Emergent Biopolitics of Kinship, Gender and Reproduction: Trialogues from the South

TRIALOGUES is an interdisciplinary research project on emerging biopolitics of kinship, gender, and reproduction.

It focuses on path-breaking processes of legal innovation and concomitant political backlashes taking place in Brazil, Spain and Portugal in order to offer a singular comparative approach and to provide empirically informed theoretical insights that are relevant for ongoing debates in the intersections among gender and queer studies.Rooted in the field-defining works of moral and political philosophers, recent feminist scholarship and queer theorists have shown the need for interdisciplinary approaches to biopolitical studies.

Drawing in this dense intersection between social sciences and the humanities, the proposed research focuses in three countries pertaining to the European and the global south whose recent history is marked by the transition to democratic regimes in which profound transformations of the biopolitics of kinship, gender and reproduction took place over a rather brief period of time.

In this sense, the proposed research constitutes an original response to influent criticisms coming from sexuality studies urging a de-centering of the academic focus away from the global north in order to retain the very political impulse of field-defining concepts such as sexual and intimate citizenship.

More specifically, the project comprises one main strand to be conducted in Brazil –the country of primary focus– and 2 complementary strands in Spain and Portugal, where research will be enabled through secondments.

All three strands are aimed at producing empirically informed discussions of emerging biopolitics with an emphasis in the state logics (e.g. political institutions, social policies, legislative and judicial provisions) involved in the overlapping fields of kinship, gender and reproduction as they unfold through emerging regulations of non-monogamous relationships, gender identity and third-party assisted reproduction.