Book Review | Making Gaybies: Queer Reproduction and Multiracial Feeling, by Jaya Keaney (Duke University Press, 2023)
University of Southern California
kedizhou@usc.edu
I started reading Making Gaybies in July 2024, during a turbulent time in American politics marked by Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race and Kamala Harris making headlines with her commitment to restoring Roe v. Wade, especially in light of recent Republican efforts to reject IVF bills that aimed to protect access to fertility treatments and make them more affordable, while also regulating IVF by framing embryos as human lives. In the US context where I teach and research, discourse around reproductive rights has been more polarized than ever. Against this backdrop, Making Gaybies becomes particularly intriguing as it unpacks a different yet equally important side of the story. While in the United States, the national conversation often centers on reproductive choice in conventional terms, Jaya Keaney’s focus on queer family-making shifts away from discourses about “choice” to the deliberate racial construction of chosen families, where kinship is as much about intentional bonds as it is about biological connections.
Making Gaybies explores the process of queer family formation in Australia—particularly the decisions that prospective queer parents make regarding donor conception and surrogacy, choices that reflect their own racial and cultural identities. Keaney draws on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s method of “studying athwart” (26) or uncovering and engaging with the less visible, intimate, or oblique aspects of relationships and identities. “Athwart” emphasizes the fluidity and turbulence of human interaction, often overlooked in traditional academic analyses but central to Keaney’s interviews with queer parents. This method suits Keaney’s research on race and queerness within queer family-making, wherein such identities do not compose static categories but spark intercorporeal fields that shape and are shaped by “embodiment attachment, and subjectivity” (26). Keaney’s primary object of analysis is personal narratives about family-making experiences, revealing the incredible depth of consideration queer parents give to the racial selection of their future children via reproductive technologies such as IVF and surrogacy in a society grappling with evolving legal and social acceptance of queer identities. In this context, “queer” and “multiracial” are “co-constituting” (6). Keaney argues that reproductive technologies and their associated cultural transformations are cultivating “a multiracial imaginary of queer kinship” (4). Queer family-building navigates a prism of multiraciality, where racial lines become “malleable through daily practices and intimate attachments” (4). Keaney articulates how race is “a technology of intimacy” (173), fostering multiracial families through the figure of the mixed-race child. Evoking Australia’s celebrated multiculturalism, racial mixedness can often serve as a form of queer capital, at times “even more valued than whiteness itself” (18). As Keaney points out, the pursuit of this multiracial queer kinship faces constraints associated with the commodification of reproductive materials, such as financial costs and access to suitable donors. They can substantially limit the possibilities for queer family formation and obscure the underlying whiteness and class privilege at play in reproductive processes that only favor those who can afford to choose.
Making Gaybies offers a critical contribution to our understanding of reproductive technologies and their uses by queer communities by revealing their inherently racialized or racializing nature. Keaney’s work is particularly notable for the integration of a historical lens contextualizing reproductive technologies within Australia’s unique settler colonial landscape, as explored in Chapter 2. While multiracialism and the legacy of authentic Indigeneity have profoundly shaped contemporary Australian society, the nation has remained deeply connected to global notions of whiteness and eugenic reproductive histories, given its cultural affiliation with the West since colonization. This historical backdrop informs queer parents’ racial decisions, which are not arbitrary or isolated choices but dovetail into what society has long considered an ideal, desirable race—genetically, visually, and socially. Keaney demonstrates that race operates as a malleable technology of intimate attachment, “assembled differently in different reproductive arrangements” (86). Choices surrounding race and reproduction are as much about forming familial bonds and personal identities as they are about navigating sociohistorical landscapes imbued with racial biases and constructs. Nevertheless, these intimate choices are deeply personal and emotionally charged, as discussed in Chapter 3. The process of selecting donors, particularly within the profit-driven infrastructure of the commercial fertility industry, involves complex feelings and massive emotional labor. This process extends beyond the clinical setting into broader societal and familial contexts after the child is born, where racial likeness is continuously cultivated “through family stories and practices that imbue appearance and ancestry with meaning” (85). The act of choosing a donor is not just a medical decision but an affective one. Queer parents find themselves caught between their internal desires to create a family that reflects their identities and values and the external pressures to conform to societal norms that usually fail to recognize the fluidity and diversity of family structures. As Keaney observes, the discourses of choice often oversaturate queer reproduction, yet these narratives fail to “reflect reproductive realities” (107). Race is not merely enacted at the moment of choosing a donor; it is a “lived substance through which intimate attachment is formed” (108), deeply ingrained within the family structure and across generations.
In Chapter 4, Keaney draws attention to “the routine disappearance of gestational labor in queer reproductive narratives” (113). This erasure minimizes the role of gestational surrogates, particularly in terms of their racial and ethnic backgrounds, which many dismiss as irrelevant to the child’s racial identity. Unlike the meticulous selection processes for choosing sperm and egg donors—where racial likeness is frequently a critical factor—queer reproductive imaginaries often render gestational labor invisible, reflecting a broader cultural narrative that views the womb as merely a neutral container. Keaney challenges this notion by highlighting “the porosity of the womb” (127) within feminist politics, where blood, nutrients, and other shared substances are exchanged, directly influencing the biological development of the fetus. She, therefore, turns to the fundamental question of where racial inheritance occurs biologically, proposing that racial identity does not remain fixed or confined solely to genetic materials. Instead, the gestational environment itself can contribute to the racialization of the child—research in epigenetics and microbiomics shows that a child’s gene expression and health outcomes are shaped substantially in utero. The surrogate’s embodied experiences, social context, and biopolitical environment may have a lasting impact on the fetus, making the surrogate’s role far more significant than traditionally acknowledged.
Just as Chapter 4 redefines kinship by including gestational labor, the final chapter exposes how race and racism are increasingly obscured in queer families’ narratives, often under the universalizing rhetoric of love. This “love makes a family” discourse, Keaney argues, is a political tool legitimizing queer families, particularly in the fight for equal rights. However, the narrative that positions love as a transcendent, apolitical force capable of overcoming racial disparities risks glossing over the real, lived experiences of those who are racialized. By focusing exclusively on love as the foundation of kinship, queer family discourses can depoliticize race, stripping it of its social and historical significance, leading to what Keaney describes as “colorblind forms of racism” (156). Her text asserts that while love can be a unifying force, it can simultaneously function as a mechanism of erasure, particularly in multiracial queer families, where people often minimize or celebrate racial differences superficially. This colorblind approach can inadvertently reproduce the same racial hierarchies and exclusions that queer families seek to resist.
So how can we reimagine a more deeply felt and embodied form of love to arrange queer kinship and race differently? Keaney answers with a powerful manifesto. As she writes, “A robust queer love politics can foster antiracism, if it embodies at heart a willingness to be undone by differences of many kinds, as they collide in the intimate encounter of parenting and all our other kinships” (180). As I conclude my reading of the book, I am struck by how profoundly her words resonate with the reproductive challenges we face in the US. Making Gaybies goes beyond conventional discussions of reproductive choice, particularly those centered on heteronormative and binary understandings of family. Keaney’s vision of love—one that is willing to be vulnerable, to be “undone” by difference—is precisely the kind of transformative thinking that might best serve the weighty issues around reproductive choice and justice in my own context of research. She challenges us to rethink our assumptions about how we approach queer kinship, love, and care, to recognize the interconnectedness of our lives, and to embrace complexity rather than shy away from it. In a society increasingly polarized around issues of reproductive rights, where the discourse often fails to address the full spectrum of human experiences, Making Gaybies provides not just a timely intervention but a necessary one. It not only expands an ongoing conversation about the struggle for racial, queer, and reproductive freedom but also offers a vision of family-making and caring that brings our very most intimate categories in loving critique.
Author Bio
Kedi Zhou is a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Her current research focuses on reproductive technologies, engaging with literature from feminist theories, science and technology studies, and cultural studies.