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Accepted Paper:
Ligation, litigation, and ova at the end of the world: A queer anthropology of reproductive time travel
Taylor Riley
(University College London)
Same-sex reproduction possibilities are formed in the shadow of violence and exclusions in the past and present. This paper will critically contemplate the ethics of stasis and change as it theorizes reproductive travel, including across time, from a queer anthropological perspective.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on eugenic histories and narratives of same-sex family-making, the paper considers social and biological transformations found in futures of same-sex reproduction and examines how reproductive violence and possibilities themselves travel in queer ways. This ethnographic speculation highlights the everyday labor of queer kinship that is forming chosen family and the labor of navigating landscapes of laws, norms, and reproductive technologies. Both raise questions of discrimination and privilege, where prospective queer parents face many exclusions but can also contribute to racialized inequities in the realms of commercial surrogacy and adoption. Both labors also involve being on the move, from a journey across the street, or along the branches of a genealogical archive, or down a fallopian tube, to a plane ride, or ten, halfway or more across the world. As it considers that travelling across space, the paper also examines expeditions across time into worlds where single-sex ‘biological’ reproduction (an imperfect, often misleading term) is as banal and simple as opposite-sex reproduction. As such, I analyze records of forced sterilization in the 20th century US, observations on lesbian parents from ethnographic research I conducted in South Africa between 2015 and 2016, transnational reproductive trends, and current developments in biomedical research to examine the pitfalls and potentials of queer reproductive travel across space and time.