Queering reproduction in transnational bio-economies

In this commentary, I consider how scholars, practitioners and those seeking to have babies via assisted reproductive technology (ART) might be accountable to 21st century family-making in ways that attend to reproductive stratifications (the uneven support for people to conceive and raise children), and yet refuse to renaturalize or valorize certain forms of reproduction or reproduction by certain categories of persons [e.g. lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and gender queer (LGBTQ)/non-normative people]. I offer a queer reproductive justice (QRJ) framework that joins the shift in feminist politics from advocating safe, affordable and equitable access to ART to imagining other ways of doing and making kinship, care and children. QRJ suggests that kinship can be queered via choice and ART without succumbing to either a binary choice between queerness and normativity or without being unaccountable to oneself, others within systems of power, and the very systems that make our choices legible. QRJ neither marginalizes nor valorizes LGBTQ desires and practices for inclusion in reproductive biomedicine, and refuses to renaturalize or valorize certain forms of reproduction over others. Instead, QRJ posits queer kinship as a social formation that variously challenges and reinforces the values of neoliberal, future-oriented reproductivity and the global biological market economies in which these increasingly take shape. QRJ encourages kinship forms that include multiple possibilities for intimacies, belonging and making kin.