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  • Of Lesbians and Technosperm
  • Laura Briggs (bio)
Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience. Laura Mamo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. xi + 304 pp.

In Queering Reproduction, Laura Mamo invites us to think about the place where “sex with reproduction meets reproduction without sex” (23) in lesbian biotechnological reproduction — donor insemination and IVF. It’s a set of questions that, for better or worse, has a huge influence on lesbian life and has interestingly different histories for lesbians and gay men. For both these reasons this is an important book. Mamo steers a course between two compelling earlier arguments — Kath Weston’s, that in their chosenness, queer families are rewriting the script of kinship, and Ellen Lewin’s, that lesbians, in becoming mothers, become more fully women — normalized and mainstreamed.1 Mamo enters the fray by saying, well, both: lesbian bioreproduction is a hybrid social process, one that both queers the family and draws lesbians into alliance with the heteronormative, state- sanctioned nuclear family.

The book begins with a wonderfully textured recent history of lesbian reproduction beginning with the decidedly low-tech, inexpensive models of the 1970s and 1980s: turkey basters and a male friend willing to jerk off in your bathroom. Knowledge of how to get pregnant without sex was passed along in the workshops and informal networks of the women’s health movement. Fast-forward thirty years, and we find lesbians paying astonishing amounts of money for frozen sperm samples, taking hormones, and visiting the offices of fertility specialists. The Oakland Feminist Health Center is now the Sperm Bank of California.

The heart of the book is its fascinating interviews with lesbians attempting pregnancy. We hear individuals reflecting on their negotiations with their partners (or deciding to go it alone), going to therapy (for self-actualization), and maximizing their financial well-being. They reflect on decision points — moving “up” the interventionist ladder from home to doctor’s office, from donor insemination to IVF, from candles and romance to technoscientific rationality. They discuss the [End Page 335] decision to quit or to do things (like hormones) they thought they’d never do. Some chose donors from among their own circles and friends of friends; others used sperm banks. In the transition from doing it ourselves to high-tech methods, Mamo argues, we got caught up in a matrix that includes genetic determinism, medicine, capitalism, insurance coverage, and heteronormativity.

Why the change from low-tech to technosperm? The fact that sperm banks opened their doors to lesbians was a big factor, as was the HIV/AIDS epidemic (a problem that, Mamo points out, reprotech in the United States could mitigate but does not: European labs are washing sperm to remove HIV, U.S. labs are not). But the thirty-six lesbians whom Mamo interviewed mostly gave a single answer to the question of why high-tech: unequivocal legal rights to their children. A number of bad court decisions have found donors to be legal fathers, even granting donors’ parents (“grandparents”) more legal standing than lesbian partners. It’s too bad that Mamo didn’t follow her informants down this road. Granted, it would have changed the book — from one about biomedicine to one about family law — but her informants persuaded me that this is the real story about how reprotech constitutes lesbians as activists, not soccer moms, or maybe both. If lesbians in the 1970s and 1980s were guerrilla fertility doctors, Mamo’s twenty-first-century lesbians are guerrilla lawyers, passing around photocopies of donor agreements, expounding the legal benefits of sperm banks (donors don’t have parental rights), citing legal cases. One couple she interviewed even tailored their reproductive strategies to make themselves a test case for the Center for Lesbian Rights, using one partner’s egg and the other partner’s uterus, to try to get both of them on the birth certificate.

By failing to think rigorously about law, the book gets in trouble. Mamo writes things like, “Because gay and lesbians have never been able to marry legally, their relationships are outside the scope of family law” (113), even as she notes Massachusetts’s gay marriage statute three pages later. She writes, “Second...

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