ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses in particular on Taiwan. It provides a much-needed exploration of how Taiwanese lesbians negotiate their exclusion by legislation and social prejudice from and gain access to ARTs. Before the legislation of the Artificial Reproduction Act in 2006, physicians could decide the “suitable” users of ARTs in clinical settings. The chapter suggests taking one important contextual factor into consideration when examining lesbians’ appropriation of ARTs: the strictness of legislation and regulation. The self-insemination practices used by lesbians in the United States and the UK in the 1970s are often praised as a successful example of demedicalization and lesbian empowerment, especially because lesbians were denied access to ARTs in the United States due to the fundamental prejudices and exclusionary policies of the medical community. According to P. R. Grzanka, one of the cruxes of queering reproduction is the decoupling of heterosexuality from reproduction.