Doing Gender Justice: Queering Reproduction, Kin, and Care

How reproductive justice birth workers and queer parents build kinships and care relations that resist oppressive structures.

Anti-trans policies that restrict the boundaries of gender, reproduction, and family formation are a dangerous form of reproductive injustice with grave impacts on trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people. In Doing Gender Justice, Shui-yin Sharon Yam and Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz explore the intricate intersections of gender, race, and reproductive politics to illuminate how language and care practices can be reshaped to promote transformations at the structural level and in small everyday ways. Only by enacting justice-oriented forms of reproductive care and relations, Yam and Fixmer-Oraiz contend, could activists and health care workers challenge the dominant affective and ideological investments in binary gender and its complicity in white supremacy.

Set against a backdrop of relentless anti-trans legislation and attacks on bodily autonomy, this groundbreaking work shares the lived experiences and advocacy of queer and trans parents, gender-inclusive birth workers, and reproductive justice activists. Through rich storytelling and rigorous analysis of ethnographic data and cultural artifacts, the authors highlight innovative tactics that trans and nonbinary people use to dismantle oppressive systems and create a more expansive definition of family and kinship. Organized to examine how the dominant gender system influences discursive and cultural practices in multiple contexts, this book amplifies rhetorical inventions and tactics deployed by reproductive justice advocates, birth workers, and queer people who have created trans-inclusive spaces for reproduction and family-making.

Doing Gender Justice offers a compelling vision for a world where all forms of family and kinship are possible and where reproductive justice can be advanced in a deeply intersectional and coalitional way.

Shui-yin Sharon Yam is an associate professor of writing, rhetoric, and digital studies and a faculty affiliate of gender and women's studies and the Center for Equality and Social Justice at the University of Kentucky. Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz is the F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa.