Tamara Lea Spira, associate professor of queer studies and American studies at Western Washington University, and a queer mother, here “traces the shifting meaning of queer family in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.” In doing so, she looks critically at how queer families have increasingly used “the nuclear biogenetic family” as a model and “heterosexual conception as the unmarked norm,” leading to a reproductive justice agenda rife with contradictions that (often unwittingly) upholds racism and colonialism.
Spira instead presents a view of queer reproductive justice rooted in the movement created by Black and queer-of-color feminists in the 1970s, which emphasized the “radical interdependency” of all people. The revolutionary vision of this movement, however, was transformed as LGBTQ families sought access to mainstream institutions like marriage. Spira offers “a critique of LGBTQ+ movements’ uncritical uptake of dominant ideologies of family” and instead urges a queer reproductive justice paradigm rooted in networks of care, decolonization, and feminist movements.
In building her argument, she looks at how LGBTQ people’s desire for family intersects with questions of who is worthy to be a parent and what children are worthy of care—questions tangled in racism and colonialism. When LGBTQ people were allowed to adopt, for example, it was as a means to provide “crisis services for a state that disavowed responsibility” for marginalized children (such as those abandoned at the U.S. border because of harsh immigration policies).
She also looks critically at the Donor Sibling Registry, which seeks to connect donor-conceived people with their genetic kin, for how it privileges gametes and DNA in defining family. She sees the DSR as positioning queer families (and others that have used assisted reproduction) as “deficient” and needing the connection with donors to repair their “brokenness.” Additionally, she shows how “Conversations about shared donors carry anxieties about legitimacy and belonging that reinforce hierarchies of race, value, and life, regardless of the racialization of the parties involved.” She still agrees that parents should be truthful with donor-conceived kids about their origins, however, and that there is nothing wrong with children wanting to know or connect with a donor and/or donor relatives—but she importantly asks us to be aware of the broader context within which this is happening.
Ultimately, Spira urges us to reject the binary choice of either “celebrating queer family building at any cost” or “valoriz[ing] the bionormative heteropatriarchal nuclear family as the only option,” and instead to build a queer reproductive justice movement around “communities of care” and “intergenerational reciprocity.”
The book offers many more arguments for rethinking the history of LGBTQ families, our current tasks, and our collective responsibilities to future generations. It is an academic read, to be sure, but should provide much food for thought not only to academics, but also to activists, policymakers, and others—not that there is always a line between the two. As Spira writes about the feminist poets of the 1970s, “It is important to consider the material role of writers, print culture, and writing in movement organizing.” This book might play a similar role today; whether one agrees with all of her arguments or not, many will appreciate the questions she raises, and her assertion, “To create a world worthy of one’s children is to commit to a multigenerational task. It is to insist on hope in the face of daunting conditions; there is no other choice.”
