, Marie Thompson looks to prenatal sound systems, intravaginal speakers which allow users to play music to their foetuses in vivo.52 With names like ‘Babypod’ and ‘Babyplus’, the makers of these technologies claim they are able to, ‘stimulate vocalisation in babies before birth, helping to develop their communication skills in the womb’ (74) and ‘enhance their current and future affective capacities’ (76). Thompson sees them as part of a sonic affect aimed at ‘shaping, transforming and enhancing the pre-born as future-child’. Here ‘good parenting’ can be enacted as early as 16 weeks – which Thompson argues amplifies neoliberal capitalism’s impulse towards personal, maternal and familial responsibility, and maternal-familial investment in the pre-born as child. Here, not only childhood but the space of pregnancy and the foetus has become a realm for ‘economic and psychic investment in the future’ – eroding a clear division between prenatal and postnatal development. Thompson reads this through Cindi Katz argument that under neoliberalism children have become an ‘accumulation strategy’, in which childhood becomes a spectacle and a space structured around preparing for a competitive future. Katz writes that ‘in the current period, children are both an economic and psychic investment in the future’ (9), with increased pressure for parents to curate a perfect childhood, moulding children into future workers via good education and extracurricular activities (11). This occurs in part due to anxieties around political, economic, geopolitical and environmental factors, wherein securing a ‘good’ future for children is becoming increasingly precarious. Prenatal sound systems and ultrasound bonding scans allow parents to begin investing in their child before birth – child as accumulation strategy becomes ‘foetus as accumulation strategy’ with an emphasis on parental-foetal mediation. Affective labour as comforting, nurturing, listening and caring can be enacted earlier and earlier via technologies. What’s more, if we return to Gotby’s notion that these forms of work create subjectivity, then we can see how early this formation of subjectivity, both of the foetus and the mother, starts to take place.

IV In conclusion, a limit to a labour framework?

In part one of this paper, I looked to the work of Gotby to consider the argument that affective labour (or what Gotby refers to as ‘emotional reproduction’) as a component of gestational labour takes place in both the directly and indirectly market-mediated sphere and plays a central role in the construction of a gendered subjectivity. As I wrote above, viewed in this way it becomes increasingly difficult to locate a maternal subject who is not completely subsumed within their role in capitalism. In a paper in this journal from 2011, Sandford addresses this problematic, paying specific attention to a number of apparent contradictions in the concept of ‘maternal labour’, she asks, ‘how can the concept of the maternal circulate alongside the category of labour as anything other than an abjected, psychologistic and therefore idealistic theoretical deviance?’ (2). For Sandford the idea of ‘maternal labour’ ‘swallows’ experiences of the maternal, so that when attention is paid to the specifics of mothering, its potential character as labour is undone. While other forms of domestic labour – cooking, cleaning, running the household – can arguably be done by anybody, Sandford argues that the labour of maternity is ‘affective, invested, intersubjective’ (6) and relational. Focusing on its affective dimensions, the labour taking place is based on an interpersonal attachment that, she argues, cannot be theorised via labour frameworks alone.53 In calling maternal labour labour we lose what is specific about it, ‘which is precisely not a matter of indifference to the individual who labours’ (9). What is more, in the case of ‘gestational labour’, we potentially lose varied experiences of pregnancy so that differences, including miscarriage, stillbirth, and abortion, are not given adequate space, and instead are congealed into the category of abstract labour.

I too am ultimately sceptical that we can derive all of the dimensions of human desire or experience from an analysis of the laws of capital– these aren’t questions that can be answered at a high level of abstraction alone.54 However, as I have sought to demonstrate in this paper through the examples of surrogacy, ultrasound ‘bonding’ scans and prenatal sound systems, while not fully subsumed, we can see how the market does play a significant role in creating new forms ‘affective, invested, intersubjective’ labours– shaping new foetal and maternal subjectivities at earlier and earlier moments in pregnancy, which has only increased since Berlant was writing in 1994. I could equally have dedicated a section of this paper to examples where embryos, facilitated by technological developments, are being positioned as proto-children, with new subjectivities and affective relations emerging in and outside of fertility clinics.55 What’s more, significantly, as I have argued throughout, it is in part because of this affective dimension of maternal labour as a ‘labour of love’, that it can be weaponised and devalued, naturalised and gendered, as Sandford herself notes when she writes that positioning maternal labour as labour allows us to usefully recognise it as ‘socially necessary labour delegated to women, rather than as a natural function of women (7).56 This points to a tension in a social reproduction or affective labour framing– between wanting to make visible the otherwise invisibilised reproductive labour involved in gestation and maternity, to degender and denaturalise these forms of work, while at the same time being careful to resist the ways in which neoliberalism has already transformed the womb into a space of production to be optimised.

Notes

  1. Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now (London: Verso, 2019). [^]
  2. While the maternal subject is being constructed at earlier and earlier stages of pregnancy, it is worth stating that pregnancy and birth are not equivalent to nor essential to mothering. [^]
  3. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire (London: Penguin, 2004); Commonwealth (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2009). [^]
  4. Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 289–90; Maurizio Lazzarato, Immaterial Labour in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Michel Hardt and Paolo Virnol, translated by P Colilli and E Emery (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). [^]
  5. While the products of immaterial labour might be intangible, it is still ‘material’ in the sense that it is embodied. [^]
  6. Hardt and Negri, 2004, p. 96. [^]
  7. Johanna Oksala, Affective Labor and Feminist Politics, Signs 41, no.2 (2016): 281–303, p. 3. See also, Alessandrini D, Immaterial labour and alternative valorisation processes in Italian feminist debates, feminist@law, 1(2), pp.1–28; Alva Gotby, ‘They Call It Love: Wages for Housework and Emotional Reproduction’ (University of West London, 2019), p.137. [^]
  8. Stella Sandford, What Is Maternal Labour? Studies in the Maternal 3, no.2 (2011). [^]
  9. Maria Dalla Costa, Women and the Subversion of the Community, in The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, ed. by Maria Dalla Costa and Selma James (Falling Wall Press, 1972), pp. 19–54; Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle (Common Notions, 2012). [^]
  10. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender: On the Separation of Spheres and the Process of Abjection, Endnotes 3 (2013). [^]
  11. Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction (Autonomedia, 1981); Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Brill, 1983). Federici (2012). For an overview of these debates and more recent debates see: Paula Varela, Social Reproduction in Dispute, Spectre, 10 December 2021. [^]
  12. For example ‘Contradictions of Capital and Care’, New Left Review, 2016; Melinda Cooper, Family Values (Zone Books, 2019); Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentring Oppression, ed. by Tithi Bhattacharya (Pluto Press, 2017); Endnotes (2013); Martha E. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction, Brill, 2019. [^]
  13. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentring Oppression, ed. by Tithi Bhattacharya (Pluto Press, 2017). [^]
  14. Susan Ferguson, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour and Social Reproduction (Pluto Press, 2020); Cinzia Arruzza, ‘Functionalist, Determinist, Reductionist: Social Reproduction Feminism and Its Critics.’, Science & Society, 80.1 (2016), pp. 9–30; Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-Liberalism, ed. by Meg Luxton and Kate Bezanson (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006). [^]
  15. Alessandra Mezzadri, ‘On the Value of Social Reproduction’, Radical Philosophy, 2.4 (2019), pp. 33–41); Roswitha Scholz, ‘Patriarchy and Commodity Society’, in Marxism and the Critique of Value, ed. by Neil Larsen and others (MCM Publishing, 2014); Kevin Floyd, ‘Automatic Subjects: Gendered Labour and Abstract Life’, Historical Materialism, 24.2 (2016), pp. 61–86; Martha Giménez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction (Brill, 2019); Amy De’Ath, ‘Gender and Social Reproduction’, in Beverly Best, Werner Bonefeld and Chris O’Kane (eds), The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Volume 3, (Sage, 2018). [^]
  16. Endnotes (2013). [^]
  17. Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (University of California Press, 2012). Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text. [^]
  18. Nicola Fairchild and Eva Mikusa, ‘Emotional Labour, Ordinary Affects and the Early Childhood Education and Care Worker’, Gender, Work and Organization, 28.3 (2021), pp. 1177–90. [^]
  19. Alva Gotby, They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life (London: Verso, 2023), p.x. [^]
  20. Other analyses of forms of reproductive labour that involve emotions and affects include: Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas’ ‘intimate labour’, used to refer to ‘embodied and affective interactions in the service of social reproduction’, Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care (Stanford University Press, 2011), p.7; Ellie Anderson’s ‘hermeneutic labour’ describes the ‘burdensome activity of: understanding and coherently expressing one’s own feelings, desires, intentions, and motivations; discerning those of others’, ‘Hermeneutic Labor: The Gendered Burden of Interpretation in Intimate Relationships between Women and Men’, Hypatia, 38.1 (2023), pp. 177–97, p. 177. [^]
  21. For more on the ways in which gender functions under capitalism see Endnotes (2013). [^]
  22. Alva Gotby, ‘They Call It Love: Wages for Housework and Emotional Reproduction’ (University of West London, 2019), p.137. [^]
  23. Gotby takes issue with the idea that there is such thing as an authentic ‘sense of self’. Similarly, Kathi Weeks critiques a framework that centre alienation, questioning the legitimacy of an ‘essential’ humanist self, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxist, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2011), p.89–91. [^]
  24. Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge, 1981); Lewis (2019b). [^]
  25. Sigrid Vertommen, Michal Nahman, and Vincenzo Pavone, ‘Global Fertility Chains: An Integrative Political Economy Approach to Understand the Reproductive Bio-Economy’, Science, Technology and Human Value, XX.X (2021), pp. 1–34. [^]
  26. O’Brien (1981); Kathryn Russell, ‘A Value-Theoretic Approach to Childbirth and Reproductive Engineering’, Science & Society, 58.3 (1994), pp. 287–314; Tsipy Ivry, ‘The Pregnancy Manifesto: Notes on How to Extract Reproduction from the Petri Dish’, Medical Anthropology, 34.3 (2015), pp. 274–89; JaneMaree Maher, ‘The Productivities of Pregnancy: Reviewing Medical Technologies and Feminist Critiques’, Hecate, 27.2 (2001), pp. 135–46; Rachelle Joy Chadwick, ‘Visceral Acts: Gestationality as Feminist Figuration’, Signs, 48.1 (2022). [^]
  27. Lisa Baraitser, Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 61. [^]
  28. This does not presume a biological relationship. [^]
  29. The global fertility industry has a projected worth of 36.6 billion dollars by 2031. Databridge Market Research, ‘Fertility Services Market Size, Report, & Research Industry By 2031’, 2024 <https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/reports/global-fertility-services-market>; Pande, A., 2014. Wombs in labor: Transnational commercial surrogacy in India. Columbia University Press, New York; Parry, B., 2018. Surrogate labour: exceptional for whom? Economy and Society 47, 214–233; Vertommen, S., Barbagallo, C., 2021. The In/visible wombs of the Market: the Dialectics of Waged and Unwaged Reproductive Labour in the Global Surrogacy Industry. Review of International Political Economy 1–41. [^]
  30. As an exception see Molas (2023) and Namberger (2019). [^]
  31. Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, Clinical Labour: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). There are ongoing debates within work on social reproduction and biocapitalism as to whether surrogacy and egg vending are productive of surplus value, or whether they even constitute labour. See: Susan Ferguson, ‘Notes of Sophie Lewis: Wombs, Value, and Production’, Spectre, 6 June 2020 https://spectrejournal.com/notes-on-sophie-lewis/; Kevin Floyd, ‘Automatic Subjects: Gendered Labour and Abstract Life’, Historical Materialism, 24.2 (2016), pp. 61–86. [^]
  32. Heather Jacobson, Labor of Love (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), p. 43. [^]
  33. Zsuzsa Berend, ‘The Emotion Work of a “Labor of Love”: An Ethnographic Account of Surrogacy Arrangements in the United States’, in Handbook of Gestational Surrogacy, ed. by E. Scott Sills (Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp 63–64; Rudrappa, S., 2015a. Discounted life: The price of global surrogacy in India. NYU Press, New York; Rudrappa, S., 2015b. Reproductive Interventions, in: Rudrappa, S. (Ed.), Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India. NYU Press, p. 0; Rudrappa, S., Collins, C., 2015. Altruistic Agencies and Compassionate Consumers: Moral Framing of Transnational Surrogacy. Gender & Society 29, 937–959; Vora, K., 2012. Limits of “Labor”: Accounting for Affect and the Biological in Transnational Surrogacy and Service Work. The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 111, 681–700; Vora, K., 2019. Surrogacy, Labour and Human Reproduction. Radical Philosophy 204, 42–46. [^]
  34. While Indian previously housed a booming surrogacy industry for ‘reproductive tourists’, since 2021 surrogacy has only been available to Indian nationals. [^]
  35. Kalindi Vora, Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 40. [^]
  36. Vora (2015), pp. 40–41. [^]
  37. Sophie Lewis, ‘Cyborg Uterine Geography: Complicating “Care” and Social Reproduction’’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 8.3 (2019), pp. 309–310. [^]
  38. Jaya Keaney, Making Gaybies: Queer Reproduction and Multiracial Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023), p. 115, p. 3. [^]
  39. Alys Eve Weinbaum, ‘Marx, Irigaray, and the Politics of Reproduction’, Differences, 6.1 (1994), pp. 98–128, p. 101. [^]
  40. Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, ‘Foetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction’, in Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine, ed. by Michelle Stanworth (Minneapolis” University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 268. [^]
  41. Lauren Berlant, ‘America, “Fat,” the Fetus’, Boundary 2, 21.3 (1994), pp. 145–95, p. 191. [^]
  42. Lisa M Mitchell, Baby’s First Picture: Ultrasound and the Politics of Fetal Subjects (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2001). [^]
  43. 3D sonography uses the same sound wave technology as 2D scans: ‘high-frequency sound waves emitted from a transducer differentially rebound from bone and tissue, scanning the foetus in thin slices.’ The 3D version digitally records these slices before assembling them into a 3D picture; in 4D, the 3D images are updated at short intervals, creating a moving image. Julie Palmer, ‘The Placental Body in 4D: Everyday Practices of Non-Diagnostic Sonography’, Feminist Review, 93.1 (2009), p. 65. [^]
  44. Charlotte Kroløkke, ‘Biotourist Performances: Doing Parenting During the Ultrasound.’, Text and Performance Quarterly, 31.1 (2011), pp. 15–36; Elizabeth Fraser, ‘Cyborg Bonding: 3D Fetal Ultrasound as a Technology of Communication and the Rise of “Boutique” Ultrasound’, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, 9.1 (2016), pp. 68–80; Janelle Taylor, ‘The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram and the Work of the Sonographer’, Journal of Diagnostic Medical Sonography, 18.6 (2002), pp. 367–79. [^]
  45. Barbara Katz Rothman, ‘Pregnancy, Birth and Risk: An Introduction’, Health, Risk & Society, 16.1 (2014), pp. 1–6, quoted in Julie Roberts, Griffiths Frances, and Alice Verran, ‘Seeing the Baby, Doing Family: Commercial Ultrasound as Family Practice?’, Sociology, 51.3 (2017), pp. 527–42, p. 9. [^]
  46. Elena Neiterman, ‘Doing Pregnancy: Pregnant Embodiment as Performance’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 35.5 (2012), pp. 372–83, p. 373. [^]
  47. Vincenzo Pavone, ‘IVF as a Looking Glass: Kinship, Biology, Technology and Society through the Lens of Assisted Reproductive Technologies’, BioSocieties, 10.1 (2015), pp. 111–15; Rayna Rapp, ‘Race & Reproduction: An Enduring Conversation’, Medical Anthropology, 38.8 (2019), pp. 725–32. [^]
  48. Roberts et al., (2017). [^]
  49. Kroløkke (2011), p. 25. [^]
  50. NHS, Building a Close Relationship with Your Baby, Start for Life – Baby Basics: Bonding with Your Baby https://www.nhs.uk/start-for-life/baby/baby-basics/bonding-with-your-baby/building-a-close-relationship-with-your-baby/#during-pregnancy [accessed 21 August 2025]. [^]
  51. NHS Inform, Attachment and bonding during pregnancy, https://www.nhsinform.scot/ready-steady-baby/pregnancy/relationships-and-wellbeing-in-pregnancy/attachment-and-bonding-during-pregnancy, [accessed 21 August 2025]. [^]
  52. Marie Thompson, ‘Your Womb, the Perfect Classroom’: Prenatal Sound Systems and Uterine Audiophilia, Feminist Review 127, no. 1 (2021): 73–89; Cindi Katz Childhood as Spectacle: Relays of Anxiety and the Reconfiguration of the Child, Cultural Geographies 15, no. 1 (2008) – further references to both texts appear as page numbers in brackets in the text. [^]
  53. A similar argument (in terms of incommensurability) is made by Ferguson (2020) against Lewis’ positioning of gestation as labour. [^]
  54. For an argument in favour of ‘full abstraction’ as a route to the abolition of gender, see Beverly Best (2021). [^]
  55. Lucy van de Wiel, ‘Prenatal Imaging: Egg Freezing, Embryo Selection and the Visual Politics of Reproductive Time’, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 4.2 (2018), pp. 1–35. [^]
  56. See Heather Berg for a useful discussion of the politics of refusing reproductive labour. Heather Berg, ‘An Honest Day’s Wage for a Dishonest Day’s Work: (Re)Productivism and Refusal’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 42.1/2 (2013), pp. 161–77. [^]

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

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