The past few years, with renewed attacks on LGBTQ rights after previous gains, “have created more pressure than ever for queer people to marry, have children, and create public narratives of LGBTQ progress.” This means that “losses, challenges, and disruptions to stories of ‘successful’ LGBTQ family-making are often silenced, both personally and politically,” writes Christa Craven in this thoughtful volume.
Craven, a cultural and medical anthropologist at the College of Wooster, tries to break the silence by drawing on interviews with 54 queer people who experienced loss as gestational parents, non-gestational parents with gestational partners, or through adoption loss (when a child is reclaimed by their birth family before the adoption is finalized), as well as from her own experience with pregnancy loss. She observes that even for straight, cisgender people, reproductive loss is often hushed up in order to focus on “happy endings”; for queer people, the “deafening heteronormativity” of family-making literature creates a “‘double invisibility’ for queer family-making efforts that do not produce a ‘success story.’”
She disperses some of this invisibility by exploring the queer-specific nuances of how her subjects experienced grief, the support (or lack thereof) available to them, how they commemorated their losses and found resiliency, and the intersections of social class, race, and religion. Craven also makes a compelling argument for a communal response, which can help “combat the multiple cultural silences that surround reproductive loss, queer families, and queer ‘failure.’” Her book is a must-read for any queer person who has experienced reproductive loss or is supporting someone who has.
