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Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience, by Laura Marno. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. 304pp. $23.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822340782.
A lesbian baby boom has occurred in the U.S. over the last two and a half decades, facilitated by lesbians' access to various assisted reproductive technologies and services. This phenomenon is rendered particularly significant by its social context. Lesbians having babies intensify general cultural anxieties about new and emergent reproductive technologies, changing beliefs concerning gender and sexuality, and rapidly transforming family structures and meanings. Laura Mamo's book Queering Reproduction provides an indepth analysis of lesbians seeking pregnancy through alternative insemination, asking what this trend portends for lesbians, sexual minority cultures, and American culture as a whole.
A few major themes thread through Mamo's investigation. One is the relatively rapid shift from a do-it-yourself mentality emphasizing in-home, low-tech approaches to insemination to a highly medicalized approach featuring professional assistance early in the process. Another important theme is the way lesbians' pursuit of pregnancy outside the heterosexual nuclear family queers our understandings of reproduction and family. Mamo largely rejects the notion that lesbians' efforts to achieve pregnancy represent troubling assimilation to heterosexual normalcy, writing that "while lesbians and other nonheterosexual actors and groups variously push and pull their way into normativity, doing so does not solidify the normal, but instead makes its borders far more porous and opaque" (p. 5). A third major theme is the interplay between agency and structure in lesbians' choices and behaviors: lesbians' efforts to...