5th desember 2024, 3PM-4PM (UTC+1) join via link: https://aarhusuniversity.zoom.us/j/61202584133

This paper presents a unique kinship model constituted by altruistic surrogacy arrangements in the UK. It draws on qualitative interviews with 30 families of gay men I carried out in 2020-2022 in the UK. The paper introduces ethnographic cases representing different kinds of non-heteronormative and queer kinships created through surrogacy in the UK, including the so-called traditional surrogacy arrangements. These kinships are supported by strong surrogacy communities that have existed in the UK for four decades now. However, they are also framed by surrogacy and IVF expense spreadsheets – and thus by social class structures. – The spreadsheets used by many intended parents underscore the complexity of fertility planning and deliberation involved in having children by gay men using surrogates. It is exacerbated by persistent heteronormativity of public funding for fertility treatments within the NHS public healthcare. However, the spreadsheets also act as condensed signifiers of an important form of fertility change, a shift toward deliberate, proactive and calculated approaches to achieving desired fertility goals, which increasingly characterise many heterosexual couples and singles as well. 

Marcin Smietana is a research fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and an affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge. He works at the intersection of the sociology and anthropology of reproduction as well as queer/LGBTQ+ studies. His research on queer kinships and LGBTQ+ families in the United Kingdom, United States and Spain has led him to research surrogacy and reproductive justice. As a result, he is currently working on gestational time assessment, abortion and childbirth care in the United Kingdom, as part of the ERC ‘PregDaT’ project at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.   

Marcin has worked as a research associate and senior research associate in the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc) at the University of Cambridge, a Marie Curie fellow at the University of California-Berkeley’s Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and a postdoc at Queen Mary University of London’s Remaking Fertility initiative, and he has been collaborating with the AFIN research group at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. This follows on from his PhD from the University of Barcelona, and his earlier undergraduate studies in sociology at the Jagiellonian University of Kraków in his native Poland.