Table Of ContentIntroduction
the questionnaire seemed to go on forever. Renee looked
around at the other patients who had come to San Mateo Fertility Associ-
ates and wondered who they were. Was she the only lesbian here? Her
friends Jan and Marilyn had told her that lots of lesbians used the doctors at
this clinic. Renee and her partner had spent the last month going through
the donor catalog and had arranged to have three vials of sperm shipped to
this o≈ce. Renee refocused on the form: she knew the date of her last
menstrual cycle, but was it diabetes that had killed her uncle? As she waited,
she tried to focus on the baby she was so eager to conceive.
Renee is a lesbian in the Bay Area of San Francisco, California. Hers is the
story of a significant cultural group, one with its own fascinating history,
assumptions, mores, ethics, practices: she is part of a large population of
lesbians who are bearing and/or raising children. Lesbian identifications
have to some extent shifted, one is told, from flannel and softball to strollers
and day care. In the United States an estimated 1.5 to 5 million lesbian
mothers reside with their children (Hequembourg and Farrell 1999).
Despite these numbers, the research literature is relatively silent on how
lesbians (or gay men) go about reproducing and forming families. How do
lesbian women negotiate their paths to motherhood? How do they concep-
tualize family? How do they go about conceiving children? What kinds of
medical assistance do they seek? What other routes do they take to building
a family? As K. R. Allen and D. H. Demo noted, ‘‘Where these families have
been studied, they have been problematized and their diversity has been
overlooked’’ (1995, 11). While researchers have begun to fill this gap, much
more remains to be known, especially in the realm of ‘‘chosen families.’’
Renee’s story is about cultural change, about the ways that feminism in
general, and lesbian feminism in particular, has influenced the contempo-
rary culture(s) of lesbian lives; once geared to resist dominant culture,
lesbian feminism now appears to embrace parenthood and all the tropes of
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2 introduction
normalcy that accompany it. But Renee’s story is also about historic social
change: the separation of reproduction from heterosexual intercourse; the
medicalization and demedicalization of homosexuality; the emergence of
gay and lesbian social identities; and the normalization of fertility services
that lend a helping hand to all women seeking pregnancies. Finally, hers is a
story about the evolving relationship between Americans and biomedical
interventions and technologies. Biomedical sciences and their medical ap-
plications no longer focus exclusively on the treatment and cure of pathol-
ogy in the form of illness, but increasingly on the amelioration of life di≈-
culties through transformations of one’s self. While Renee and the other
lesbians featured in this book largely accept biomedical assistance on their
paths to pregnancy, they are also strategic in how they negotiate the process,
at once resisting and accepting medical ideas, techniques, and services. Re-
nee’s story—and lesbian insemination in general—is a fascinating lens
through which to view the changing relationships between Americans and
biomedicine.
After all, Renee does not need to be in that waiting room. She is not
infertile according to the medical classification. Her problem, if one chooses
to call it that, is social. She needs a substance that is by no means scarce. And
the procedure of vaginal insemination is uncomplicated, requiring the sim-
plest of technologies, which Renee can learn about from friends, the Inter-
net, and other media resources.
Renee has grown up in America after and with Our Bodies, Ourselves, that
is, in an era when empowerment in the realm of women’s health issues was a
core tenet of feminism in general and lesbian feminism in particular. Yet,
despite the success of women’s health movements, Renee is filling out the
new-patient forms at the San Mateo Fertility Associates, a medical group of
‘‘fertility specialists’’ that o√ers comprehensive diagnosis and treatment of
infertility and reproductive endocrinology disorders. In other realms of
medicine and healthcare, one might suspect that advertising influenced
Renee, but society is not yet at the point where reassuring tv doctors say,
‘‘Ask your doctor about lesbian insemination.’’ Perhaps Renee has been
influenced by the wave of self-help literatures that are written as personal
narratives of empowerment, yet advocate expert services to overcome per-
sonal obstacles. Or perhaps she is following the advice of friends or her
primary-care physician or gynecologist.
So what has brought Renee to seek specialist services? How do these
services interact with her sense of who she is and her goal of pregnancy? And
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introduction 3
how does she benefit? Citing theory, research, and ethnographic material,
Queering Reproduction explores these questions in the context of both medi-
cal and social trends. It describes the medical therapies and social move-
ments that have led Renee and many others to turn to specialists. It chroni-
cles the changes in medical knowledge, feminism(s) and women’s health
movements, healthcare services economies, and political ideologies that
have influenced the options and actions of women choosing motherhood
outside the bounds of heterosexual relationships. In particular, it shows
how advances in assisted reproduction have ‘‘biomedicalized’’ a relatively
simple process. It shows how, by gaining access to these interventions,
lesbians have destabilized the dichotomy between heterosexual and homo-
sexual experience and the institution of the family, the grounds upon which
dichotomous gender is reinforced and maintained.
In the process, this book explores many of the cultural forces and patterns
that shape and are shaped by Americans’ evolving ideas, behaviors, and life
journeys. At one time, Renee’s story might have seemed unusual, but today
her story is becoming routine for many with access to medical services and
the capital to negotiate all that these services o√er. Furthermore, when one
looks deeply at the contours of her actions and the forces that shape them,
one finds many of the same immense, interrelated forces that influence so
many other aspects of American life.
Renee’s Story and American Life in the New Century
Renee’s story shares many qualities with those related to me by the other
thirty-five lesbians I interviewed for this book. First, her story reflects a
heightened concern with security and uses the rhetoric of risk management
that has saturated public discourse. There are several kinds of risks managed
by the lesbians I interviewed: reducing risk of disease transmission with the
promise of technoscientific advances in sperm testing, washing, and stor-
age; reducing risk of reduced social dominance by selecting sperm with the
‘‘right’’ genetic and social characteristics; and reducing risk of unstable pa-
rental rights by accessing and creating legal documentation stating inten-
tional parenthood and by following state legislation declaring and defining
parental status.
Second, Renee’s story echoes current health care discourses which em-
phasize not only illness, treatment, and cure but also health, enhancement,
and personal responsibility and fulfillment.∞ Similarly, the women inter-
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4 introduction
viewed were knowledgeable about medical issues and their own bodies;
they were enterprising in the ways they gathered resources, initiated health
care actions, and responded to new information; they were pragmatic in the
ways they engaged their bodies and selves with medical, legal, and cultural
worlds; and they were calculating in their attempts to maximize benefits to
themselves and their children. These characteristics were clear in the ways
women decided to become parents, sought donors, and selected anony-
mous sperm. As women select sperm donors, for example, they are encour-
aged to consider enhancing the next generation by reducing both the risk of
potential illnesses and that of perceived cultural liabilities such as short
stature, acne, academic weakness, lack of athleticism, lack of musical talent,
or even being black or Asian.
Third, Renee’s story speaks to a consumer society marked by ideals of
ownership, presumed individual choice, and consumption as means to
fulfill one’s desires, identities, and life-goals. Consumption infuses all as-
pects of our lives, including our reproductive lives. Healthcare has extended
in ways that emphasize consumer processes of pleasure and transformation:
there is no choice but to exercise choice. Healthcare encompasses any and
all issues concerning health and lifestyle with a goal of meeting assumed
market demands. The lesbians interviewed describe interactions that are
pragmatic negotiations taken as they reach toward an end goal/desire:
to become pregnant and attain motherhood. For many lesbians, buying
sperm—and all that sperm embodies—becomes a route not only to achiev-
ing parenthood, but also to realizing their imagined senses of self and their
hope for the future.≤
Fourth, Renee’s story reflects anxieties about social connection and be-
longing in the age of ‘‘bowling alone’’—a trend toward less civic engage-
ment and more isolated (often electronic) activity both at home and in the
workplace (Putnam 2000)—and in a culture in which healthcare services
facilitate lesbians’ reproduction while simultaneously legally and politically
contesting their right to exist. In this context, women like Renee are seeking
to redefine and create family in ways that render them legible as full partici-
pants in the United States and in ways that might be used to gain legitimacy
in a largely heterosexist culture. In doing so, the boundaries between family
and community are blurred as the field of procreators extends beyond tradi-
tional mothers and fathers.
Fifth, the story reflects a culture that places immense value on technosci-
entific progress, measured by the continual introduction and professional
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introduction 5
oversight of new technologies that promise to be more advanced, success-
ful, and e≈cient (and, yes, more expensive!). Yet the implications of adopt-
ing such technologies are consequential for older technologies, as many
become obsolete; for medical practices, as newer technologies are built into
standard protocols; and for the cost of delivering and receiving healthcare
services.
Finally, Renee’s story illuminates the ways in which people interact with
the world around them and make meaning out of those interactions. It
shows that the everyday behavior of ordinary people is not calibrated either
to follow or to subvert American ideals or the ideals that animate social
movements (e.g., feminism) or organizational discourses (e.g., fertility
medicine). Rather, individuals act in ways that seem likely to achieve their
most deeply held goals and dreams. Their actions, as well as the meanings
that shape them, reflect strategic and intentional navigations of the enabling
and constraining stratifications of society.
While the immediate goals of lesbian reproductive practices are parent-
hood and the formation of families, they are also part of a politics of seeking
recognition and belonging. I use the term queering reproduction to draw
attention to processes by which lesbian reproductive practices simultane-
ously alter and maintain dominant assumptions and institutions. I argue
that while lesbians and other nonheterosexual actors and groups variously
push and pull their way into normativity, doing so does not solidify the
normal, but instead makes its borders far more porous and opaque, thereby
recasting the meaning of reproduction itself. The stability and assumed
naturalness of reproduction, and by extension the family form, has under-
gone substantial cultural reworking and is today finally queered. Lesbian
reproductive practices have contributed significantly to this destabilization.
Crafting New Family Forms
Nothing within biology demands the nuclear family. It is a cultural and
social system enforced by regulations and reinforced by legal discourse,
medical practices, and cultural norms. Yet in the United States it is the
nuclear family, bound by blood and legal arrangements of marriage and
adoption, that represents social order, idealized kinship, and legitimate rela-
tions. But, as Gayle Rubin (1975) argued, cultural rules are alterable rules.
For more than three decades, new family forms have proliferated in the
United States and many other countries. There are intentional single par-
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6 introduction
ents, blended (step-parent) families, interracial families, older-parent fam-
ilies, families headed by grandparents, and other variations. Such variety is
not the result of individual choices alone, but is shaped by historical social
forces and ideologies, which themselves do not reflect a single historical
moment, but represent expanding and contracting changes over time.
Nonetheless, these new family forms collectively destabilize the myth of the
U.S. (white) nuclear family (Coontz 1992; Stack 1974), show that families
comprise both immediate and extended kin (Stack 1974), and demonstrate
that families take a diversity of forms (Stacey 1990, 1996; Collins 1999).
Like other emergent family arrangements, gay and lesbian families have
only recently been the subject of social-science research. Most of the re-
search on lesbian families has emphasized the normalcy of these families, of
their relationships, and of their e√ects on children when they are compared
with the ‘‘normal’’ heterosexual nuclear family (see Stacey and Biblarz
2001). Social scientists have focused primarily on the increased visibility of
gay, lesbian, and queer communities and their participation in marriages,
domestic partnerships, and child-rearing (see for example Lewin 1993,
1998a; Carrington 1999). They have tended toward a general theorization
of gay, lesbian, and queer social (and family) life (Stacey and Biblarz 2001;
Stacey 2003). In contrast, Maureen Sullivan (2004) has eloquently argued
that dual-mother families are agents of social change undoing the gendered
social order. Families in which both parents are of the same sex undo gender
by refusing the relationality through which dichotomous gender is defined.
I examine lesbian processes of becoming parents and constructing fam-
ilies through the use of assisted-reproduction technologies. My focus lies on
the complex ways in which such technologies and the family structures they
engender both ‘‘trouble the normal’’ and reinforce the normalization of
traditional gender, sexuality, and family constructs. That is, I ask how, and
in what ways, do these practices construct new and old ways of knowing
about kinship, of becoming related, of being recognized as belonging to
social life, and of being and doing gender, sexuality, and family.
Complicating Identity Matters
Within studies of sexualities, assumptions of the unity of gay identities and
experiences were displaced in the 1980s and 1990s. Susan Krieger (1983),
Jennifer Terry (1991), Kath Weston (1991), Ellen Lewin (1993), and oth-
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introduction 7
ers conducted empirical research that destabilized homogeneous, universal
views of lesbians. Other scholars further di√erentiated lesbian ‘‘identity’’
and revealed how race and class dimensions participate in the multiple bases
of lesbian identities (see, for example, Kennedy and Davis 1993; Lewin
1996; Anzaldúa 1987). Judith Butler (1990, 1993) conceptualized the very
meaning of gender and sexuality as reiterative performances. As Virginia
Olesen (2000) pointed out, this was similar to earlier articulations by the
sociologists Erving Go√man (1959) and Candace West and Don Zimmer-
man (1987). By viewing sexual identities as processes, scholars displaced
the dualistic conceptions of gender and sexuality, prioritizing instead a
questioning of ‘‘the notion that sexual subjects share a sexual core (a prefer-
ence or orientation), that underneath the skin they have the same kind of
self’’ (Gamson 2000, 352).
The theoretical assumption that one could locate the ‘‘truth’’ of sexuality
and thus study it was eroded in favor of distinguishing the social and inter-
actional processes by which bodies and desires are given meaning and trans-
formed into social categories with political significance. This had long been
understood by qualitative researchers working in phenomenological, inter-
actionist, and other constructionist or labeling-theory traditions. What
these perspectives share is an understanding of sexuality as a powerful sys-
tem of regulation whose very categories (the dominant being heterosexual
and homosexual) function as regulatory ideals that produce, discipline, and
mark the bodies they govern and underpin all aspects of contemporary life.
In many ways, U.S. culture continues to assume heterosexuality and to
emphasize the channeling of sexual expressions into ‘‘legitimate’’ forms and
‘‘proper’’ settings, that is, within marriage and for the purposes of procrea-
tion. Heterosexism, with its assumptions of what constitutes normal and
deviant behaviors, desires, and lifestyles, continues to shape social-science
literature, social policy, and social ideas. Heteronormativity, the equation
of humanity with heterosexuality, operates as a hegemonic or taken-for-
granted assumption in U.S. society and is embedded into many of its social
institutions, including the family (Warner 1993). Heteronormativity oper-
ates as a system of power that variously a√ects, through privileging and
constraining, heterosexuals, gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered
persons, and everyone else.
Queering Reproduction is critical social theory that engages central ques-
tions facing groups of people placed in unequal systems of political, social,
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institutional, and historical contexts. Lesbians continue to be denied full
citizenship in U.S. society—they are denied the right to marry, to visitation
of their partners, to transfer property and assets on death, to immigrate to
the United States, and so on—and are faced with heterosexist and hetero-
normative logics of gender and sexuality that constrain their daily lives.
Lesbian identities and lesbian politics form a scope through which this
book looks. Yet the very concepts of ‘‘lesbian’’ and ‘‘lesbian process’’ are
problematic. Lesbians represent a multitude of understandings, practices,
and standpoints. Lesbian encompasses an experiential diversity that is ex-
tremely complex, that is shifting, situated, and intersectional with other axes
of di√erence such as race, gender, class, nationality, age, and geographic
place. Lesbian itself is a linguistic convenience, a placeholder that might seem
to suggest a fixed set of characteristics and meanings associated (in a world
that tends toward binary categories) with the concepts not male–not hetero-
sexual. The distinction between lesbian as a linguistic category productive of
power and as a group-based identity reflects the di√erence between ‘‘post’’
projects that emphasize the ways meanings are materially and discursively
produced based on linguistic and embodied repetitions—what Butler
(1990) terms ‘‘performativity’’ (see also West and Fenstermaker 1995; West
and Zimmerman 1987)—and meaning derived from one’s standpoint(s) in
social locations.≥
I use lesbian as both identity and linguistic construct. At times, I use the
term as a convenient marker to describe the women and experiences that are
the subject of this study (and the subject of a political group). This takes into
account the complexity of lesbian subjectivities. At other times, I grapple
with lesbian as a more dimensional concept that is given meaning through its
linguistic position in relation to heterosexuality, thus examining the ways
that binary categories work to construct and normalize the social order and
how these are ‘‘built in’’ to institutions, discourses, and practices. As a result,
I centralize how the very meaning of human reproduction is brought for-
ward, stabilized, and shaken through its tight coupling with the meanings of
heterosexuality, family, and nature.
While I have no choice but to complicate matters, power relations are
never as transparent and clear as one hopes to make them. At times, they are
invisible and embedded in the categorical names assigned to persons and the
social practices and institutions that those individuals encounter in everyday
life. Subjectivities are sociohistorical constructs, varied and distinctive in
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introduction 9
their specificities across time, place, and culture. They are categories of mean-
ing shaped by historical processes and systems of knowledge (see, for exam-
ple, Omi and Winant 1994 on racial formation). As a result, lesbian subjec-
tivities are ongoing social formations shaped by historical processes and
systems of knowledge, including the histories of ‘‘infertility’’ and ‘‘homosex-
uality’’ as medical classifications, the politicization of lesbian identities, shift-
ing gendered and social norms, and the rise of ‘‘Fertility Inc.’’∂
Yet at times I force a ‘‘unity’’ of the lesbian subject that does not exist; I do
so deliberately and thoughtfully as a project of critical social thought. The
term lesbian is both experienced materially on the bodies of human actors
and (re)produced in social (inter)actions. My goals are to reveal the ways
in which such subjectivities negotiate regulatory practices and to uncover
the ways in which heterosexuality continues to operate as a system of nor-
malization.
The influence of the French philosopher Michel Foucault is highly signifi-
cant to my argument. Foucault (1980a) argued that definitions in the realm
of sexuality and reproduction are cultural categories as well as systems of
regulation that change over time and place. Bodies and their subjectivities
and identifications are constituted in and through relations of power-
knowledge. The classifications of ‘‘infertility’’ and ‘‘homosexuality,’’ for ex-
ample, do not arise in nature, but are constituted by social and cultural
systems of meaning, codified in cultural rules that define what is normal and
abnormal. These discourses in turn shape subjects—and their identities—
through their labeling practices. Through the lens of Foucault’s thought,
one sees how declaring same-sex sexuality to be unnatural is a line-drawing
mechanism through which heterosexuality is naturalized.
Constituting Subjects, Making Biomedical Belonging
This book traces some of the historical processes and discourses that have
shaped and continue to shape lesbian subjectivities and the unfolding of
lesbian motherhood as a technological achievement. As part ‘‘archaeology
of knowledge’’ (Foucault 1972), this book attends to the ways various
knowledges produce new forms of subjects and practices. It emphasizes
those discourses in which lesbian reproductive practices have been embed-
ded and shaped over the past century, particularly in the last thirty years. As
such, it proceeds from the assumption that lesbian reproductive practices
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10 introduction
are situated in and shaped by various disciplinary discourses and power
relations.
I make use of the work of feminist poststructuralists (see especially Bal-
samo 1996; Sawicki 1991; Lock and Kaufert 1998) who draw heavily on
Foucault’s work to argue that subjectivities in general and gendered subjec-
tivities in particular are entangled within power relations. Foucault (1980a,
1980b) argues that modern power is enacted through regulations of the
population. Biopower is his term for an important shift from control over
death to the regulation of life processes such as birth, health, sex, and
mortality through methods of administrative calculation that, in e√ect, ar-
range life into standards of normalization. Biopower operates inside the
minds and bodies of populations, a√ecting how they think of themselves
and their social relations. That is, modern power makes selves, identities,
and ways of being.∑ Subjectivities, of course, are intimately connected with
the material, lived realities of gender, race, class, and other systems of priv-
ilege and inequality. As long as race, class, and gender stratifications are part
of social life, individuals are constrained in the ways in which they can shape
their bodies and identities.
Discourses of (medical) reproduction and sexuality co-produce lesbian
subjectivities and social forms of biomedical belonging. At the same time,
the ways women respond to power relations are varied, ranging ‘‘from
selective resistance to selective compliance,’’ as Margaret Lock and Patricia
Kaufert (1998) describe. Yet, while there may be choice and freedom, these
are neither universally applied nor meaningful; people’s imaginings of their
selves, and their abilities to create themselves anew, are limited. I make claims
of agency that account for the structural constraints of power relations.∏
What might appear to be emerging freedoms and choice o√ered by new
technological practices are concurrently forged within power relations, not
outside them. This idea marks much of feminist technoscience studies ap-
proaches: the meeting of bodies with technological and scientific practices
are part of culture and power; they do not exist outside of culture and
power. Bodies and their subjectivities are conceived, technologized, and
debated within politically and socially meaningful contexts by people who
face di√erent and multiple situations of power (Grosz 1993; Pitts 2005).
Although I examine lesbian practices of achieving pregnancy as ‘‘eyes
wide open’’ and intentional, I nonetheless argue that despite idealist visions,
structural constraints continue to be imposed. In an e√ort not to falsely
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