Blood Politics: Australian Nurses, HIV and the Battle for Rights on the Wards

Queerness is increasingly entangled with the fertility industry, signaled by an emerging discourse of queer reproductive citizenship. The introduction positions contemporary queer family making as a rich site from which to explore cultural understandings of race, sexuality, and relatedness. Foregoing a critical impulse to scrutinize queer practices by degrees of normativity, affective interview methods are used here to explore the intimate textures of how queer people understand and enact reproduction and racialized belonging in their everyday lives. The introduction argues that race operates as a technology of intimacy, with a foundational but underdetermining relationship to heteronormative kinship.

Introduction

2023

Assembling Queer Fertility

2023

Chapter 1 explores the reproductive options that are available to queer people in Australia who want to conceive children. While queer people can now formally access Australian fertility clinics due to liberalizing laws and the disease entity of “social infertility,” a range of barriers remain, such as ongoing de facto discrimination, high costs, and donor gamete shortages. Tracing these complexities, this chapter examines how Australia's stringent governance approach to assisted reproduction, influenced by the country's settler coloniality, delimits reproductive options for queer people.

Making Do

2023

Chapter 2 explores how everyday experiences of queer family making challenge a prevailing discourse of reproductive choice that is central to the global fertility industry. In practice, queer family making in Australia is characterized by compromise, creativity, and translational work. Many prospective parents travel overseas or go online to source gamete donors or to organize surrogacy arrangements that are not available within Australia. Others find themselves conceiving children in reproductive arrangements very different from what they had originally intended. This chapter theorizes queer reproduction in Australia as a practice of “making do.” “Making do” is a distinctly settler colonial iteration of globalized reproduction, where a restricted fertility industry and state multiculturalism together propel intending parents into multiracial reproductive arrangements.