Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I discuss norms in UK birth cohort research and queer/ed study participants both erased and made marketable subjects under capitalist conditions. I pose the materialist possibilities of critical queer perspectives on relatedness and reproduction in this context.

Paper long abstract:

From the eugenics era to the present, the UK has a long history of engineering social and sexual citizenship through enlisting its population in biological and social research. ‘Normal’ human development therein has been coproduced by biomedical and cultural bias. While much discourse has shifted toward combatting those widespread inequities, queer and trans subjects often face the options of conformity or being disappeared in the data. Discussing observations from field research on an intergenerational birth cohort study in Bristol, I seek to highlight the hierarchies that coopt and benefit queer/ed middle-class birth cohort research participants. Limited options for quantifying ‘family’ on study questionnaires and lack of clarity regarding who ‘counts’ in research, literally in terms of statistics and figuratively in terms of value, means that queer families and non-genetic relatives ‘queered’ by boundaries of ‘the family’ within research, face erasure. Heteronormative constructions of relatedness and intelligibility prevail in a context where past and future family health can be distilled down to maternal causality, as Lappé and Jeffries Hein’s (2023) materialist work on placenta research reveals. On the other side of this, there is potential for the hypervisibility of ‘good’ queer subjects who may help ensure a study’s financial viability. I argue that crip and queer perspectives on assisted reproductive technologies, deconstructing invisibly selective relatedness, for example between identical twins and their genetic children, and a queer/trans anthropological approach to shared biophysical connection, what I term a queer ‘mesobiome,’ contribute to materialist biopossibility (Willey 2016) in the realm of social reproduction.