Natural mother = real mother? Choice and agency among un/natural 'mothers' in India

The article is set against India's pronatalist ethos and fertility industry that fetishize biological motherhood as natural and real. To counter its bio-centric paradigm of mother-making, it forefronts and juxtaposes the adoptive (non-birth-but-legal) mother with the surrogate (birth-giver-but-legal non-mother) to mirror the flux and constructedness of 'real' motherhood. I use a poststructuralist frame to examine their non-normative 'choice' and complex agentic struggles. Seeking legitimacy as ethical maternal subjects, they both reimagine and/or reify the normative maternal. I also focus on their absent antithetical counterparts - the birth and commissioning mother - to highlight how socio-legal structures and logic either fail to recognize or attempt to hide non-patriarchal motherhood. Since this constellation of 'mothers' points to the discursivity of the maternal, I argue that the non-corporeal formative elements of motherhood be emphasized. I urge a shift from the feminist preoccupation with choice towards intersectional structural realities that trigger/limit agency and, ultimately, human relatedness.