Sophie Lewis: I’d like to ask you to begin by talking about the all-female brokers and bioclinical capitalists in your film, who walk around a derelict sanatorium in the Czech Republic, hoping to “harness” its bygone sense of “community” while repurposing it into a private gestational surrogacy clinic. “We need to think carefully about how we can work around these fixed definitions of motherhood,” says the director of the enterprise, referring to the various European legal standards in place in 2018 that proscribe the act of “simulating the mother.” This is particularly interesting since commercial surrogacy, albeit a work-around, is not, of course, interested in a communal, polymaternal unfixing of definitions of motherhood at all: in fact, it could not exist without a fixed definition of motherhood.

Lucy Beech: I witnessed complex relationships between care, capital and legislation in quite a few areas of the assisted reproduction industry. The scene you reference reflects this as the director of the clinic is training her team to view the law as processual tool and enable their clients to unlock different methods of circumvention. Yet her attempts to work around the fixed legal definitions of motherhood are not necessarily geared toward advocating for the redistribution of reproductive responsibility, acknowledging the difficulties marginalised people face or destabilising the dogmas of biological parenting. Instead the broker character strikes an uncomfortable balance between legislation, ethics, care and entrepreneurialism. She capitalises on the lack of legislation restricting/regulating surrogacy contracts in the Czech Republic where doctors practice an ‘out of sight out of mind’ approach to treating patients at their own discretion (which is often a draw for many otherwise excluded people who pick and mix their legislation and care providers transnationally). Like many clinics I visited in Czech, allowing those marginalised people to “slip through the net” maximises profit whilst maintaining the status quo. Perhaps openly redressing Surrogacy as a poly-maternal tool might motivate different regulations of care work that result in alternative approaches and protection of those reproductive actors involved. As it stands, the surrogacy industry perhaps capitalises on the back stage / out of sight nature of these transactions. The film is a container for this conflict rather than a set of answers; the script built from marketing material for clinics, funded scientific research; interviews with intended parents; bio-social community forums where these “work-around” strategies are shared and discussed and PR material for surrogacy brokers and international patients.

SL: You end with a flood: a yellow ocean; Eve’s ducts overflowing. Here, and in your voiceover, which repeats the idea that the protagonist and the host “are soaking in each other,” you appear to be referencing Donna Haraway’s proposition in Staying with the Trouble (2016), that we as humans are all always already “swimming in urine.” (The piss of pregnant mares is needed to make pills that help menopausal humans—or wannabe pregnant ones!—and Haraway’s preoccupation is how every being involved could receive better care). But you are not optimistic, nor romantic, about this “synching.” Why?

LB: The flooding of Eve at the end of the film was a reference to the work of Bernard Zondek, a sex endocrinologist whose work on hormones led to the development of the pregnancy test. Employing a method of environmental endocrinology from a European settlement project in Palestine/Israel Zondek attempted to treat infertile ’settler’ animals. By treating animals Zondek discovered that hormones could be purified from the urine of one creature and used to affect the hormonal balance of another. This process of ‘soaking and sharing’ included utilising hormones purified from the urine of menopausal women as a means of follicle stimulation. I was thinking that a woman’s unpaid care work continues on even in retirement. I’m actually working on another film that deals with the political history of using urine in more detail.

Synching is a central goal of gestational surrogacy where the Intended parents’ (IP) cycle has to be synched with the surrogate’s. More recently ‘natural’ menstrual synchrony through pheromones and proximity has been debunked as a myth. The gestational surrogacy process exemplifies that in reality this synching has to be automated using biological hormones extracted in some cases from the urine of menopausal women (or pregnant women/horses). To me the myth of menstrual synchrony reinforces essentialist narratives that posit women as innately relational and therefore better equipped for care work. So on the one hand my reference to synching is not romantic, it’s automated, and on the other I’m with Haraway in that I recognise the necessity of taking care of those unseen actors that facilitate these assisted reproduction processes.

SL: We spend time, in Reproductive Exile, with a stallion and a veterinary laborer performing insemination in a stable, then in the bleachers at a Czech horse-show, where an “imported mare” is having her exceptional genetic profile entered in the national data-bank. The analogizing of human reproduction with horses, equine breeding, and the specter of eugenics, is something that your film has in common with—among many other texts—the recent blockbuster Sorry to Bother You. Could you talk about your inspirations, here?

LB: The mare insemination in the opening sequence refers to the Pregnant Mare Urine farming production processes (PMU), where mares are kept continually pregnant; often inseminated for ease with restricted water intake to keep estrogen more concentrated in their urine supply. I intercut the biological material of the lead character being extracted, packaged and shipped in parallel to that of the horse semen as I wanted to infer a stream of inter-species biological material being handled and shipped across global lines to aid the patient consumer. I wanted to bring into question a conflict between the desire to essentialise a technical body and the co-constitutive nature of its construction within an inter-corporeal network of human and non-human relations. 

SL: Your film is a loop, evoking, perhaps, the endless cycles of IVF, the frustrated hopes and futile repeat attempts of many an infertility “patient.” Can you talk more about your perspective on the desire for a baby “of one’s own?” Can it be fulfilled?

LB: The idea of having ‘a child that resembles you’ came from marketing material I found for a clinic in Czech Republic. This was the selling point. Hope can be very lucrative, it is a technology of desire that is actively cultivated by the fertility industry. However I understand that whilst the production of desire can be orchestrated that does not take away from the fact that the feeling is very real.

Credits

Commissioned by Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill; Tramway, Glasgow.