ABSTRACT
This final chapter gathers the central findings of the book and provides concluding remarks about the way in which alternative families both challenge understandings of family and kinship and uphold traditional values relating to the nuclear family and racial superiority of whiteness. It revisits the term ‘chosen families’ (where biology and blood ties are downplayed) and argues that biology is now being re-inscribed as fundamentally important for kinship in LGBTQ+ donor families. Rather than interpreting lesbians’ alignments with nuclear families as assimilation into heteronormativity, this chapter sees the alignment as a surviving strategy for queers and LGBTQ+ who – despite recent legal recognition and access to reproduction, marriage and adoption – continue to experience discrimination and invisibility. Online media is seen as a two-edged phenomenon; on one hand, it provides access to donor sperm and allows donor families to find each other; on the other hand, the online commercialisation of sperm invites to both homonationalism and a new racialised eugenics of reproduction. Whereas most research into homosexuality and families compares these families with heterosexual families, this chapter underscores the diversity and ‘messiness’ of contemporary LGBTQ+ reproduction and reveals the multifaceted nature of these families in terms of gender and sexuality.
