In this seminar, Jaya Keaney will discuss her new book, Making Gaybies: Queer Reproduction and Multiracial Feeling. In Making Gaybies Jaya Keaney explores queer family making as a site of racialized intimacy. Drawing on interviews with queer families in Australia, Keaney traces the lived experiences of choice and constraint as these families seek to craft likeness with their future children and tell stories of chosen family made through love. Queer family building often involves multiracial and multicultural encounters, as intending parents take part in the global fertility industry. Keaney follows queer family making through reproductive technologies and highlights the confines of varied transnational reproductive markets and policies as well as changing formations of race, gender, sexuality, and kinship. Whether sharing the story of white gay men choosing Indian and Thai egg donors to make their surrogate-born children’s ethnicities visually distinct from their own or that of an Aboriginal lesbian and her white partner choosing a Cherokee donor from the United States to articulate a global Indigeneity, Keaney foregrounds the entwinement of reproduction, race, and affect. By focusing on queer family making, Keaney demonstrates how reproduction fosters a queer multiracial imaginary of kinship.

Jaya Keaney is Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is a feminist technoscience studies scholar interested in reproduction, racism, and queer feminist biologies.

Our speaker will be presenting in-person at Deakin Downtown, but you can also join us via Zoom

Meeting ID: 824 9386 1227

Password: 85388244

Staff, HDRs and students are all welcome.

For any inquiries and in-person RSVPs, please contact David Giles d.giles@deakin.edu.au or Timothy Neale t.neale@deakin.edu.au