Gestational labour as affective labour: prenatal parenting, new technologies of foetal-mediation, and maternal labour at the level of the womb.

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This paper examines the emergence of gestational labour as a key concept within Marxist-feminist theories of social reproduction. Rather than focusing on its physical aspects however, I explore the affective dimensions of pregnancy under capitalism. For while maternal labour is often recognised as a form of affective labour, gestation itself is less likely to be theorised in these terms – doing so risks attributing subjectivity to the foetus or equating gestation with maternity. However, as this paper argues, capitalism is increasingly penetrating the spaces of pregnancy and fertility, introducing new affective demands and forms of commodification. With a focus on surrogacy and technologies of foetal mediation, I show how gestational labour becomes newly configured as affective labour, shaping both foetal and maternal subjectivities at progressively earlier stages of pregnancy.