Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience

by Laura Mamo

Originally developed to help heterosexual couples, fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization and sperm donation have provided lesbians with new methods for achieving pregnancy during the past two decades. Queering Reproduction is an important sociological analysis of lesbians’ use of these medical fertility treatments. Drawing on in-depth interviews with lesbians who have been or are seeking to become pregnant, Laura Mamo describes how reproduction has become an intensely medicalized process for lesbians, who are transformed into fertility patients not (or not only) because of their physical conditions but because of their sexual identities. Mamo argues that this medicalization of reproduction has begun to shape queer subjectivities in both productive and troubling ways, destabilizing the assumed link between heterosexuality and parenthood while also reinforcing traditional, heteronormative ideals about motherhood and the imperative to reproduce. Mamo provides an overview of a shift within some lesbian communities from low-tech methods of self-insemination to a reliance on outside medical intervention and fertility treatments. Reflecting on the issues facing lesbians who become parents through assisted reproductive technologies, Mamo explores questions about the legal rights of co-parents, concerns about the genetic risks of choosing an anonymous sperm donor, and the ways decisions to become parents affect sexual and political identities. In doing so, she investigates how lesbians navigate the medical system with its requisite range of fertility treatments, diagnostic categories, and treatment trajectories. Combining moving narratives and insightful analysis, Queering Reproduction reveals how medical technology reconfigures social formations, individual subjectivity, and notions of kinship.

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT

320 pages, Paperback

First published August 13, 2007

Reviews

[Megan Osterbur]

While certainly interesting and informative, it is also limited and biased. The author conducted an in depth case study of current and prospective lesbian parents who were regularly identifiable via there engagement in some public forum for the process. A fair portion of the book consisted of recounting their stories but she did put them into a larger context via legal frameworks and general theories.
One of the biggest problems I have with this book is the incongruousness of the title with the content. I was disappointed that it did not address gay male parenthood except in the context of potential donors for lesbians. As a result it didn't even begin to address the additional levels of complication they face in pursuit of a surrogate, decisions about whether to have a gestational surrogate and an egg donor or have one woman serve as both, etc.