Scandinavian Border Crossings: Race and Nation in Queer Assisted Reproduction

About the project

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.

These days, Danish donor sperm is exported to clinics and patients in Sweden and Norway, and Swedish and Norwegian people frequently travel to Denmark for fertility treatments and insemination.

A cross-Scandinavian phenomenon

While previous studies of queer reproduction have been carried out in national settings and centred on assisted reproductive technologies, our project approaches and understands queer reproduction as a cross-Scandinavian phenomenon that raises a lot of interesting questions about belonging, relatedness and nation-building. To that end, they point to the biopolitical dimensions of assisted reproduction and focuses on the matching of gametes and intended parents.

A collaborative and multi-sited ethnographic project

In this collaborative and multi-sited ethnographic project studies on how online media is intertwined in people’s lives and in particular in reproduction and kinship is also explored. Not only can gametes and treatments be found and purchased online, social and other online media are now central to kinning; people search for and locate "donor siblings", and thus create new forms of kinship across Scandinavia.

New understandings of kinship and reproduction

The project is theoretically driven and 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.