A Tale of Two Surrogates

We really can only tell you what we did, and perhaps make you aware of any mistakes we made. The first thing we did is we wrote a full script of our book. To do that, we began with the main themes from our ethnographic data and analysis that we wanted to communicate in the story, so for instance, we wrote down "motivations" and "shared body" and "gift relationship." Then we assembled the themes in a narrative arc of one surrogacy journey and we wrote a brief storyline of what kind of story could communicate that theme. Then we listed a lot of representative quotes from surrogates in our data that illustrated each theme, and this was the basis of the storyline. We then decided on our two characters- Jenn and Dana—and each of us began to write the story and dialogue of each chapter based on our ethnographic data. The words of each surrogate, and the words of the Greek Chorus and Dana's surrogacy group, are all based on actual words of surrogates in our data.

Finally, after we finished our entire script, sending it back and forth over months and months to tweak it, we began to assemble a storyboard using powerpoint in order to map out each page. On the storyboard we indicated exactly which expressions, gestures, dialogue, and background would be on each page. We had to drastically reduce the words and translate our intentions into drawings. We mapped out the entire book this way, and then we added full page spreads where we wanted a pause in the narrative. Only after a year had passed and we had finished mapping out the whole book, we began to look for an artist that had the style we had agreed we both liked: clean lines, realistic drawing, black and white. We were lucky to find Andrea Scebba who was just starting out in his career as a comic artist and agreed to work with us on the book.

Although we thought that we had "finished" at that point, it was only the beginning. Each page took at least a week of back and forth between the three of us. Andrea would first translate the page from our storyboard to a rough sketch, then he would send it to us for comments and redraw. Then he would ink it, and send it back for more comments. Then he would add the text. There were many things that we would go back and forth on in disagreement, and things that were hard to translate into drawings. As we progressed with the book, we also understood that we would need to shade it in greyscale, and therefore Andrea had to go back and shade each page much later in the process.

Sure! Zsuzsa has written quite a bit about her online ethnographic methods that she used during the decade that she did research on Surrogate Mothers Online. You can learn more about how she did her research in her 2018 article in Sage Research Methods entitled "Ethnographic Fieldwork Online: Studying a Surrogacy Support Forum" and in the introduction to her monograph, The Online World of Surrogacy.

Elly has done multi-sited ethnographic research on Israeli surrogacy, including narrative interviews with surrogates and intended mothers. You can read about her methods in the introduction to her monograph, Birthing a Mother: the Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self. The research methods of her follow-up study of married Israeli surrogates can be found in her article "The Power of the Single Story: Surrogacy and Social Media in Israel."

Our story is an interesting one! We met over fifteen years ago through email and began writing to one another about our research, comparing and contrasting our findings on surrogacy in the US and in Israel. We would comment on one another's writing, encourage one another and give each other critiques and comparative comments on drafts. We became good friends without ever meeting, and even began to write co-authored articles comparing our findings, before we finally met up for the first time at a conference on reproduction at Cambridge University in 2017. We arrived a few days before the conference began, and walked around the town together, and it was like we knew each other always!

During the pandemic, we felt inspired to do something more creative than the usual academic writing, and both of us wanted to make our writing more accessible to a cross-over audience that could include people entering the world of surrogacy or caregivers working with people in the process. We also both noticed that our students were of a new generation that engaged with visual texts more freely than with classic academic writing. So we decided to try this, not knowing that it would take us over three years to complete and not really knowing how complex it is to write a graphic novel about ethnographic research?

Our book is the first ethnographic graphic narrative in the Graphic Medicine series at Penn State University Press, but there is a growing series from University of Toronto Press called EthnoGraphic and there have been a few other titles from other publishers. We recommend that you check out these other ethnography based graphic novels:

• Turkish Kaleidoscope by Jenny White (Princeton Univ. Press).
• Lissa by Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye (Univ. of Toronto Press). 
• The King of Bangkok by Claudio Sopranzetti, Sara Fabbri and Chiara Natalucci (Univ. of Toronto Press).
• The Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey in North Africa by Aomar Boum and Nadjib Berber (Stanford Univ. Press).

Our book is the first Graphic Medicine title we know of about surrogacy and written specifically based on ethnographic research, but there are several other Graphic Medicine titles that deal with infertility and other reproduction-related issues. We recommend that you look at:

• The Facts of Life by Paula Knight
• Bump by Kate Evans
• Graphic Reproduction: A Comics Anthology edited by Jenell Johnson
• Two Week Wait: an IVF story by Luke Jackson and Kelly Jackson/illus. by Mara Wild
• Kid Gloves by Lucy Knisley
• Barren by Sarah Glidden
• Catalogue Baby: A Memoir of Infertility by Myriam Steinberg
• I(V)F: A Memoir of Infertility by Sheila Alexander
• Menopause: A Comic Treatment edited by MK Czerwiec

We did not write this book to encourage people to pursue surrogacy, but instead to communicate the real stories we have collected over the years of our research. We don't believe in normative prescriptions and instead think that one thing might work for one surrogate and not for another. It is, however, clear to us that there are some things that made the surrogacy journey a happier one for the women in our research, and one can read our book in a way as a guide to some of those elements of what might help make it a more positive experience.

• Surrogates are real people with families and lives, they are not objects to be treated as rented, bought, or sold. The book shows some of the behind the scenes events and conversations that might take place in the surrogate's life. It is important to remember that surrogates do not do this alone but often as a "family project" involving partners, children, and even their extended families.

• Surrogates usually approach surrogacy for a mix of reasons, and it is disrespectful to treat them as though they chose to become surrogates only for the money or to assume that there is something that might explain why they made this non-normative choice. Some women just want to do this in order to do something meaningful for others and there does not have to be some specific reason.

• Surrogates in the United States do not have a committee or a standard contract supervised by the State like in Israel to ascertain that their rights are protected. Like Jenn, US surrogates might feel the need to advocate for their rights and take personal responsibility for contract negotiations. Women entering surrogacy arrangements might find indications for some of the do's and don'ts that surrgates advised one another in Zsuzsa's data from Jenn's story.

• Surrogates might receive remuneration for their efforts, but many of them still view surrogacy as a gift relationship in which they expect their efforts to be acknowledged as more than a business transaction. Intended parents might thus understand from this book why their surrogate might be sending them gifts, and what their surrogate might be indicating and expecting regarding acknowledgement of their efforts.

• Surrogacy is a relationship that works out best when it is based on trust and open communication between the parties involved.

One of the most central aspects of Zsuzsa's data is that US surrogates who she studied on the Surrogate Mother's Online forum created an online community in which they educated and supported one another throughout the process. We knew that we wanted each of the surrogates to go through their journey with the presence of their individual family but we also felt that it would not be an authentic portrayal of the data if we did not have a vehicle for showing the surrogates interactions with other surrogates. We also wanted to have a way to show the different voices that make up the data.

The idea for the Greek chorus came from several lines of reasoning: we liked how the idea reflected the overall theme of the hero's journey, and how the classic Greek chorus would accompany the heroine, echoing her thoughts and actions throughout. We also liked the idea that Jenn is speaking to a group of women who she is imagining in perhaps a romanticized way as participants in this act of creation, sort of like Greek goddesses. Finally, we thought this would be a good way to mark the surrogacy group that Jenn interacts with as existing in a different realm of experience: she interacts with her family, the intended parents, and medical professionals in her everyday life, but her interactions with the Greek chorus are visually differentiated.

The Greek Chorus appears more frequently and consistently in Jenn's story than the surrogacy group that accompanies Dana through her journey. This is both a reflection of our data—the SMO surrogates were far more immersed in the virtual meeting ground than the Israeli surrogates were—but also because each character has different support networks. Dana's sister and her best friend, as well as the intended mother, Sarah, play a more involved role in her journey than her surrogacy support group, whereas for Jenn it is mainly her husband, Mike, and the online group that accompany her throughout. Moreover, unlike the Greek chorus, Dana's surrogacy support group is illustrated as competitors in a competitive sport competition. This depiction is meant to evoke the elements of Israeli surrogacy that are more similar to a competition: surrogates are selected after medical and psychological testing and have to pass a committee; they narrate their stories as surmounting an obstacle course and are aware that many do not pass.