257 - Special Session. Biogenetics, New Reproductive Technologies and the Creation of New Kinship

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Abstract

This session features scholars from various fields who are rethinking the meaning of kinship formed as a by-product of new reproductive technologies. Although the medical profession treats the exchange of gametes as impersonal, the recipients describe interconnections.  These interconnections have no name; some have uncertain legal status; and each could be transnational.  These relationships occur outside traditional boundaries of family; they exist among heterosexual and same-sex parents, both partnered and single.  They also bring to the forefront several different types of inequalities: those among families within a single country and across borders, as well as those among individuals in a single family constellation.

Sub Unit

• Special Sessions

Session Organizers

• Rosanna Hertz, Wellesley College

• Margaret K. Nelson, Middlebury College

Individual Presentations

• New Kinship Studies: An Anthropologist's Perspective - Susan McKinnon, University of Virginia

• The Uncertain Legal Basis for the New Kinship - Naomi Cahn, George Washington University

• Queer Intimacies and Structural Inequalities: New Directions in Stratified Reproduction - Laura Mamo, San Francisco State University

• Creation, Disruption, Denial, and Disclosure of Kinship in the Era of the New Repro-genetics - Charis Thompson, University of California-Berkeley