Available From UC Press

Envisioning queer futures where we lovingly wager everything for the world’s children, the planet, and all living beings against all odds, and in increasingly precarious times. 
 
Queering Families traces the shifting dominant meanings of queer family from the late twentieth century to today. With this book, Tamara Lea Spira highlights the growing embrace of normative family structures by LGBTQ+ movements—calling into question how many queers, once deemed unfit to parent, have become contradictory agents within the US empire’s racial and colonial agendas.
 
Simultaneously, Queering Families celebrates the rich history of queer reproductive justice, from the radical movements of the 1970s through the present, led by Black, decolonial, and queer of color feminist activists. Ultimately, Spira argues that queering reproductive justice impels us to build communities of care to cherish and uphold the lives of those who, defying normativity’s violent stranglehold, are deemed to be unworthy of life. She issues the call to lovingly wager a future for the world’s children, the planet, and all living beings against all odds, and in increasingly perilous times. 

Tamara Lea Spira is Associate Professor of Queer Studies and American Studies in the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University. A previous UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Spira received her PhD in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"The intimacies of queer family formation can deviously embody the very ideological assumptions that support capitalist heteropatriarchy and its essential reliance on the perpetuation of racism. As Tamara Spira persuasively argues, queer reproductive justice requires not only an unremitting critique of biological essentialism, but special scrutiny of the ways in which colonialism and racism continue to be reasserted through new reproductive strategies. Everyone who claims a stake in the planet’s future should read this important text."—Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz

"The material and symbolic order of the family still structures our domination. Tamara Lea Spira's Queering Families offers the queer reproductive justice politics we need now. Spira's rigorous analysis sheds light on the harrowing conditions we are currently facing, grounded in wisdom from critical traditions that can help us shape discernment and action now."—Dean Spade, author of Love in a F*cked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell, Together

"The queer parent occupies a fraught position within US political debates surrounding adoption, reproductive technologies, and the family. Queering Families thinks through this position to advance a queer politics of reproductive justice drawn through a history and legacy of Black and queer of color feminisms, making it important reading for those concerned with ARTs, reproductive justice, and feminist and queer theory."—Kalindi Vora, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University