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Published: 1993

Total Pages: 0

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The Sugar Mother, among other contemporary works, illustrates the argument of this informed and informing discussion of "the continuity in representational strategies" of the reproductive body across Romantic, modern and postmodern social formulations. Such representations function (1) to create a "metaphoric break between mother and foetus that made possible their different social positionings"; (2) to reconstruct the use of "woman's body to produce or consolidate male power"; and (3) to deconstruct the use of 'the (male and female) body to serve industrial production." Three images especially figure these functions - the extra-uterine foetus, the surrogate mother, the pregnant man. The Sugar Mother, a "theoretical" postmodern text, "uses the theme of surrogacy ... to attack the notion that there is a natural world existing before or beyond representation." Squier sees the "stability of bodily identity" and sexual identity to be "shaken in this world," where "male desire for control ... connects the biblical notion of immaculate conception to the contemporary notion of surrogate mothering ... Like the Bible, [and] Edwin's books of the body and Cecelia's obstetrics convention papers, Leila's invention of herself as a surrogate mother exemplifies the human use of systems of representation to shape, control, and gain power in our world."