Gwendolyn Beetham,
"Assisted Reproduction as a Queer Thing"
(page 4 of 4)
Queering Kinship
Several recent collections have attempted to explore some of the
complex ways in which kinship building happens outside the norm,
including One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talk about Polyamory, Open
Adoption, Mixed Marriage, Househusbandry, Single Motherhood and Other
Realities of Truly Modern Love[13]
and And Baby Makes More: Known
Donors, Queer Parents, and Our Unexpected
Families.[14] These
collections offer critical and diverse contributions to parenting memoir
writing—arguably signaling the arrival of a new subgenre of parenting
literature that allows issues of the political economy of reproduction
to be taken seriously. These collections offer self-reflective
critiques of the use of ART and adoption, while simultaneously using
them to build alternative kinship structures.[15]
The collection One Big Happy Family includes the perspective
of a heterosexual male sperm donor in a piece recounted by an anonymous
author (using the pseudonym Antonio Caya) who gave his semen to a single
lesbian friend who later became pregnant. Although Caya gives little
time to larger issues of the reproductive economy, his personal
reflections on being a "known donor" are both rare and thoughtful.
And Baby Makes More includes three essays from gay male donors
who help with the creation of queer families. Their contributions to
active parenting beyond sperm donation are varied, but the aspect of
being a "known donor" is recalled as important to both the men involved
and to the mothers who asked them if they might contribute. Their
inclusion as gay male sperm donors is also important, with only
one sperm bank in the U.S. allowing donations from openly
gay men.[16]
More elusive than the gay male perspective is the transgender
perspective, which is also included in And Baby Makes More.
Here, Tobi Hill-Meyer recounts the process of deciding to store sperm
prior to transitioning, and then reflecting on with whom she might use
it or to whom she might donate it. The inclusion of a story from this
perspective is important, as transgender people tend to be the most
marginalized (or sensationalized, when we think of the recent moral
panic over the "pregnant man," Thomas Beatie[17])
in discourses around
reproductive technologies. A 2006 Mother Jones article on the
fertility industry found that Geoffrey Sher, owner of one of the most
profitable fertility franchises in the country, the Sher Institute, only
turned down a few patients in 24 years of operation, "one being a woman
who wanted to harvest her eggs, fertilize them, freeze the embryos, have
a sex change, find a woman to marry, and then have his wife carry his
babies." Apparently, such a trajectory fell outside of Sher's
self-professed "no judgments" approach.[18]
Although all of the essays recounting the process of sperm donation
question the role of biology in parenting to an extent, perhaps
unsurprisingly, the essays that most clearly spell out the challenge
that society's biological imperative poses to alternative kinship
construction are by academics coming from feminist, critical race, and
reproductive rights backgrounds. In And Baby Makes More, Damien
Riggs, a lecturer in social work and the editor of the journal Gay
and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review, recounts his experience as
both a gay male adoptive co-parent and as a sperm donor. Regarding the
latter, Riggs reminds people in his life (friends, curious by-standers,
his own mother) that "biology ... did not necessarily equal kinship, equal
family." While this is a product of his own experience with the
creation of kinship via the non-biological route of adoption, his
theoretical training certainly plays a part, evidenced by his statement
that:
"I am ... aware of the cultural location of my own understanding
of biology as a white, middle-class gay man, and that meanings of
biology for indigenous communities, for example, may mean very different
things when they are connected to sovereignty claims through the state's
requirement in Australia to prove descent. Biology is thus, in my
opinion, a set of meanings that are laden with both cultural and
personal contexts."
Others' culturally and personally
contingent understandings of biology, Riggs contends, sometimes impinge
upon his own relationship to biology, with expectations, for example,
that he is the "real" father of the children conceived with his sperm,
and the "adoptive" father of children with whom he feels a strong
kinship bond. "Resemblance talk" is summoned again in this context, as
Rachel Warburton, a professor of literature and feminist and queer
theories, contends. Although acknowledging, like Riggs, that others'
understanding of the importance of biology does not intend to harm her,
outsiders' insistance on using resemblance talk—suggesting that the
children she parents with her female partner look "just like" their
known sperm donor—"invariably works to erase [her] relationship with
[her] sons." Despite the "threat of invisibility," Warburton stresses
the benefits of a known sperm donor over the reduction of "the donor to
a set of predefined, disembodied characteristics," as she contends
happens with anonymous donors. The double-edged nature of using a
known donor is also explored by Chloe Brushwood Rose, a professor of
education who has also written on queer femininity, as she describes
being made to feel "reduced to an incubator" when a mutual friend of the
sperm donor (the donor, incidentally, also appears in the book) asks to
hold "Bob's daughter." Like Warburton, who described her known donor as
"kin," Brushwood Rose asked a "member of [her] chosen family to go
'biological.'" The use of the terms "kin" and "chosen family" are not
accidental—they describe the kinship networks which members of queer
communities have built for decades, as an alternative to—and in spite
of—legal and political recognition. The importance of these networks
are what make "resemblance talk" all the more complex.
In the end, while a celebration of these queer reproductions is
definitely in order, I am left a little bit sad by what I didn't find
much of in the narratives from "critical adopters": a serious accounting
for the person's own privilege. In other words, queers and feminist
straight women who use reproductive technologies have generated many
insightful critiques of mainstream legal structures and social norms of
"family," and perhaps more importantly have generated new forms of
kinship. But the critiques are almost all limited to the ways in which
the critic her or himself (and her or his "group") is marginalized.
There's little attention, so far, to the ways in which reproductive
technologies also facilitate privilege, such as the super-elite mode of
parenting and ever-greater concentration of resources that might be
encouraged by parent-to-child ratios that can exceed 4:1 in some of
these families, or the naturalization of race that is achieved through
the usually implicit decision to seek racially "similar" donors. It is a
lot to ask of people who are already in such a tenuous position legally
and socially; the right-wing is still working hard, after all, to
associate LGBT people with family decay and child molestation. But it's
worth hoping that the next phase of critical adoptions will go further,
looking for ways to approach reproductive technologies as simultaneously
tools of survival for marginalized people, and exercises of privilege
that should be undertaken with ambivalence and wariness.
Endnotes
1. See Shellee Colen, "'Like a Mother to Them':
Stratified Reproduction and West Indian Childcare Workers and Employers
in New York," in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics
of Reproduction, Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, eds. (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1995). [Return to text]
2. Amelia Jones, "Inside Infertility," in Domain Errors.
Cyberfeminist Practices, Maria Fernandez, Faith Wilding, and
Michelle M. Wright, eds. (New York: Autonomedia, 2002). [Return to text]
3. Meisha Rosenberg, "The Scarlet I: Has the
Advent of Assisted Reproductive Technology Lessened the Stigma of
Infertility—or Added to It?", Bitch Magazine 40 (2008). [Return to text]
4. "Infertile
Revolutionary." [Return to text]
5. This blog alerted me to the fact that the New
York State Department of Health ran an
"Infertility
Demonstration Program" helping
to cover the cost of infertility services to low-income persons. (There
is no information on whether or not the LGBT community or SMCs benefit
from these services.) [Return to text]
6. See Cynthia R. Daniels and Janet Golden,
"Procreative Compounds: Popular Eugenics, Artificial Insemination and
the Rise of the American Sperm Banking Industry," Journal of Social
History 38.1 (2004): 5-27. [Return to text]
7. Amy Harmon, "First Comes the Baby Carriage,"
The New York Times 13 October 2005. [Return to text]
8. Jennifer Egan, "Wanted: A Few Good Sperm,"
The New York Times 19 March 2006. [Return to text]
9. That said, two popular guides for lesbian
parents: Suzanne M. Johnson and Elizabeth O'Connor's For Lesbian
Parents and Kim Toevs and Stephanie Brill's The Essential Guide
to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy and Birth, do contain sections
weighing the pros and cons of different forms of conception: from
anonymous donor, known donor, co-parenting, etc. [Return to text]
10. "Butch and
Pregnant." [Return to text]
11. Amy Agigian, Baby Steps: How Lesbian
Alternative Insemination is Changing the World (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2004): 121. [Return to text]
12. One could (and people do) certainly argue that same
sex parenting itself is an alternative kinship formation. A similar
argument can be found regarding same sex marriage. [Return to text]
13. Rebecca Walker, One Big Happy Family: 18
Writers Talk about Polyamory, Open Adoption, Mixed Marriage,
Househusbandry, Single Motherhood and Other Realities of Truly Modern
Love (New York: Riverhead, 2009). [Return to text]
14. Susan Goldberg and Chloe Brushwood Rose,
And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents, and Our Unexpected
Families (London, ON: Insomniac Press, 2010). [Return to text]
15. I would also include Rachel Epstein's
Who's Your Daddy? And Other Writings on Queer Parenting (Toronto:
Sumach Press, 2009), as part of this nascent subgenre, although I was
not able to get access this book in time to include it in the
review. [Return to text]
16. Cited in Daniels and Golden: that bank is
Rainbow Flag
Health Services. [Return to text]
17. I did not include Thomas Beatie's
autobiography, Labor of Love: The Story of One Man's Extraordinary
Pregnancy (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008) in this review. Beyond
the sensationalized accounts in mainstream media, Beatie's book provides
a personal account of the severe discrimination faced by transgender
males in the medical system, and by society towards transgender parents
more broadly. [Return to text]
18. Elizabeth Weil,
"Breeder
Reaction," Mother Jones July/August (2006). [Return to text]
Page: 1 |
2 |
3 |
4
|