In Making Gaybies Jaya Keaney explores queer family making as a site of racialized intimacy. Drawing on interviews with queer families in Australia, Keaney traces the lived experiences of choice and constraint as these families seek to craft likeness with their future children and tell stories of chosen family made through love. Queer family building often involves multiracial and multicultural encounters, as intending parents take part in the global fertility industry. Keaney follows queer family making through reproductive technologies and highlights the confines of varied transnational reproductive markets and policies, and changing formations of race, gender, sexuality, and kinship. Whether sharing the story of white gay men choosing Indian and Thai egg donors to make their surrogate-born children's ethnicity visually distinct from their own or that of an Aboriginal lesbian and her white partner choosing a Cherokee donor from the United States to articulate a global Indigeneity, Keaney foregrounds the entwinement of reproduction, race, and affect. By focusing on queer family making, Keaney demonstrates how reproduction fosters a queer multiracial imaginary of kinship.
Jaya Keaney is Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne.
Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Origin Stories 1 1. Assembling Queer Fertility 31 2. Making Do 45 3. Crafting Likeness 72 4. Racializing Wombs 110 5. Love Makes a Family? 141 Conclusion: Manifest Care 169 Notes 181 Bibliography 199 Index 219
"In Making Gaybies Jaya Keaney offers an empirically and conceptually rich account of racialization in contemporary queer family making. Through insightful exploration of how lesbian and gay couples navigate choice and constraint in their paths to parenthood in contemporary multicultural Australia, Making Gaybies makes vital contributions to transnational scholarly conversations in feminist science studies, queer studies, and critical race studies. A highly engaging book written with great candor and care, it deserves a wide readership." - Anne Pollock, author of (Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States) "This astonishing book brilliantly reconfigures how we understand race, reproduction, and desire by investigating queer kinship as a terrain of feeling and the intimate bonds forged in the name of family as a site of radical transformation. Jaya Keaney's book is an instant classic-as beautifully written as it is forcefully and sensitively argued." - Sarah Franklin, author of (Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception) "Making Gaybies will be of interest to a wide range of readers, spanning from those who are working in the field of LGBTQ+studies, social studies of reproduction, and gender studies to race and identity studies. Making Gaybies raises important questions around queerness, heteronormativity, kinship, an racism, from my understanding, by telling the readers how multiple facets of 'choices' both contribute to the resistance of normalcy as well as to the reproduction of existing norms in society. I also believe that Making Gaybies comes in handy for people who work in fertility clinics and LGBTQ+organizations to understand more about queer intended parents' feelings, concerns, and decision-making in their reproductive journeys." - Jung Chen (LGBTQ+ Family) "Keaney skilfully weaves together anecdotes, fieldwork glimpses, and conversations to paint a picture of the ways in which race literally operates at the heart of queer reproduction. As an engaged and nuanced critic, Keaney offers an exemplary way of accounting for the complexities of studying one's own community and the entangled relationships of ethnographic research." - Ulrika Dahl (Lambda Nordica) "Keaney's book is a powerful addition to the growing scholarship on reproductive markets. . . . Making Gaybies is a perfect fit for graduate seminars in health and society, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality. Beyond the classroom, Keaney's book deserves an enthusiastic and wide audience." - Brian Donovan (Ethnic and Racial Studies)
