Michael Nebeling Petersen

Becoming Gay Fathers through Transnational Commercial Surrogacy

Based on eight interviews with Danish gay male couples and one gay man, who had or were planning to become fathers through transnational commercial surrogacy, I examine the ways the men form family subjectivities between traditional kinship patterns and fundamentally new forms of kinship and family. Arguing that class, mobility, and privilege should also be understood as relational and negotiated positions, I show that gay men engaged in surrogacy must be understood as more flexible and differentiated. Second, I show how kinship as synonymous with biogenetic relatedness is supplemented by notions of kinship as devotion, individual will and determination, and reproductive desire in order to strengthen the men’s affinity to their children. Last, I examine how the men negotiate and work within the given structures of heteronormativity and Whiteness and rework notions of parenthood while at the same time reaffirming old hierarchizations of racialized and sexualized forms of procreation and families.Based on eight interviews with Danish gay male couples and one gay man, who had or were planning to become fathers through transnational commercial surrogacy, I examine the ways the men form family...

(Un)liveabilities: Homonationalism and transnational adoption

Rosa Morena tells a story about kinship in which a white homosexual Danish man adopts a child born to a black poor Brazilian woman. Using a theoretical framework of biopolitics and affective labour the article highlights how the male homosexual figure is being cast as heteronormative and white in order to become intelligible as a parent and the bearer of liveable kinship. The casting rests on the affective and reproductive labour of the birth mother who is portrayed as an unsuitable parent through a colonial discourse steeped in sexualized and racialized imagery. A specific distribution of affect fixates and relegates the birth mother to a state of living dead, and thus she becomes the bearer of an unliveable kinship.