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Paper Short Abstract:

Based on qualitative interviews among queer people, the study explores the negotiation of queer kinship within normative state structures of family making when engaged in family making through assisted reproduction. It shows how this creates reproductive situations of both possibility and violence.

Paper Abstract:

This qualitative study explores the experiences of family making processes among queer people in Denmark in the context of changing legislation on parental rights and access to assisted reproduction, that offer new opportunities for queer people engaged in family making. Based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with 25 trans*, non-binary, and genderqueer people, as well as homosexual men, the study explores how queer individuals navigate family making processes and form queer families within the specific structural conditions of assisted reproduction and legal parental rights landscapes in Denmark today. Drawing on theorizations of queer kinship and (kin)coherence, the analysis shows how queer kinship is performed within state-funded normative structures of having children and how this results in queer kinship as a site of both possibility and violence, of both joy and grief. The analysis illustrates that participants must negotiate their queer kinship bonds in interactions with welfare and legal institutions to become socially coherent in the eyes of the institutions making access to family formation possible. The study finds practices of resistance, ’passing’ as hetero- or homonormative, and at times by-passing the involvement of the state as they seek to ‘do’ queer families, embodying both the exclusion and inclusion of queer kinship in state logics of reproduction. We discuss how these strategies are employed by participants simultaneously as a means of insisting on the legitimacy and visibility of queer bodies and kinship ties as well as necessary survival strategies to minimize the harmful interactions experienced in family making processes.