Racializing Wombs

Abstract

Chapter 4 examines how prospective queer parents understand race and kinship at the site of gestation. As a form of embodiment mired in the feminine, gestation is routinely erased as a site of labor in both fertility industry discourse and queer reproductive narratives. This erasure is aided by a prevailing discourse of the womb as nonracializing, with race being transmitted instead by sperm and eggs. Despite this discourse, the narratives of pregnancy considered in this chapter frequently see gestation as entangled with racialized inheritance. Following these empirical threads, the chapter theorizes a gestational model of racial inheritance, which locates racialized kinship not as a discrete property of bodies, but as an intercorporeal and affective field.