"Not Too Different": Doing Resemblance, Enacting Boundaries in Sperm Donor Matching For/By Dutch Intended Parents

Scholars writing about selecting gamete donors have emphasized the importance of resemblance when choosing a donor. However, while they have thoroughly researched the question of why prospective parents consider resemblance important, how resemblance is done remains unexplored. Adopting a material semiotics approach and employing ethnographic research about sperm-donor matching for and by prospective parents in the Netherlands, I argue that resemblance matching entails enacting boundaries between people deemed "similar enough" and "too different." In relational practices of (not) doing kinship and doing resemblance, race is often enacted as a relevant difference.