Conférence de Marcin Smietana, Univ. of Cambridge and Queen Mary Univ. of London, UK
This talk explores the intersections of queer/LGBTQ+ perspectives with those of Reproductive Justice. An overview of Reproductive Justice scholarship, substantiated by my ethnographic data, leads me to the proposal of Queer Reproductive Justice (QRJ). It urges us to look at the ways in which hierarchies of social class, race, gender, sexuality and geopolitical location structure queer reproduction. I draw on my book manuscript to provide ethnographic data from the UK and the US and explore the following questions: How do social class and the new phenomenon of spreadsheet fertility determine the thinkability of gay parenthood, and increasingly heterosexual parenthood too? How does race play out in the men’s thinking about their choice of egg donors? LGBTQ+ family making reveals logics that structure reproduction: it shows how having children becomes thinkable, how it is subject to economics, how it is racialised, and how it becomes politicised as a community claim.
Marcin Smietana is an Affiliated Lecturer in the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc) at the University of Cambridge, where he was a Senior Research Associate earlier. Currently he also holds the post of Postdoctoral Researcher at Queen Mary University of London’s Remaking Fertility initiative, and he is an Affiliated Researcher with AFIN-Barcelona research group at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His ethnographic research focuses on gay men who create families through surrogacy and adoption in the United Kingdom, United States, and Spain. He adopts perspectives from the sociology of reproduction, queer kinships, queer reproductive justice, as well as race and whiteness studies.