Mediating reproductive labor: affective migration infrastructures and Central Asian surrogates in Georgia

Abstract

Georgia has developed into a global surrogacy hub, driven by affordable services and an accessible regulatory environment that offers legal certainty for intended parents. With rising international demand exceeding the availability of local surrogates, clinics increasingly rely on women from Central Asia, who turn to surrogacy as a means of economic survival in the context of limited opportunities at home. This article examines Georgia’s surrogacy sector as an affective migration infrastructure that produces and contains the reproductive mobility of Central Asian surrogates. I argue that intermediaries sustain this infrastructure through emotional labor: managing surrogates’ affective states and balancing care with control amid cultural tensions and interpersonal conflicts. The article also highlights the social dynamics of surrogates’ communal living arrangements, where solidarity and competition are intensified by surveillance policies that reward mutual monitoring. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Georgia and Kazakhstan, this study contributes to broader debates on reproductive labor and mobility by foregrounding affective governance and mediation in the global surrogacy industry.