Romancing the Sperm: Shifting Biopolitics and the Making of Modern Families by Diane Tober (review)

Romancing the Sperm: Shifting Biopolitics and the Making of Modern Families analyzes the multiple participants in and recipients of sperm donation in the San Francisco Bay Area. Diane Tober, a critical medical anthropologist, investigates how women make decisions about families without men, why men decide to donate sperm, and how sperm banks mediate between donors and recipients. Guided by feminist research principles, she interrogates how these women negotiate access to medical clinics, social acceptance, and legal recognition while creating families. This often involves managing relationships with donors, doctors, friends, and family. The center of Tober's inquiry is the sperm bank, where the different participants in the reproductive market are connected through the exchange of sperm. Although donors and recipients are often separated by time, space, and legal contracts, Tober is ultimately most interested in examining the connections between them. She situates her research at the intersections of critical theoretical approaches to the study of technology, sexuality, governance, and reproduction. Much of the analysis is closely tied to robust anthropological literatures on kinship, medicine, and reproduction.

The book draws on rigorous ethnographic research to examine how individuals make decisions about family in an era when technology facilitates possibilities for creating families beyond the traditional heteronormative, nuclear model. The initial phase of her research began in the early 1990s, and Tober conducted follow-up interviews two decades later. Tober started with two research questions: (1) how do sexuality, relationships, and fertility affect a women's identity, and (2) how do women without a male partner select a sperm donor? As the book progresses, Tober takes the reader through her various methodological decisions, showing how her inclusion of more groups, like sperm donors and employees at sperm banks, stemmed from evolving research questions. The benefit of this approach is that it holistically investigates all the participants connected to sperm banks, showing how donors' and prospective mothers' ideas about family are shaped by medical institutions and reproductive technologies.

But at its core, Tober's book is about "modern families," her carefully selected term for families who do not fit the heteronormative model. Some of her most compelling conceptual contributions address the creation of these modern families. For example, her concept of "grassroots eugenics" interrogates how "people choose donors according to their own idiosyncratic beliefs surrounding genetic and social value" (189). Tober uses the concept to investigate how her sample of mostly white women uses information about race and ethnicity to select a sperm donor. (Future research for scholars interested in genetics, gender, race, and reproduction could investigate this concept with more diverse participants.) Another is the idea of "molecular families," which refers to donor-conceived families that are "pulled together by some mysterious chemistry" and is a term taken from an interview with one of Tober's participants (179). This concept removes negative connotations of "test-tube babies," instead suggesting that donor-conceived families are small miracles.

What gives Tober's account unique insight into modern families is that it captures decades of social and academic change. This period allows Tober to reflect on how social transformations shaped family formation through sperm donation, including how the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) crisis pushed many single women and lesbians to connect with sperm donors through sperm banks rather than using known sperm donors, how technological advancements have changed who buys donor sperm, and how social and legal changes gave lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) parents more protections and thus altered sperm donation practices. In addition to these social changes, Tober's research also traversed an explosion of research on reproduction and shifting approaches to gender, sex, and sexuality. In some ways, the chapters offer the reader a chronological journey through the past thirty years of interdisciplinary scholarship on reproduction. Beginning with the decisions that single mothers and lesbian couples make when deciding to have children and where to obtain sperm, Tober investigates how these women navigate and negotiate...