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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how time structures reproductive inequalities through transnational surrogacy. It shows how biomedical temporal regimes, anticipation and waiting shape access to legitimate parenthood. It highlights reproductive micro-infrastructures and the relational labour parents entail.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines reproductive temporalities as a central site through which polarisation around reproduction is produced, negotiated, and sustained, drawing on the trajectories of male couples engaging in transnational surrogacy. In a national context where these forms of parenthood remain legally and symbolically marginalised, it argues that time operates as a key political mechanism in the making of legitimate families.

Mobilising the concept of reproductive micro-infrastructures, the paper analyses the anticipatory, coordinative, and waiting practices through which intended parents make parenthood possible outside state-recognised frameworks. By tracing the temporal stages of reproductive itineraries it highlights the role of biomedical metrics (clinical calendars, gestational thresholds, standardised protocols) as normative technologies. Far from neutral, these temporal regimes standardise reproductive experiences, distribute capacities to act, and function as tools of control that distinguish legitimate from illegitimate forms of parenthood.

The paper further shows that these trajectories rely on extensive, invisible, affective, moral, and relational labour carried out at the margins of nationally sanctioned reproduction. This labour involves managing uncertainty, waiting, and urgency, as well as sustaining collaborative relationships with other reproductive actors, particularly surrogate mothers, whose embodied, emotional, and social temporalities often remain misaligned with institutional schedules.

Through an ethnographic attention to temporal disjunctions, synchronisations, and negotiations, the paper demonstrates that reproductive polarisation unfolds less through overt ideological opposition than through differentiated regimes of time that enable certain parental projects while constraining others. It thus contributes to rethinking reproductive temporalities as dynamic forces through which power, legitimacy, and reproductive governance are enacted.