Love Makes a Family?

Abstract

Chapter 5 explores how queer parents construct race in practices of telling origin stories after a child is born. Many queer parents center their origin stories of donor conception or surrogacy on kinship forged through love, cementing parental ties even prior to a child's birth. This discourse draws on a decades-long queer vernacular of chosen family and has proved deeply effective in securing public legitimacy for queer parenting. However, in today's multiracial terrain of queer family building, a discourse of love can risk effacing race and racism by mobilizing a colorblind ethic, minimizing racial difference between parents and children. While scholarship on assisted reproduction has overwhelmingly focused on genetics and gestation, this chapter foregrounds love as another primary reproductive site through which relatedness is constructed, with racializing impact.