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Based on fieldwork at a transnational surrogacy clinic in India and analysis of assisted reproductive technology (ART) legislation under consideration in the Indian parliament, this paper examines how bodies become potentialized through a combination of technology and networks of social and economic inequality. In this process, the meaning that participants assign to bodies and social relationships mediated by bodies becomes destabilized in a way that allows some surrogates to imagine and work toward a connection to commissioning parents that will offer them long-term benefit. The politics that position the clinic to potentialize the bodies of surrogates-and as a result the relations between participants and their imagined outcomes-occur at a moment of global demand for ARTs. As such, they rely on differentiation of subjects culturally, geographically, and economically. This article examines how the potentializing of women's bodies as surrogates occurs at the nexus of political, medical, and social influences in one ART clinic and how the resulting social relations are negotiated between participants in the clinic.

Affective and biological labor such as that found in call center and surrogacy work are indices of new forms of exploitation and accumulation within neoliberal globalization, but they also rearticulate a longer historical colonial division of labor. In this essay, feminist materialist scholarship provides the grounds to continue to scrutinize which kinds of exchange and subjectivity can even be represented by categories of labor. Leading to the question of what stakes are involved in asserting that gestational surrogates and others whose productivity occurs primarily through biological and affective processes are subjects of capitalist labor power. This essay argues that tracking vital energy, rather than value, as the content of what is produced and transmitted between biological and affective producers and their consumers holds on to the human vitality that Karl Marx describes as the content of value carried by the commodity and absolute use value of labor power to capitalist production, while also describing the content of these value-producing activities as greater than what can be described in terms of physical commodities and their value as represented through exchange.

Historical forms of domination and power, encompassed but not limited to social categories and hierarchies of difference, get built into seemingly non-human objects and the infrastructures that link them, thus sanitizing digital media technologies as human-free.  Rather than questioning the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of the human, fantasies about the revolutionary nature of new media and technology developments as posthuman carry forward and re-universalize the historical specificity of the category “human” whose bounds they claim to surpass.  To begin to theorize some of the ways in which the notion of a revolutionary network of humans and things is both racial and racializing, the first part of this article develops a reading of Sylvia Wynter’s theorization of modern “man” as fundamentally constructed through racial-scientific notions of the biological and economic.  We then think Wynter’s notion of homo-oeconomicus alongside Rifkin’s postulation that in fact the infrastructure revolution marks a paradigm shift away from capitalism. Through an analysis of several contemporary platforms (including Alfred and Amazon Mechanical Turk), we address the global-racial erasures and disappearances undergirding techno-utopic fantasies of a post-labor society.  At the same time, as we argue, it is insufficient to merely point out the way in which human racialized and gendered labor underwrites techno-utopic fantasies. Instead, we move to a consideration of the epistemological and material shifts as well as legacies tied to prior post-Enlightenment revolutionary thought, such as that of Franz Fanon, to reconceptualize who or what can count as human.  In conversation with feminist science studies scholarship on the posthuman, we grapple with what it means to think the subject of labor, and the human as subject, outside of the biological-economic imperatives of prior imaginaries.

The introduction to this special issue offers a theorization of postsocialism as an analytic that connects the 'afters' of the capitalist-socialist dynamic to think about how political action need not take shape in ways that are familiar as revolutionary, or oppositional. We argue that postsocialism marks a queer temporality, one that does not reproduce its social order even as its revolutionary antithesis. Resisting the revolutionary teleology of what was before, postsocialism creates space to work through ongoing legacies of socialisms in the present. Secondly, we assert the need for pluralizing postsocialisms as a method, which brings to the fore current practices, imaginaries, and actions that insist on political change at a variety of scales, including local, state, and transnational ones. Pluralizing postsocialisms as a method and considering it necessary for analysis of a global postsocialist condition can provide a crucial analytic through which to assess ongoing socialist legacies in new ethical collectivities and networks of dissent opposing state-and corporate-based military, economic, and cultural expansionism since the end of the Cold War.