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Paper short abstract

This research examines how Chinese lesbian couples excluded from China’s maritalized ART regime pursue IVF in Cambodia. Based on 2024–25 ethnography, it theorizes “reproductive commuting” and trust as infrastructure shaping queer family-making across legal grey zones and intra-Asian inequalities.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines cross-border reproductive travel between mainland China and Cambodia as a regional formation of queer family-making. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research conducted between 2024 and 2025 with Chinese lesbian couples, it analyzes how women excluded from China’s maritalized access to assisted reproductive technologies (ART) pursue IVF abroad and how these mobilities reshape kinship practices.

The study asks how queer family-making emerges through intra-Asian reproductive mobility under conditions of regulatory exclusion, and how such movements reorganize relations among state governance, fertility markets, and intimate life. I conceptualize these journeys as reproductive commuting: cyclical, time-compressed trips synchronized with ovulation cycles, workplace leave regimes, and shifting moral regulation of “legitimate” reproduction. While Cambodia’s proximity and Mandarin-language clinics make it accessible, fertility services operate within legal grey zones marked by institutional precarity and opaque oversight. In this terrain, “trust” functions as an alternative infrastructure, circulating through reputation (koubei) and digital networks that collectively stabilize uncertainty.

Engaging feminist STS and transnational queer sociology, the paper argues that reproductive mobility constitutes a relational infrastructure through which kinship futures are assembled. Rather than treating cross-border IVF as merely reactive, I situate it within an intra-Asian reproductive geography where legality, technology, and intimacy are co-produced. By foregrounding the China–Cambodia reproductive corridor, the study highlights how Asia’s peripheries generate alternative reproductive modernities through circulation, improvisation, and collective knowledge.

Keywords: queer family-making; cross-border IVF; reproductive mobility; feminist STS; East Asia; kinship; reproductive governance.