Reproduction, kinship & family-making
My work on reproduction, kinship, and family-making extends reproductive justice principles beyond healthcare to questions of belonging, legitimacy, and possibilities for choice. Grounded in the right not have children, to have wanted children, and to parent under supportive conditions, this research examines how reproductive decisions are shaped by social norms, gendered expectations, and unequal power relations. Across studies on queer kinship, gay fatherhood, and voluntary childlessness, I explore whose families are recognised, whose choices are legitimised, and how people negotiate reproductive lives that fall outside dominant ideals.
Research Area
'Voluntary Childlessness' / Childfree Identities
My work on voluntary childlessness examines how people who choose not to have children make sense of their decisions in contexts shaped by strong pronatalist norms. Using qualitative and discursive approaches, this research explores how childfree identities are constructed, how stigma is navigated and resisted, and how ideas of choice, fulfilment, and responsibility are taken up and constrained.
Our novel cross-national study of childfree communities in India (Simi Shivakumar), Poland (Magda Mijas), and South Africa (Ingrid Lynch, Catriona Macleod) highlighted both the possibilities and limits of “choice” rhetoric in resisting stigma.
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More recent work, with Jacquie Wootton (my masters student), extends this focus to an overooked group, identified in my earlier study. Interviews with older voluntarily childfree women in Aotearoa New Zealand showing how these women negotiate ageing, belonging, and value in relation to pronatalist, gendered, and ageist norms.
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This work contributes to reproductive justice scholarship by centring the right not to have children and by critically examining how individualised narratives of choice can both enable and limit resistance to reproductive norms.
Project
Gay men’s parenthood choices: An exploratory study
We investigated how gay-identified men in South Africa make decisions about whether to become fathers, and how these choices are shaped by social norms, exclusion, and questions of belonging. Grounded in reproductive justice principles, the project centres the right to have—or not have—children and to form families under supportive conditions, focusing on planned same-gender families and experiences of reproductive citizenship. The findings have informed academic scholarship, policy, public debate, media analysis, and practical resources.
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Funding: Ford Foundation (Gender and Reproductive Justice Fund, 2014),
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Principal Investigator: Tracy Morison
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Associate Investigators: Prof Vasu Reddy and Dr Ingrid Lynch (Human Sciences Research Council)
Book
Queer Kinship
What makes kinship queer? This collection from leading and emerging thinkers in gender and sexualities interrogates the politics of belonging, shining a light on the outcasts, rebels, and pioneers. Queer Kinship brings together an array of thought-provoking perspectives on what it means to love and be loved, to ‘do family’ and to belong. The collection includes a number of different topic areas, disciplinary approaches, and theoretical lenses on familial relations, reproduction, and citizenship. The text amplifies the voices of those who are bending, breaking, and remaking the rules of being and belonging. Photo essays and artworks offer moving glimpses into the new life worlds being created in and among the ‘normal’ and the mundane.​
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Editors: Tracy Morison, Ingrid Lynch, & Vasu Reddy
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Chapters co-written by me:
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‘Living two lives’ and ‘blending in’: Reproductive citizenship and belonging in the parenthood narratives of gay men. (with Ingrid Lynch)
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Focus on ‘the `Family’? How South African Family Policy Fails Queer Families. (with Catriona Macleod, and Ingrid Lynch)
