In Making Gaybies Jaya Keaney explores queer family making as a site of racialized intimacy. Drawing on interviews with queer families in Australia, Keaney traces the lived experiences of choice and constraint as these families seek to craft likeness with their future children and tell stories of chosen family made through love. Queer family building often involves multiracial and multicultural encounters, as intending parents take part in the global fertility industry. Keaney follows queer family making through reproductive technologies and highlights the confines of varied transnational reproductive markets and policies as well as changing formations of race, gender, sexuality, and kinship. Whether sharing the story of white gay men choosing Indian and Thai egg donors to make their surrogate-born children’s ethnicities visually distinct from their own or that of an Aboriginal lesbian and her white partner choosing a Cherokee donor from the United States to articulate a global Indigeneity, Keaney foregrounds the entwinement of reproduction, race, and affect. By focusing on queer family making, Keaney demonstrates how reproduction fosters a queer multiracial imaginary of kinship.

Jaya Keaney is Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction: Origin Stories  1
1. Assembling Queer Fertility  31
2. Making Do  45
3. Crafting Likeness  72
4. Racializing Wombs  110
5. Love Makes a Family?  141
Conclusion: Manifest Care  169
Notes  181
Bibliography  199
Index  219