Paper short abstract:

This essay examine the choice of sperm donors in California from the perspective of Queer women, choosing between friends and criobanks, therecent changes in the legal framing, and the increased de-kinning or separation between the donor and the social parents.

Paper long abstract:

In California, one of the states with high concentration of same sex couples in the United States,

there has been recent shifts in the Law, allowing for three parents or more to appear on a child' s birth certificate. Furthermore, after t the 2015 supreme court ruling that recognizes same sex families as entitled tequal rights as heterosexual families, many legal restrictions about sperm donors and legal obligations are slowly being reduced.

On one level, this important shift leads to an active recognition of non-heteronormative families.

My research explores how queer females navigate the offer of sperm donors via criobanks, vs. the more murky terrain of queer and fictive kinship building by using know donors, and multiple bio- mothers.

In my autoethnographic account, it appears that questions of parenting and kinship are not easily translatable in legal terms. Noticing the shift from exchanges of reproductive materials started in the realm of gay activism in the 1990s to a market-driven, on-line catalogue model today, the figure of the sperm donor becomes interestingly caught in a dichotomy: on one level clearly separated from any parenting role by laws and by the techno-mediation of the sperm bank; on another, expressing a desire to be connected through bio-exchanges and friendships in way that exceed the current legal vocabulary, which is developing by increasingly protecting the same-sex couple as a unit. I conclude with a critique of the binary form in family formation and its reiteration in same sex families in contemporary California