ABSTRACT
The subject of this chapter is neoclassical economics as a sexually specific discourse or knowledge that constructs sexually specific subject positions. Using the example of the neoclassical conception of the surrogate motherhood exchange, I argue that the female body is constituted as the excluded ‘other’ of the contracting agent or rational economic man, and hence, more generally, that woman is the constitutive outside of neoclassical economics. I read the neoclassical construction of the surrogate motherhood exchange through the metaphor of the womb-as-capital in order to reveal the way in which the binary opposition of man/not-man supports the claims of economists that neoclassical economics is a universally applicable and sexually-indifferent knowledge. I argue that the womb-as-capital metaphor is essential for the neoclassical conception of the surrogate motherhood exchange, and I situate it within a range of discourses which support the notion of the universal individual and hence a ‘one-sex model’, or a construction of sexual difference as man and his derivative ‘other’. When considering these issues, it is important to note that to argue that a particular discourse constructs sexual difference or femininity in particular ways is not to essentialize sexual difference or femininity, since, as Cornell argues, ‘Woman “is” only in language, which means that her “reality” can never be separated from the metaphors and fictions in which she is presented’ (1991: 18). I argue, then, that the neoclassical account of the surrogate motherhood exchange produces the female body as meaningful in particular ways, but I do not simultaneously assert another true meaning which I would then compel neoclassical economists to add to their analyses. Meaning is created between texts rather than between texts and the real world, and hence neoclassical economics must be understood as intertextual. It does not produce sexed bodies as meaningful in particular ways within a vacuum, but relies for its intelligibility upon a series of discourses to which it also
contributes (on intertextuality, see Culler 1983: 32, 103-4; see also Amariglio and Ruccio, Chapter 6). For this reason, the discussion of the neoclassical construction of the contracting agent within the surrogate motherhood exchange draws upon textual support from a wide range of sources, including the work of feminist legal theorists. The purpose of this chapter, then, is not to accuse neoclassical economics of ignoring some reality of woman which exists independently of its theoretical constructions, and hence neither to advocate nor to oppose surrogate motherhood contracts. Rather, this is a specific case study of the problematic status of ‘woman’ within the neoclassical account of exchange in general. It is therefore a feminist poststructuralist reading of the neoclassical modelling of the exchange for its production of meaning, but not, I again stress, for the purpose of producing a specific position in relation to surrogate motherhood contracts per se. It is also important to keep in mind that, although I draw upon the extant economic texts on surrogate motherhood (Posner 1989, 1992; Hewitson 1997), the analysis to follow requires neither consistency with the conscious intentions of authors, nor verification from the experience of women and men who have been involved in surrogacy. On this latter point, I endorse Pateman’s argument that the existence of smoothly-completed surrogacy contracts (as well as, in the context of the ‘sexual contract’, happy marriages or satisfied prostitutes) is irrelevant to the productive work of the discourse of the contract or exchange itself (1988: 215).
