Paper short abstract:

This paper interrogates the shared analyses of power in the tenets of Reproductive Justice and queer justice to offer a critical frame of Queer Reproductive Justice. We build on our research on LGBTQ+ families with trans children in the US, and on gay men's use of surrogacy in the UK and the US.

Paper long abstract:

This paper interrogates the shared analyses of power and social oppression in the tenets of Reproductive Justice and queer justice to offer a critical frame of Queer Reproductive Justice. It operationalizes Queer Reproductive Justice as a critical theoretical contribution to the fields of reproduction, queer theory, and critical race, indigenous, and postcolonial scholarship and praxis at a time when threats to and stratifications of reproduction are growing and held within dangerous political projects to maintain white supremacy and cisgender and hetero-normativity in global bio-economies. Following the discussion of contemporary contexts of reproduction, and Reproductive Justice scholarship as it conjoins with the ‘queer,’ we discuss two of the authors’ qualitative research projects: (1) Gender Justice research in the US that illustrates how LGBTQ+ families, including families with transgender children, struggle to achieve their right to raise families in safe and dignified conditions in school and community settings and beyond, and (2) an ethnography of gay men’s use of surrogacy to become parents in the UK and the US, which foregrounds the ways in which the right to have children is shaped by gender and sexuality norms, intersecting with social class. We suggest an operationalizing of Queer Reproductive Justice that builds on the rich history of work presented herein and that signals a dynamic continued engagement around the structural bases of queer reproduction, and queering reproductive justice.