Between Life and Loss

Queer Grief and the Making of Kin

Abstract

Recent anthological research on assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) has destabilised historical notions of biology, family-making, and kinship, drawing science and technology into dialogue with queer theory, and particularly theories of queer kinship. When first introduced in the 1980s, ARTs prompted energetic discussion and debate regarding the ethical, social and legal implications of these technologies. Rich ethnographic research and theoretical critique have followed their introduction and development over the past four decades. However, there remains a palpable absence of studies on the intimacies of queer grief linked to ARTs and reproduction. Through an analysis of reproductive policies and laws in the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Africa, this article explores the impact of navigating predominantly (hetero)normative notions of kinship on the lives of queer individuals. Engaging with Spivak’s notion of juridical co-option, this analysis reveals that in order to access these technologies and spaces, queer-identified people are frequently required to perform the work of translation – bending heteronormative discourses and practices around ARTs into a shape that better fits their bodies and lives. This labour of translation is often unrecognised, yet it generates profound grief: the grief of not seeing one’s body and desires reflected in reproductive praxis.  By placing the burden of translation on queer individuals, and by relying on the pain of grief to sustain silence, the article suggests, reproductive policies and institutions continue to maintain and reproduce hegemonic heteronormativity. This dynamic, in turn, sustains the conditions that foster grief among queer people seeking to create kin in these contexts. This grief is peculiarly queer because it occupies a liminal space between the potential loss of self, entailed in navigating normative policies to create new selves, and the inherent risk of loss – and grief – involved in attempting to create new life.