Becoming Gay Fathers Through Transnational Commercial Surrogacy

676859 JFIXXX10.1177/0192513X16676859Journal of Family IssuesNebeling Petersen research-article2016 Article Becoming Gay Fathers Through Transnational Commercial Surrogacy Journal of Family Issues 1–27 © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0192513X16676859 jfi.sagepub.com Michael Nebeling Petersen1 Abstract Based on eight interviews with Danish gay male couples and one gay man, who had or were planning to become fathers through transnational commercial surrogacy, I examine the ways the men form family subjectivities between traditional kinship patterns and fundamentally new forms of kinship and family. Arguing that class, mobility, and privilege should also be understood as relational and negotiated positions, I show that gay men engaged in surrogacy must be understood as more flexible and differentiated. Second, I show how kinship as synonymous with biogenetic relatedness is supplemented by notions of kinship as devotion, individual will and determination, and reproductive desire in order to strengthen the men’s affinity to their children. Last, I examine how the men negotiate and work within the given structures of heteronormativity and Whiteness and rework notions of parenthood while at the same time reaffirming old hierarchizations of racialized and sexualized forms of procreation and families. Keywords surrogacy, queer, homosexuality, gay families, heteronormativity, precarity, privilege, race, reproduction, class 1University of Southern Denmark, Odense M, Denmark Corresponding Author: Michael Nebeling Petersen, Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M, Denmark. Email: nebeling@sdu.dk Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 2 Journal of Family Issues Introduction: Gay Male Families That gay men become fathers is hardly news. However, the ways and understandings of gay men having children are changing radically. As the research in the 1990s about gay fatherhood reflected, when gay men became fathers it was mostly as a result of prior heterosexual relationships (Bergman, Rubio, Green, & Padrón, 2010). However, parallel to legislation becoming more liberal to gay parenting and homosexuality becoming more culturally acceptable, today gay families have become culturally intelligible and possible (Nebeling Petersen, 2012a). Cisgendered gay men, for obvious reasons, need assistance to procreate. In Denmark, gay men usually become fathers in cooperation with (mostly lesbian and single) women with whom the men do not have traditional heterosexual intimate relations. These family forms are popularly called rainbow families. As a second family form, gay men can also become parents through adoption. In Europe, this family form has been outlawed due to legislation that has made it illegal for gay men to file petitions for adoption.1 In recent years, legislation in a series of Western European countries, including the Scandinavian countries, has changed; thus, same-sex couples can adopt transnationally according to the same rules as heterosexual couples. In reality, transnational adoption is very difficult as sending countries often do not recognize same-sex couples as adoptive parents (“Mange homoseksuelle par,” 2012). The state regulation of gay adoption has been a highly controversial center for political debates in Europe in recent years, for example, in Denmark where gay adoption was legalized in 2010 after 10 years of debates (see Nebeling Petersen, 2014), and in France, where gay adoption was legalized in 2013 and resulted in vast public debates and demonstrations. Though no studies have compared the spread of gay adoption in Europe and the United States, as the legislation has been less restrictive in some U.S. states, and combined with a larger number of children available for adoption domestically in the United States, it is reasonable to assume that gay adoption has been relatively more common in the United States, while gay adoption has not been an option for same-sex couples in most European countries where gay adoption has been illegal by state regulation until recent years. However, some U.S. state laws have limited the possibility as adoption agencies functioned as gatekeepers and in practice, have limited access to adoption for same-sex couples (Berkowitz, 2013; Brodzinsky, Patterson, & Vaziri, 2002). The third gay male family form is created through surrogacy. Due to biomedical advances and globalization, this family form is rapidly becoming common. The staff members in surrogacy agencies2 and the commissioning parents, I have interviewed, estimate that most frequently, gay couples use a Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 3 Nebeling Petersen gestational surrogate and buy an egg from an egg donor to be fertilized through in vitro fertilization (IVF) with one of the men’s own sperm. Then, the embryo is transferred to the surrogate mother. This form of family is different in significant ways from the other gay male family forms. First, in contrast to rainbow families and similar to adoption, surrogacy enables same-sex male couples to create families where the gay male couple are the only two (legal) parents. As only two (different or same-sex) persons can hold legal parenthood to a child in Denmark, in the case of rainbow families, legal parenthood is often shared between the genetically related mother and father from the birth, while most common in gay surrogacy, the genetically related father will have legal parenthood from birth, and the other father will receive legal parenthood following a stepchild adoption.3 Second, in contrast to adoption and similar to rainbow families, surrogacy enables gay male couples to procreate with a genetic link to the child. Third, surrogacy provides the gay couple with more control of the reproductive process in terms of when to become pregnant and how to do it, for example, choosing egg donor, the timing, and specific fertility treatments and agents. While surrogacy arrangements also entail waiting and negotiating, commercial surrogacy enables the male couple to feel more in control (Berkowitz, 2013; Lev, 2006). This feeling of control is in contrast to rainbow families where the gay male couple has to negotiate with the mother(s), and in contrast to adoption, in which gay couples often wait in vain for years. The possibility of creating a nuclear family with only two parents with genetic children and control of the reproductive process makes a gay family through surrogacy more similar to a traditional heterosexual nuclear family than the other forms of gay families. However, the creation of a family without a mother and with only two fathers is significantly different from the heterosexual family and the gendered norms surrounding it. This leaves gay men who create families through surrogacy negotiating a new form of family subjectivity emerging between traditional kinship patterns and fundamentally new forms of kinship and family. The tension between new and old forms of family subjectivity and creation is the point of departure for this article. It is important to notice that not all gay men have the opportunity to choose surrogacy. Two central reports about gay men and surrogacy (Bergman et al., 2010; Greenfeld & Seli, 2011) showed that gay men who use transnational or national surrogacy are demographically upper-middle or upper class, most have hired help in the home such as nannies or au pairs, and the majority are White (Berkowitz, 2013). The same demographic patterns are observed in relation to adoption but not to the same magnitude. Regarding the numbers from the two reports, Berkowitz (2013) concluded “The demographic characteristics Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 4 Journal of Family Issues of these men highlight the extent to which surrogacy is a procreative pathway only available to a racially and economically privileged minority” (p. 75). The class perspective is even more significant when looking at the difference between surrogate mothers and the intended parents. Two older reports about national surrogacy in the United States from 1988 to 1990 showed that the intended parents often had more education and a high income, whereas surrogate mothers had a low income and less, if any, education (Dillaway, 2008). In a study on American surrogate mothers, Heather Jacobson (2016) estimates that the typical surrogate mother is working class or middle class, employed “largely in typical female-dominated professions: teaching, child care, nursing, retail, social work, and clerical work” (p. 48). The class difference between intended parents and surrogate mothers in transnational surrogacy is even wider, and race and colonial global inequality add to the differences (DasGupta & DasGupta, 2010; Pande, 2014; Vora, 2015). Transnational feminist research on surrogacy has problematized that surrogacy is staged as a win-win situation, where “[u] nequal power and status brought about by poverty and nationality are swept aside by the notion of surrogacy as an ‘egalitarian’ swap” (DasGupta & DasGupta, 2010, p. 141). Global and racialized inequalities are made invisible by neoliberal discourses that stage intended parents and surrogate mothers as free, individual, and rational agents (Kroløkke & Pant, 2012). Method and Material I conducted eight interviews from 2014 to 2015 with seven Danish gay male couples and one gay man. All had become or were planning to become fathers through transnational commercial surrogacy (see Table 1). Four of the couples already had children via surrogacy, while the other three couples and the gay man were prospective intended parents in different stages. All were semistructured in-depth interviews (Brinkmann, 2014) and lasted from 1½ to 2½ hours focusing on the men’s reproductive stories and lives as gay fathers (to be). As commercial surrogacy is illegal in Denmark, very few people are open about the ways they create families. When I started my research, I had a difficult time finding informants, and no one responded to my various calls for interviewees on surrogacy forums and websites. Finally, I made contact with a gay couple who are parents to three children who were willing to meet with me and participate in an interview. They told me how difficult it was to bring children born in the United States to Denmark, to finalize the stepparent adoption to make the cofather the children’s legal father, and to naturalize the children for Danish citizenship.4 They also told me that until this process was finalized, the family lived in a precarious position, afraid of being caught by the authorities and afraid of the consequences. Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 Table 1. List of interviewees. Name (years old) Residence Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 Jesper (36) and Provincial town Thomas (37) Karl (60) and Lars (39) Town outside Copenhagen Mads (32) and Jakob Bigger provincial (33) town Christian (37) and Provincial town Lukas (40) Klaus (35) and Peter Copenhagen (36) Karsten (44) and Per (48) Henrik (26) and Rasmus (32) Johannes (28) Race of children Mixed race Number of children surrogacy Twins, 15 months Country of surrogacy Not completed White Daughter, 7 months USA Fully and twins 7 years completed White Daughter, 1 year USA Not completed White One son, 2 years USA Not completed White egg Surrogate is First India, then N/A donor pregnant in Thailand Thailand Copenhagen, plan to White egg Donated sperm, USA N/A move when child is donor awaiting born. fertilization Provincial town No egg donor None, still Researching in N/A yet researching Thailand Copenhagen suburbs No egg donor None, still Researching N/A yet researching in USA and Mexico Note. All participants are White, cisgendered, and self-identified gay men. India Coparent adoption status Naturalization Not completed Fully completed Not completed Not completed N/A N/A N/A N/A 5 6 Journal of Family Issues I understood that the men I was interested in interviewing were afraid of the exposure an interview would give them. The first couple was kind enough to invite me into their private and secret online circles. I became part of a secret Danish surrogacy Facebook group, and through this group and the kind help of the couple, I met other couples and gay men who were or were in the process of becoming gay fathers through surrogacy. Understanding the fundamental insecurity the men experience, I expanded the informants’ anonymization by promising them full anonymity in terms of names, affiliations, jobs, and other marks that could reveal their identity. I also did not ask for full names and made it possible for my informants to meet with me at a location other than their home address to allow them further anonymity. Although only one couple would not allow me to know their home address and last names, I believe that the mere possibility of full anonymity signaled to the informants that I was aware of their situation and would not expose them in any way. As commercial surrogacy is punishable in Denmark, many informants were anxious about the interview materials left in my care. Thus, I also promised the informants that after finishing my research, I would permanently destroy all transcripts, computer files, notes, recordings, lists, and other documents I have used in the research process. Of the eight interviews, seven were with gay couples and one was with a gay man. He was in a relationship, but his partner did not want to participate in the interview. The men ranged in age from 26 to 60 years. Five of the couples lived outside Copenhagen in various smaller cities, and two of the couples lived in Copenhagen. Four couples were already parents of children born through surrogacy in the United States and India, but only one couple had finalized the stepchild adoption and naturalization process. One couple was pregnant with a surrogate mother in Thailand; one couple had just donated sperm and was awaiting fertilization and implementation in the United States; the last couple was still researching and had not started the process. Except for one couple, all the men was economically privileged and had, through their income or family, access to the economic capital surrogacy demands.5 All the men were cisgendered and White. Although the majority of the feminist research in surrogacy, for obvious reasons, focuses on the experiences and conditions of the surrogate mothers (e.g., Pande, 2014; Teman, 2010; Vora, 2012), I want to stay close to the specific experiences of gay couples. However, although the men I interviewed were different in many ways, in this article, I look for patterns among different narratives in the interviews. Instead of telling the men’s stories in their own uniqueness, I want to show how transnational commercial surrogacy as a reproductive technology for gay men plays out. I do this by examining the two main dilemmas gay male couples manage throughout the surrogacy process. Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 7 Nebeling Petersen First, I look closer at the men’s mobility in the global market of surrogacy to argue that the mobility of gay men differs from that of their heterosexual counterparts. Second, I follow how gay men negotiate traditional kinship patterns in these new forms of creating subjectivity, kinship, and family. Relational Class and Global Surrogacy Even though the men, I have interviewed, belong to a privileged minority in terms of race, class, and nationality, they do not experience themselves and their surrogacy journey as one of privilege (see also Riggs & Due, 2010). Although they are all middle and upper class and they all have the economic and social capital to make the surrogacy arrangement a reality, they do not see themselves as mobile and privileged agents. This shows that class, mobility, and privilege should be understood not only as economic and structural patterns but also as relational and negotiated positions. Although the men in Denmark are economically privileged and mobile compared with and in relation to their surrogate mothers in India, Thailand, and the United States (Dillaway, 2008),6 the men experience immobility and economic stratification compared with and in relation to heterosexual couples and among each other. Some of couples I interviewed had access to capital either from inherited family fortunes or from their own businesses and were economically privileged in the sense that “money is not a question,”7 as one interviewee told me. Although most of the couples were economically well-off, some felt economically stressed due to the high costs of surrogacy. For example, Jesper and Thomas explained that they chose India because surrogacy is up to three times cheaper in India than in the United States, but still they had a hard time financing it. They had to borrow money against their house, from their parents, and from the bank (a “baby loan”), and still, they were short of money. They told me how they could not afford to move, as they had borrowed more money against their house than the house was worth, leaving the couple bound to their mortgage payment. They seemed like an ordinary middle-class couple struggling to make ends meet caught in deep and not economically privileged. Choosing India as a destination for surrogacy was not a choice among different global destinations; instead, it was the only choice for Jesper and Thomas. In contrast to the surrogate mother in India, Jesper and Thomas appear globally mobile, as they can travel transnationally in order to pay a surrogate. However, compared with more economically privileged homosexual couples, and compared with heterosexual couples who can choose among more global destinations, Jesper and Thomas appeared immobile; they did not have a Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 8 Journal of Family Issues cosmopolitan experience but one of exile. In addition, Jesper and Thomas were so in debt that they could not afford to sell their house, leaving the couple with a feeling of even greater immobility. In contrast to Jesper and Thomas, another couple had their children in the United States with two different surrogate mothers. When I asked about why the couple had chosen the United States, Lars told me: We didn’t choose South America; we simply didn’t want that. We didn’t want Russia either. And we didn’t want Asia. It had to do with that we really feel that what happened with the making of our children; it was big magical fairytale. A lot of it happened in court rooms and papers and meeting rooms, but still pretty big magical fairytale because there are only winners. Everyone walks away from it happy. . . . And we know that, and we don’t have to keep on saying “yeah maybe they [the surrogate mothers] didn’t want to do it if it couldn’t give them a second floor on the house or if they couldn’t get running water.” I’m not saying that India is exploitation of the poor. But the possibility is there, and that’s enough for us to not choose it. In contrast to Jesper and Thomas, Lars described a cosmopolitan experience when choosing the destination for their surrogacy arrangement. Lars also distinguished between more and less ethical destinations for commercial surrogacy, making his and his partner’s choice of the United States more ethical (for a more thorough analysis of the distinction between Indian and U.S. surrogacy, see Andersen, 2013; Nebeling Petersen, 2015; Nebeling Petersen, Kroløkke, & Myong, in press; Jacobson, 2016). By rhetorically stressing his and his partner’s choice of the United States on a list of possible global destinations, Lars positioned himself as a globally mobile, cosmopolitan agent, and his distinction between the United States and the rest also positioned Lars and his partner as more ethically correct than other couples who do not choose the United States. This points to class differences among economically, racially, and nationally privileged gay men; where Lars and Karl could afford to choose where they wanted to go in the global market for surrogacy, less economically privileged men have to choose among destinations where commercial surrogacy is less expensive. Thus, choosing the United States becomes a mark of class distinction as well as the correct ethical choice. Gay Men, Mobility, and Transnational Surrogacy As already mentioned, Jesper and Thomas had their children through surrogacy in India, which has been a popular destination for transnational commercial surrogacy since surrogacy was legalized in 2002 because commercial surrogacy is legal and regulated (Kroløkke & Pant, 2012), because the Indian Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 9 Nebeling Petersen surrogate mother is not named on the birth certificate, and because commercial surrogacy is up to three times cheaper in India compared with the United States. However, after a series of cases in which children born to Indian surrogate mothers ended up stateless, as the legislation in the intended parents’ home countries collided with Indian legislation or did not recognize surrogacy at all, in January 2013, India introduced new regulations for medical visas. Among other things, the medical visa now requires that the intended parents must be in a heterosexual marriage (Hyder, 2013).8 Jesper and Thomas had their children before the new visa regulations were introduced, but the couple still has frozen embryos in Delhi and still pay for cryopreservation of an embryo that could become a genetic sibling to their children. However, due to new regulations, the couple cannot get a medical visa to enter India, and the embryo cannot be moved from India. When I talked to Jesper and Thomas about the new regulations, they explained how they felt trapped and felt they had been treated unfairly due to “homophobic regulations and prejudice about families like ours.” The new Indian rules led to a surrogacy industry boom in Thailand, which very quickly became the destination for transnational commercial surrogacy for people who did not measure up to the new heterosexual marriage demand (Ritchie, 2013). An international fertility consultant from Bangkok stated in a newspaper article in February 2014 that “[o]ur business has increased threefold in the past 12 months.” He also said, “Around 35% of our intending parents are gay men” (Smith, 2014). Contrary to India, legislation regarding surrogacy in Thailand had not been introduced, making commercial surrogacy neither legal nor illegal (Hibino & Shimazono, 2013). However, in July 2014, the international media reported that an Australian couple, who had become parents to twin babies born to a Thai surrogate mother, had left one child in the care of the surrogate mother, as the baby was born with Down’s syndrome (Dean, Cheer, & Mills, 2014). As there was no regulation, according to Thai law the surrogate mother was the legal mother until the intended parents adopted the child after birth, leaving her with legal and economic responsibility for the unwanted child. Following this episode, Thailand was criticized nationally and internationally for the unregulated status of surrogacy, which led to a total ban on commercial surrogacy in Thailand in August 2014, making it illegal for hetero- and homosexual couples to purchase surrogacy in Thailand (Pearlman, 2014; “Thailand to Ban,” 2014). I interviewed Peter and Klaus in the spring of 2014 before surrogacy became illegal in Thailand, and at that time, they were pregnant with a surrogate mother in Bangkok. Before turning to Thailand, Peter and Klaus had started the process in India, but the surrogate mother lost the child very early in the pregnancy. The agency recommended Peter and Klaus replace the Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 10 Journal of Family Issues surrogate, but while doing this, the new regulations were introduced. Peter and Klaus decided to restart the process in Thailand instead. When talking about changing to Thailand, Klaus was angry about the extra costs in terms of starting from the beginning again, and he told me about the difficulties in learning the different laws and the lack of laws in Thailand compared with India: You’re thrown around, and nobody really cares. We lost a lot of money in India, and it is just too bad. . . . When we started in Thailand, it was like starting all over again, researching and learning, and you’re so nervous, and you don’t know what to do in the beginning. After I learned that legislation had been implemented in Thailand, I contacted Peter and Klaus again to see whether this change had influenced their pregnancy. Unfortunately, the surrogate lost the child before the change in the law, and Peter and Klaus have stopped trying for a child for the time being. In the aftermath of the new regulations in India and Thailand, many Indian agencies opened local branches in Nepal. This soon became a popular destination for gay couples, as the Indian agencies had significant experience and simply moved their business and surrogates to Nepal where there were no regulations, making surrogacy neither legal nor illegal. In September 2015, this changed. The government issued a ban on surrogacy (Shrestha, 2015), which made the only place outside the United States transnationally and legally accessible to same-sex couples the state of Tabasca in Mexico. Mexico resembled Nepal and Thailand, as commercial surrogacy is more unregulated than legal. However, in December 2015, the legislature of Tabasca voted to prevent foreign same-sex and heterosexual couples and persons from having children through surrogacy in Tabasca (Ochert, 2015), leaving the United States the only destination transnationally and legally accessible to same-sex couples today. Although gay intended parents must be understood as being in a position of privilege in relation to the surrogate mothers, and although gay men actively and indirectly use their racial and gendered privilege to become eligible as parents (Nebeling Petersen, 2015), I argue that the practices and choices of same-sex couples who commission surrogate mothers must be understood in more complex terms that are sensitive to the structural (dis) advantages the couples face. Instead, the couples, especially those who cannot afford to purchase surrogacy in the United States, feel that the changing national regulations around the world hit them harder and more often than heterosexual couples, thus creating a feeling of discrimination instead of privilege. Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 11 Nebeling Petersen The rapid global changes in regulations for same-sex couples must be understood in relation to the local experiences of being discriminated against and marginalized in relation to sexuality, gendered appearances, and reproduction (Nebeling Petersen, 2015; Riggs & Due, 2013). In these ways, the men do not feel privileged, mobile, or in control. Henrik, who was still researching the process, captured the feeling of being excluded and wrongfully treated when we talked about the different and changing legislation around the world. He said, “They want our money, but no one really likes us. . . . If only they knew that gay people are just like any other, just want to have children of our own.” Even though changing regulations and economic limits have decreased gay men’s mobility and feeling of privilege, the men I interviewed all emphasized how surrogacy provides control over the practicalities of the reproductive process, such when to donate sperm, start IVF treatment, or initiate the pregnancy. This control is experienced as important in the reproductive process in which the men have very little control over the barriers in the process such as (rapidly) changing national legislation and high numbers of failed IVF cycles and miscarriages. Family Futures and Pasts: Surrogacy as Game Changer The mere possibility for becoming parents changes the gay men’s experiences of what it means to be a gay man. In a study of Australian and U.S. gay fathers through surrogacy, Murphy (2013) found: Many of the men in this study also described an awareness of parenthood desires prior to coming out as gay. For these men, being open about their homosexuality foregrounded this desire and also seemed to foreclose its very possibility. . . . For the majority of the men in the study . . . coming out as gay meant almost certain childlessness. (pp. 1110-1111) I also observed this pattern among the men I interviewed. Several of the interviewees explained they had experienced coming out as gay men as a realization that they would never be fathers. One interviewee, Mads, explained how he had never thought he would become a father: I grew up in a small town, and you just didn’t see much gay represented there. When gays were on TV, then it was because they were walking around in coveralls in Utterslev Mose [famous cruising area outside Copenhagen]. . . . So that’s why I just had dismissed it [having children]; that’s ok, it will simply not be in my life. Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 12 Journal of Family Issues Interestingly, Mads associated the impossibility of having children with a stereotypical representation of gay men as sexually overt and promiscuous. This points to how male homosexuality has been configured as nonreproductive, degenerate, and barren (Berkowitz & Marsiglio, 2007; Butler, 1992; Edelman, 2004; Nebeling Petersen, 2012b; Nunokawa, 1991). In this way, surrogacy for gay male couples is fundamentally different from that for heterosexual couples. When heterosexual infertile couples turn to surrogacy, it is often the last option when a series of other reproductive technologies has failed. In contrast, “gay fathers turn to surrogacy joyfully as a pathway to parenthood” (Berkowitz, 2013, p. 78). In Mads’s words, “It was first when Jakob started talking about surrogacy that I realized that we could be parents, for real.” Most of the men I interviewed revisited their own and their partner’s family of origin in light of their new awareness of being able to procreate, and in different ways, they renegotiate their former experiences of marginalization and exclusion in their families of origin. Some started to talk more with their parents, and they gained a larger understanding of their parents’ emotions and ways of being. Kasper explained how before he became a father he had never understood why his mother made him feel guilty by picking on him: “It still annoys me [when the mother make him feel guilty], but after Lola [his child] was born, I understand better . . . I don’t know, I think it is the only way she can show her love.” The reorganization of the men’s relationships to their families of origin shows that the men not only rethink their futures as procreative beings but also rethink their pasts. The story of Kasper’s mother could easily be understood within heteronormative logic, where Kasper’s homosexuality led to his mother’s disappointment and his feeling of guilt. However, Kasper reframed the experiences after becoming a father himself and reorganized the narrative from one about guilt and shame to one about parental love. In this way, surrogacy radically changes the possible subjectivities of gay men. From understanding oneself as barren and nonreproductive, the mere possibility of becoming a father through surrogacy enables gay men to envision other possible futures as “real families,” as another interviewee, Christian, termed it. This leads to a reorganization of the past as well, as shown by the story of Kasper. Likewise, other men I interviewed reframed their histories from ones about marginalization and exclusion into histories about love and belonging, for instance, Christian, who told about his relationship to his brother and nephews. Prior to becoming a father himself, he felt his brother did not approve his homosexuality. After Christian himself became a father, the relationship between the brothers has gotten better: Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 13 Nebeling Petersen Being in the same life situation [being fathers to small children] has made us much closer than before. The children like to play together, and we hang out a lot. I guess that’s the ‘being-related thing’ that wins in the end. Affinity and Kinship: The Matter of Genetics Surrogacy enables gay couples to imagine and form families with only two parents and children genetically related to at least one of the fathers. This is in contrast to nonheterosexual kinship patterns explored by Kath Weston in the early 1990s. Weston argued that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in the 1980s homophobic context were exiled from their “blood family.” This left LGBT individuals lacking a family for emotional and social support. LGBT families instead found kinship in “chosen families” who were free from the hegemonic structures of the nuclear family, and families were chosen among friends and ex-lovers (Weston, 1991). Rainbow families can be understood in line of these chosen families in which LGBT individuals form new families in structures different from the nuclear structure of two parents and genetically related children. Surrogacy can be understood as a shift from the chosen family to a more traditional family, as surrogacy provides the possibility of a more classical family within heteronorms. The genetic link between (one of the) parents and the child is very important in the legal aftermath of the birth of the child, as one of the parents has to prove by DNA testing that he is the genetic father of the child in order to obtain sole custody of the child. However, in social terms, “the presence of a genetic link can be a meaningful symbol that validates their relationship to their child” (Berkowitz, 2013, p. 76) when gay men are negotiating the stigmas attached to being a gay male family. In this way, one could argue that gay men are mimicking the heteronormative assumption that genetics creates families. Murphy (2013) showed how biogenetic kinship is a concern in gay male families because it privileges the connections between the child and one parent. Men actively sought to resolve this potential problem by creatively playing with some of the symbols of kinship to negotiate and obscure which partner was biogenetically related to their children. (p. 1121) I asked Jesper and Thomas about the significance of the genetic link and why they had chosen Thomas to be the donor. They quickly responded that the genetic link had and has no importance at all, and they explained how they chose who to be the donor for external reasons. They wanted to choose Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 14 Journal of Family Issues the one who had the best sperm count and who did not have any genetic susceptibilities. When they both turned out to be good donors, they chose Thomas because he is an only child, and Jesper’s parents already had grandchildren from his siblings. Thomas explained, “If my parents should have a go with grandparents, I am their only chance. And even though they would love them just as much if it had been Jesper’s [sperm], I think it somehow matters to them.” Jesper said, “Now I find it amazing to see Thomas in the children. . . . But it is just an extra. To me, genetics has never mattered.” In this way, Jesper and Thomas narrated the importance of the genetic link but successfully bypassed the more traditional values connoted with valuing a genetic link to their parents. Interestingly, this narrative was contradicted later in the interview when I asked whether Jesper and Thomas wanted to have more children than the twins they already had. They told me about their frozen embryos in Delhi. The embryos were made from the same egg donor as the twins but fertilized with Jesper’s sperm. They explained that this would enable the twins to have a genetic sibling at the same time as it enabled Jesper to be a genetic father; in the words of Murphy (2013), they were “turn taking” as a strategy to negotiate biogenetic relatedness, a strategy used by most of the couples I interviewed. This contradiction shows how the couple is left in a complex affective negotiation, or in an “ontological choreography” (Thompson, 2005). On one hand, they used the genetic link as something to prove their family’s value in terms of external reasoning (e.g., legal), but also in terms of more internal familial reasoning to strengthen family ties to families of origin (grandparents) as well as to make their families intelligible within heteronormativity as “real” fathers and siblings. On the other hand, they valued the chosen family ideology that families are built on proximity, love, and devotion instead of genes. This second logic enables the nonbiogenetically related father to be just as much a father as the other, while at the same time remaining loyal to a gay affective history of chosen families. Thus, biogenetic relatedness seems to come attached to other stories, instead of having a story of its own. In a study of lesbian women’s use of reproductive technologies, Mamo (2007) suggested the use of the notion of “affinity ties” as “a kinship device that lesbians create, in the context of uncertain legal terrain, as they select sperm, assign names and significance to relationships that have no place on traditional kinship charts, and invent new family rituals” (p. 21). In similar ways, gay men use the genetic link to the child affectively and rhetorically to build affinity. The cultural imageries of genetics (Franklin, Lury, & Stacey, 2000) are part of assembling affinity, and chosen kinship and devotion are part of the assemblage. Biogenetic Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 15 Nebeling Petersen relatedness and other forms of relatedness do not cancel each other; instead, they supplement each other to make kinship become real and work to strengthen gay men’s link to their children and the narrative of being the only two and right parents to their children within institutionalized heterosexuality, which elevates reproductive heterosex as the norm of procreation by which other forms of procreation are measured (Riggs & Due, 2013). The Longing and Determination for a Family The men I interviewed did not just use biogenetic relatedness as a way to make their family intelligible within heteronormative understandings of the family. The overdetermined narrative of biogenetic relatedness in the case of Jesper and Thomas shows how “a range of symbols and metaphors very conventional to heterosexual nuclear family formation are in play in this ostensibly unconventional context” (Dempsey, 2013, p. 51). Christian and his partner Lukas told me that they had always planned to have a family: “It wasn’t a question about if, but about how we were going to have a child.” When I replied that many gay men do not think they have the possibility, Christian said, “For as long as I can remember, I wanted to have children. It’s just been something I always wanted. It just took time to find a way. Not an easy way, but we were sure we wanted kids.” Later in the interview, Christian returned to the lifelong desire to become parent, and added: “Having our child has completed me; it was like becoming a whole person.” Kroløkke and Madsen (2014) have shown how (heterosexual) surrogate families form kinship with “reproductive desire” and the affective work associating parenthood and happiness within a neoliberal frame of individual choice and self-realization. In the quotations, Christian makes his family and his kinship to his child recognizable by using the narrative of reproductive desire. Even though Christian and Lukas are not a conventional family, Christian used conventional heteronormative narratives about the desire to become a parent. The desire is framed as an affective longing, and if that longing is not met, he will become unhappy and feel incomplete. Interestingly, this is articulated with an emphasis on “wanting,” making the longing for parenthood something that is formed inherently but realized by individual determination and will. The narrative of reproductive desire and determination was prevalent in all the interviews I conducted. This allows gay men to become full and proper parents, as their ability to become parents is told through the omnipresent reproductive desire, which is further underscored by will and determination. By using this narrative, gay men become part of a heteronormative assumption about the universal human desire to procreate, and thus, their families become just like any other family. Only, they are not. Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 16 Journal of Family Issues Riggs and Due (2013) argued: [T]he reproductive capacity has become a key marker of citizenship, and when such capacity is seen as diminished, then even though technologies are increasingly available to support reproduction in modes other than through heterosex, access to the cultural capital arising from reproductive capacity is hierarchized according to an individual’s approximation to that which is still seen as emblematic of fertility, namely reproductive heterosex. (p. 957) The gay family through surrogacy is thus caught in a precarious position in which they are becoming intelligible as full and valid parents by using narratives of naturalized and universalized reproductive desire, narratives that hierarchize modes of reproduction with reproductive heterosex as the standard. I have argued elsewhere that gay men negotiate this precarity using misogynist and colonial strategies. By clinging to gendered and racial privileges, the men diminish surrogate mothers and motherhood as such and activate colonial assumptions about Indian women in particular. Thus, gay men eradicate the kinship positions of the surrogate and the donor, giving discursive and affective life to gay men’s possibility of embodying motherhood and parenthood within heteronormativity (Nebeling Petersen, 2015; see also Riggs & Dempsey, 2015). In her work on media representations of transnational surrogacy in Sweden, Gondouin (2013) argued that surrogacy can be understood as reproductive stratification based on Swedish exceptionalism and the erasure of Sweden’s colonial past, and she concluded that transnational surrogacy “is not a question of ‘reproductive justice’, but the privilege of a global elite, entitling certain groups to reproduce, whilst reproduction of other groups are limited” (p. 17). Likewise, Vora (2012) has argued that transnational surrogacy must be understood within a colonial economy transforming vital energy in the Global South to extend life in the First World. Similarly, Riggs and Due (2010) have called into question “the role of racialized hierarchies in the perpetuation of inequality” in relation to gay men’s use of surrogacy. While I acknowledge these critical interventions in the analysis of gay men’s use of transnational surrogacy, in this article, I would like to elaborate on the affective work the gay men are doing by becoming intelligible within this precarious position within institutionalized heterosexuality. Within feminist theory, affective labor and work has shed light on immaterial work, and its gendered forms and histories (e.g., Hochschild, 1983), and within feminist studies on surrogacy, the concept of affective labor has shed further light on surrogacy as a form of “sexualized care work” (Pande, 2009) as well as expanded the understanding of the colonial legacies of “free” labor (Vora, Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 17 Nebeling Petersen 2012). While I am indebted to these feminist interventions in labor and production, in the following, I deploy affective work to shed light on the affective invisible everyday work extracted from minorities in order to fit into and to secure dominant structures of inequality and to understand how this affective work functions within larger affective economies (Ahmed, 2004) of race and sexuality. Queers at Work: Disguising Homosexuality Mads and his partner Jakob are White men in their early 30s. They are fit and good looking, and they look alike. At first glance, they look like prototypes of modern urban masculinity: short haired, groomed stubble, athletic, and manly. Mads wore a lumberjack shirt and jeans, while Jakob wore a white t-shirt that showed off his muscular body under a blue blazer. Their gestures were balanced and masculine. In gay slang, the couple appeared “straight acting.” Mads and Jakob had one child through commercial surrogacy in the United States with the egg from a White donor. When I asked whether they were open about their family in public, Mads told me that “everyone knows.” Jakob took the lead and corrected Mads: “In the department store, we weren’t exactly open, now were we?” Mads laughed and explained to me that a cashier at the department store assumed they were brothers, and asked who was the father. He said: You know, sometimes there just isn’t a right way to say it. I didn’t know what to say, so I just said that Jakob was the father. . . . Sometimes, it is easier than coming out once more, I mean there in the department store [laughs]. No [stops laughing] I mean, I felt guilty not answering, and afterward, we talked about it. . . . I mean, how is she [the child] going to talk about us being two men, when we can’t? Later in the interview, I referred to the story as “the homophobic incident in the department store,” and Jakob told me that the cashier “wasn’t homophobic.” He elaborated: We look alike. Many people mistake us for brothers. She just thought we were brothers, because that’s what’s most common . . . I didn’t say anything not because I’m hiding I’m gay, I just didn’t bother explaining about the surrogate and USA and what have we? In an account of (dis)comfort as a queer feeling, Sara Ahmed (2004) noted that “compulsory heterosexuality works most powerfully in the most casual modes of conversation,” making: Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 18 Journal of Family Issues [q]ueer subjects feel the tiredness of making corrections and departures; the pressure of this insistence, this presumption [that one is straight], this demand that asks either for a “passing over” (a moments of passing, which isn’t always available) or for direct or indirect forms of self-revelation. . . . No matter how “out” you may be, how (un)comfortable queer may feel, those moments of interpellation gets repeated over time, and can be experienced as a bodily injury; moments which position queer subjects as failed in their failure to live up to the “hey you too” of heterosexual self-narration. (p. 147) Instead of analyzing these moments of heteronormativity in terms of assimilation (passing as straights) or transgression (coming out as queers), Ahmed (2004) suggests that we analyze them in terms of the affective work queers are doing “working on heteronormativity” (p. 155). Mads and Jakob’s incident in the department store and their masculine appearance could easily be read in terms of assimilation with heteronormative norms. The men’s deep-felt desire to have children of their own and a nuclear family could easily be unfolded in the same vein, as straightening of the queer. However, reading the incident through the lens of the affective work the couple is doing, it becomes clear how much work the couple do in their daily lives as gay fathers. The department store and the cashier can be read as the structure and form of the heteronormative social realm. Strolling with their baby through the department store can be read as an active working on this structure, resisting its interpellation force. When the cashier approached the couple and called them into the heterosexual social order, the couple had to do a lot of affective work in the moment deciding whether to pass in that order or to further expose their vulnerability within a hostile system. This left the couple not in the position of freely choosing between assimilation or transgression of heteronorms and instead caught between different forms of affective work on the heteronormative social structure. The queer family thus becomes formed by their failure to embody the norm. The affective work exacted from the queer family was repeated in the interview when Jakob forgave the cashier by stating she was not homophobic. By removing homophobia from the equation, Jakob is allowed to be a family of his own, just not as common. If he understands the incident as one of homophobia, he will be positioned as a failure within the norm he worked so hard to become part of. Reorganizing the incident from one of homophobia to one of lacking knowledge becomes yet another affective task for Jakob. The interpellation force of compulsory heterosexuality thus leaves the queer family in a Catch-22; they will fail no matter whether they do not adjust to the form of sociality (expose their queerness) or they adjust themselves to the form (pretend to be brothers). Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 19 Nebeling Petersen Reading the couple’s stories through the lens of affective work opens up understanding the couple’s appearance as conventionally masculine not as heteronormative work fitting into the norms but instead as queer work trying to fit into the unfittable White social norms. Passing as White Adoptive Parents to Transracially Adopted Children The work the queer couples are doing within heteronormativity must also be understood in relation to race and Whiteness.9 To understand how Whiteness and heteronormativity work together to hierarchize reproductive differences, I want to revisit the interview with Jesper and Thomas. In the following quotations from the interview, Jesper and Thomas talk about disguising their use of surrogacy and pretending to have adopted transnationally instead. Jesper and Thomas’s twin babies were fertilized with an Indian egg donor’s egg. The babies are thus mixed race, and their appearance is racially different from their White fathers. When I interviewed the couple, the babies were 15 months old, and the couple expressed concern about the “the reactions the children will meet . . . when they start kindergarten and school” and how they will be able to tell themselves about their different family and birth story. This led me to ask more about how open they had been during the process. Thomas told me that they did not discuss their surrogacy with anyone other than their close family until the children were born. When I asked how other people reacted to the visible racial differences between the children and the parents, Jesper said: People assume they are adopted. And they ask, when did you get them? And we say, “We have had them from the beginning,” and they say, “Oh, you really can [do] that?” . . . And then sometimes you don’t bother to explain, and just respond, “Yes, that [is] so lovely.” . . . Sometimes you choose the easy way out, because adoption is easier to explain after all. . . . It’s not like we’ve met many people who have been negative about it, but sometimes people don’t approve, and I think that is their right to think so. Thomas stated: We’ve spent years coming to terms with our choice [of commercial surrogacy], so I completely understand other people need time to accept. . . . And of course we have to teach our children that they will meet these questions. These quotations show how the couple borrows legitimacy from another reproductive form. When passing as adoptive parents instead of parents Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 20 Journal of Family Issues through commercial surrogacy, the couple receives cultural intelligibility by entering a different racialized affective economy, the one of transnational and transracial adoption. Common cultural narratives about transnational adoption are fueled by colonial imagery portraying the Global South as an undesirable geography, making a child’s possible future always better in the Global North (Nebeling Petersen & Myong, 2015). In these imageries, transnational adoption works to elevate Whiteness, as the narrative includes colonial assumptions about the sending countries’ assumed problems with poverty, violence, illness, inequalities, and overpopulation. In this way, transnational adoption is staged as the solution to save the children from an impossible future in the Global South. At the same time, this colonial imagery is informed by the racialized hierarchization of heterosexuality in which White heterosexuality in transnational adoption “saves” the consequences of uncontrolled racialized heterosexuality in the Global South (Nebeling Petersen & Myong, 2015). In this affective economy, the child is saved by transnational adoption into a White family in the Global North, and the adoptive parents are staged as saviors of children of the wild heterosexuality in the Global South. Transnational adoption is imagined as an altruistic endeavor in the affective economy of Whiteness and colonial legacies. In contrast, the still rare phenomenon of commercial surrogacy is most often understood as unethical in numerous ways, most significantly as exploitation of poor women in the Global South by people selfishly wanting a child of their own.10 In these narratives, commercialization of procreation in the case of commercial surrogacy works to further move procreation from its link to heterosexuality and organize procreation differently in the realm of business and nonnormative families, thus fundamentally threatening naturalized and institutionalized heterosexuality. By quietly letting themselves be understood as adoptive parents, the White gay couple remove themselves from the narratives of commercial surrogacy, which includes exploitative commodification of a heterosexualized reproductive desire. By disguising surrogacy, the couple does not remove themselves from their homosexuality as was the case for Mads and Jakob in the department store; instead, the couple quietly allow themselves to be positioned as White saviors of the failed racialized heterosexuality. This quiet acceptance of being positioned as White adoptive parents to non-White children shows how the Whiteness of the parents works to allow the couple residence within White heteronormativity. The work the couple is doing disguising surrogacy is being formed by colonial assumptions and allows the men to enter another “easier” affective economy of salvation instead of exploitation. Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 21 Nebeling Petersen Contrasting the two stories of gay couples disguising homosexuality and surrogacy, respectively, highlights how institutionalized heterosexuality is already racialized; the queer couple with White children are reworking heteronormativity by adapting the unfittable social forms of heterosexuality, while the queer couple with racialized children is reworking White heterosexuality by silently allowing themselves to be positioned within the affective economy of transnational adoption. This position makes them intelligible as suitable White parents, while at the same time reaffirming the hierarchization of different globalized reproductive patterns embedded within global inequalities and colonial legacies and institutionalized heterosexuality. Notably, the positions of children within these different affective economies remain invisible even though they function as the currency within the economies. Conclusion Commercial surrogacy radically changes the possibilities for gay men to become fathers. Whereas surrogacy for heterosexual couples is often the last option when other forms of fertility treatment have failed, to gay male couples surrogacy forms the first possibility of creating a family of their own with biogenetically related children. Instead of placing White gay men who use surrogacy squarely on one side of privilege or nonprivilege, I have highlighted the ambiguities and contradictions that form the men’s positions within a racialized, sexualized, and procreative hierarchy. The men are economically and racially privileged when engaging in transnational surrogacy, but the new procreative forms create new stratifications among gay men who have to work affectively within institutionalized White heterosexuality. The rapidly changing laws in different surrogacy destinations—enforced to secure the surrogate mother working within global fertility industry—hit same-sex couples harder or more frequently than their heterosexual counterparts, leaving the gay couples feeling trapped, immobile with reproductive matter trapped in different geographies. Thus, gay men engaged in surrogacy must be understood as more flexible and differentiated and include relational and dynamic notions of class, sexuality, mobility, and race. Forming a family, or the mere possibility of forming one, changes gay men’s subjectivity from one who can never procreate to one who can become reproductive and fertile. This enables the men to form new family futures as well as reorganize their family histories from stories about shame and guilt to stories about parental love and belonging. Biogenetic relatedness plays an important role in the making of kinship and affinity in gay families through Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 22 Journal of Family Issues surrogacy, as biogenetic relatedness enables one father to become the legal parent of the child and thus have the child naturalized to Danish citizenship, but also as a symbol of full and valid kinship within heteronormativity. At the same time, the couples obstruct and negotiate the meaning of biogenetic relatedness to enable the other father full and valid parenthood. Traditional values of kinship as synonymous with biogenetic relatedness are supplemented by the notions of kinship as devotion, individual will and determination, and reproductive desire in order to strengthen the men’s affinity to the children. White reproductive heterosex remains the standard by which other forms of procreation are measured. Gay men use their racial, gendered, national, and economic privilege to move closer to the White heterosexual standard, and they appear almost the same, but not quite. Instead of juxtaposing the experiences of gay couples with those of surrogate mothers, I analyzed the experiences of gay men by their own standards and stayed loyal to the men’s narratives. Reading these experiences as affective work on the heterosexual social structure, a more nuanced understanding of the gay men’s desires, expectations, and disappointments appears. The complex negotiation of hiding and exposing their homosexuality in the men’s daily lives shows how the men are caught in an affective Catch-22; they and their families have to adjust to a structure given form by institutionalized heterosexuality in order not to fail as a family. However, adjusting to this structure reconsolidates heterosexual superiority, making the family always already failed. Whiteness enables the men to borrow cultural acceptance from narratives of transnational adoption. When silently allowing themselves to be positioned as transnational adoptive parents, the men work to fit the imagery of White noncommoditized procreation, an imagery that reaffirms surrogacy as exploitative commoditized procreation and works to make transnational adoption the ethical choice fueled by colonial assumptions about the Global South. Discussing how these standards influence the un/ethicalization of globalized reproduction does not lead to conclusions about the ethics and politics of globalized reproduction; instead, it shows how institutionalized heterosexuality and colonial legacies frame and create distinctions within globalized reproduction, which problematize queer families and reproductive patterns in order to naturalize and unproblematize White heterosexual procreation and globalized reproduction. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 23 Nebeling Petersen Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: I wish to acknowledge the generous sup- port of the University of Southern Denmark 2020 (SDU2020) in funding the project Reproductive Medicine & Mobility (REMM) from which the work for this study originate. Notes 1. Among European countries, there are large differences in adoption patterns. In Scandinavian countries, transnational adoption is most common, while domestic adoption is most common in the United Kingdom. In addition, Western European countries generally adopt children, while Eastern European countries generally send children for adoption. 2. As part of a follow-up study to this study, in 2016, I conducted field studies in 10 surrogacy agencies in the United States including 11 in-depth interviews and 10 smaller interviews with staff members and owners. 3. The parental status of the surrogate mother depends on the national legislation in country, where the birth is taking place. In Thailand, the surrogate mother had to give up her parental status after the birth. In India, a court could issue a prebirth order prior to birth enabling only the genetically related father to be on the birth certificate, while the other father as well as the surrogate mother will absent. In the U.S. states, where surrogacy is legal, a court can also issue a prebirth order prior to birth, but here, both fathers are enabled to be on the birth certificate, also letting the surrogate mother be absent. But the American birth certificate needs to be authorized by Danish authorities, and as Danish law defines the mother as the person giving birth, both fathers are not recognized as parents in Denmark. In my interviews with lawyers working with the commissioning parents in Denmark, only one gay couple has been able to both be recognized as the legal fathers using the American birth certificate, thus avoiding stepchild adoption, while only the genetically related father was recognized as parent in all cases with gay couples, the lawyers had been in contact with. 4. In June 2014, while I conducted the interviews, a new law was introduced that makes it possible not only for the mother but now also for the father, to pass Danish citizenship to a genetic child. This makes it exceptionally easy for the gay male couple to naturalize their children, though the second father still needs to adopt the child. 5. While other forms of fertility treatments, including IVF treatments for lesbian women, are included in the universal health care in Denmark and while adoption is heavily economic compensated by the state, commercial surrogacy abroad is not legal and thus not economically compensated in any way. The men I have interviewed have spent from 400,000 DKK (app. US$65,000) to 1,500,000 DKK (app. US$230,000 on the surrogacy; India is the cheapest, cheaper in Thailand, and most expensive in the United States. This is quite a lot of money in Denmark, where having large savings is relatively uncommon in the lower and middle Downloaded from jfi.sagepub.com by guest on November 11, 2016 24 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Journal of Family Issues classes due to the relatively high taxes on income and estate and due to the broad and universal Danish welfare system that makes the needs for saving less focal. 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