Scandinavian Border Crossings: Race and Nation in Queer Assisted Reproduction

During the 2000s, Scandinavia has experienced a queer baby boom.

With new legislation providing lesbian couples and single women access to state-funded reproduction technology, combined with a growing international fertility market, including reproduction by gay men through surrogacy, the family landscape has changed drastically.

Queer assisted reproduction often crosses borders: Danish donor sperm is exported to clinics and patients Sweden and Norway, and Swedish and Norwegian people frequently travel to Denmark for fertility treatments and insemination.

Previous studies of queer reproduction have been carried out in national settings and centred on assisted reproductive technologies.

This qualitative and interdisciplinary project approaches and understands queer, as in non-heterosexual, reproduction as a cross-Scandinavian phenomenon.

Highlighting the central but often forgotten  biopolitical dimensions of assisted reproduction, the project focuses on the matching of gametes and intended parents.

Specifically, it investigates how ideas of race, nation and belonging come to the fore in this complex process and how understandings of Scandinavianness are articulated in border-crossing queer reproduction.

Finally, this multi-sited ethnographic project contends that online media have become increasingly intertwined with people’s lives and thus also become central to reproduction and kinship.

Not only can gametes and treatments be found and purchased online, online media is central to kinning, as people search for and locate "donor siblings", and thus create new forms of kinship across Scandinavia.

This theoretically driven project combines anthropological and feminist theories of kinship, with insights from critical race and whiteness studies and online media studies which will be developed in relation to original empirical research in order to develop new understandings of kinship and reproduction as shared Scandinavian phenomena in our time.