Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork at Danish sperm banks and interviews with Danish sperm donors, I explore donors' practices of relatedness in order to discuss how their experiences may inform anthropological theory on kinship and relatedness.

Paper long abstract:

What is known about sperm donors' practices of relatedness is rather limited. Most research has focused almost exclusively on recipients of donor semen and the children who are born through donor insemination. The other part of the relatedness equation - men that donate semen and their families - is almost always disregarded. How kinship and relatedness matter to them and what kind of relations they deem important are narratives that hardly ever figure when kinship and relatedness are discussed, conceptualized, and researched. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at Danish sperm banks and qualitative interviews with Danish sperm donors, I explore how men that donate their semen in Denmark make sense of the multiple connections involved in and established through sperm donation. This exploration does not begin with the assumption that certain types of relations are more important than others. Rather, I am interested in how Danish sperm donors make sense of the multiplicity of the donor insemination kinship universe. These insights shall be used in order to discuss how the experiences of Danish sperm donors may inform contemporary anthropological theory on matters of kinship and relatedness.