Queering Reproduction

Laura Mamo is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Affiliate Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Lesbian and Gay Studies at the University of Maryland.

“Queering Reproduction is the most comprehensive and theoretically rich account of lesbians’ reproductive practices to date. Laura Mamo shows how social movements, emotions, consumerism, and biomedical technologies collide with the search for belonging to produce brave new families. She documents how sex without reproduction and reproduction without sex lead to myriad unintended consequences that both queer and normalize. A terrific book.”-Arlene Stein, author of Shameless: Sexual Dissidence in American Culture “Mamo’s complex and multi-sited ethnography and her beautifully written and incisive analysis of the stories and accounts she finds there, will be of interest to scholars working within the fields of infertility and biomedicalisation, LGBTQ lives and politics, to students of ethnography and social science and to health practioners and clinicians working within reproductive medicine and health, as well as to those interested more broadly in thinking about the relationships between technologies, bodies and identities.” - Tracey Jensen (Feminist Review) “The book’s strength is its smart, rich, and textured understanding of the past and present of lesbian communities’ negotiations of reproduction, an account that will seem deeply familiar to some readers and not at all to others. This written account of a largely oral and memory-based narrative is a tremendous resource for students and anyone who has not been inside or in close proximity to urban lesbian communities since the mid-1980s in the United States.” - Laura Briggs (GLQ) “The research is meticulous and thorough and the interview data are sensitively handled, and beautifully contextualized from a range of sources. It is an enormously accessible text and the writing style is very engaging. It is also highly original in scope. . . . This book engages with debates about the politics of reproduction, feminist analysis of technoscience, and lesbian and queer identity politics. It does so in a rigorous, well-informed and engaging way, while drawing on a wealth of impressively constructed empirical data.” - Kate O'Riordan (Body & Society)

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 1Chapter 1. From Whence We Came: Sex without Reproduction Meets Reproduction without Sex 23Chapter 2. “Real Lesbians Don’t Have Kids” or Do They? Getting Ready for Lesbian Motherhood 58Chapter 3. Choosing a Donor: Gaining, Securing, and Seeking Legitimacy 86Chapter 4. Negotiating Conception: Lesbians’ Hybrid-Technology Practices 128Chapter 5. Going High-Tech: Infertility Expertise and Lesbian Reproductive Practices 157Chapter 6. Affinity Ties as Kinship Device 190Chapter 7. Imagining Futures of Belonging 224Notes 251Works Cited 273Index 295