Precarious Labourers of Love
Precarious Labourers of Love
Queer kinship, reproductive labour and biopolitics1
This chapter explores how different forms of reproductive labour create different precarities within LGBTQ parenting and kin-making in contemporary Sweden. It especially considers the precarisation of biological labour in a setting where intimate labour is the foundation for kin-making and where the necessary making, gestating and breastfeeding of a child is downplayed in relation to parenthood status. Drawing on ethnographic research, the chapter also illuminates how ‘biology’ produces strong feelings, even in a kinship structure that departs from the notion of intent and intimate labour as equally shared matters. Framing queer reproduction as both a biopolitical question and a question of gender labour the chapter then discusses how gendered and racialised ideas of parenthood and kinship are reproduced and reworked in imaginaries of LGBTQ parenthood. Contributing to critical whiteness studies, it argues that the (queer) nation is repeatedly recreated as white while whiteness remains invisible to those who inhabit it.
Keywords: biological labour, intimate labour, gender labour, LGBTQ reproduction, biopolitics, race and gender
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