Your genetic country of origin going back 100 years: Race, nation and the biopolitics of matching in Scandinavian donor conception

How do we think critically about queer kinship and reproduction in a time when hard-won rights are increasingly under attack by illiberal populist and anti-gender movements? With a focus on welfare-state regulated access and recognition in Sweden, this paper aims to  consider queer family making through assisted reproduction as a scene of racialized intimacy  and homonationalist biopolitics. Through an intersectional approach and drawing on ethnographic research in fertility clinics and interviews with staff and parents, I explore how ideas of race and nation feature in talk about gamete donation and donor selection for queer and solo intended parents in Sweden and Denmark, and how in (queer) assisted reproduction, are understood gametes as carriers of racial, national, and cultural traits and the transnational fertility market where race is often operationalized as a consumer choice. By focusing on the regulation of (queer) assisted reproduction in Scandinavian welfare states, and in particular, the differing views of staff and parents around “matching”, this paper discusses the making of race and nation through queer reproduction in Scandinavia. In particular, it examines the role of familial stories in clinic assessments and how these sit alongside visual technologies of matching as a matter of colour. It concludes by discussing queer assisted reproduction as entangled in the biopolitics of reproducing race and nation rather than as evidence of progressive welfare state politics.

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Ulrika Dahl is Professor of Gender Studies at the Centre for Gender Research , Uppsala University, since 2018. Her current research concerns queer kinship, family and reproduction through intersectional, transnational and critical race perspectives. She also works on anti-gender movements and the conservative turn in feminism in Sweden and she teaches family/reproduction, methods, and intersectional feminist and queer theory on all levels.