In Making Gaybies Jaya Keaney explores queer family making as a site of racialized intimacy. Drawing on interviews with queer families in Australia, Keaney traces the lived experiences of choice and constraint as these families seek to craft likeness with their future children and tell stories of chosen family made through love. Queer family building often involves multiracial and multicultural encounters, as intending parents take part in the global fertility industry. Keaney follows queer family making through reproductive technologies and highlights the confines of varied transnational reproductive markets and policies, and changing formations of race, gender, sexuality, and kinship. Whether sharing the story of white gay men choosing Indian and Thai egg donors to make their surrogate-born children's ethnicity visually distinct from their own or that of an Aboriginal lesbian and her white partner choosing a Cherokee donor from the United States to articulate a global Indigeneity, Keaney foregrounds the entwinement of reproduction, race, and affect. By focusing on queer family making, Keaney demonstrates how reproduction fosters a queer multiracial imaginary of kinship.
Industry Reviews
"In Making Gaybies Jaya Keaney offers an empirically and conceptually rich account of racialization in contemporary queer family making. Through insightful exploration of how lesbian and gay couples navigate choice and constraint in their paths to parenthood in contemporary multicultural Australia, Making Gaybies makes vital contributions to transnational scholarly conversations in feminist science studies, queer studies, and critical race studies. A highly engaging book written with great candor and care, it deserves a wide readership." -- Anne Pollock, author of * Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States *
"This astonishing book brilliantly reconfigures how we understand race, reproduction, and desire by investigating queer kinship as a terrain of feeling and the intimate bonds forged in the name of family as a site of radical transformation. Jaya Keaney's book is an instant classic-as beautifully written as it is forcefully and sensitively argued." -- Sarah Franklin, author of * Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception *
"Making Gaybies will be of interest to a wide range of readers, spanning from those who are working in the field of LGBTQ+studies, social studies of reproduction, and gender studies to race and identity studies. Making Gaybies raises important questions around queerness, heteronormativity, kinship, an racism, from my understanding, by telling the readers how multiple facets of 'choices' both contribute to the resistance of normalcy as well as to the reproduction of existing norms in society. I also believe that Making Gaybies comes in handy for people who work in fertility clinics and LGBTQ+organizations to understand more about queer intended parents' feelings, concerns, and decision-making in their reproductive journeys." -- Jung Chen * LGBTQ+ Family *
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