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Seminar series

Citizenship, cross-border surrogacy, and the ‘motherhood mandate’

Global Citizenship Seminar Series

Add to calendar 2023-02-16 12:00 2023-02-16 13:00 Europe/Rome Citizenship, cross-border surrogacy, and the ‘motherhood mandate’ Sala Triaria Villa Schifanoia YYYY-MM-DD
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Scheduled dates

Feb 16 2023

12:00 - 13:00 CET

Sala Triaria, Villa Schifanoia

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This seminar will host a paper presentation by Katie Tonkiss
This presentation will interrogate the role of heteronormative ideals of the family in shaping exclusion from citizenship in capitalist patriarchal societies. Specifically, it will focus on cross-border commercial surrogacy, through which parent(s) may commission a baby to be born via a surrogate in another country. While commercial surrogacy is prohibited in most countries, its legality in a small number means that each year many babies born through cross-border surrogacy enter a legal grey-area where their right to citizenship in both the surrogate’s state and the parent’s state is contested. The author, Katie Tonkiss, will show that a pronatalist ‘motherhood mandate’ – a social bias in favour of gestational motherhood – shapes access to citizenship and family life for children born via cross-border surrogacy. This problem, she suggests, is a consequence of the tension between consent and inheritance that is embodied within citizenship itself.

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