ABSTRACT
In considering the geographies of relatedness, Catherine Nash (2005, 450) gives critical consideration to the “social organization of the ‘natural facts’ of sex and reproduction” and to the naturalization and geopolitical organization of nation-states via the family. Her analysis embraces transnational adoption schemes and gamete transportation for assisted reproduction, and the curtailment of immigration on the basis of arguments about ‘balancing’ ethnic mix. At the same time, Nash argues for more work by geographers on the effects of biotechnologies that “create new understandings of embodiment, subjectivity, sociality, the human and human genetic diversity and relatedness” (450). On the understanding that human reproduction is both primal and foundational, she seeks to demonstrate how geographies of relatedness foreground the links between the intimate and institutional, and subjectivity and governance.
