Queering babies: (Auto)ethnographic reflections from a gay parent through surrogacy

This essay focuses on the figure of the surrogate baby and explores how encounters with this figure disrupt or confirm normative expectations about the ‘babyness’ of babies, the ‘parentness’ of parents, and the interactions between these two. Given their prenatal history, surrogate babies are queer creatures by default: their becoming and existence have to be negotiated through a set of institutionally defined normativities. But can this queerness—whether imagined, experienced, or discursively produced—serve as a window to the queerness of all babies and how standards of normalcy are formed in the world they are born into? In this essay, I construct an autoethnographic account in dialogue with a collection of personal narratives from same-sex and different-sex parents to address the performative and relational aspects of this queerness—something that is not fixed but produced and attributed according to one’s horizon of expectations. I consider three domains where this process most evocatively comes to the fore: the nature-affect-technology nexus in conception stories, the exoticization of the newly formed families by bystanders and acquaintances, and the parental anxieties that emerge in envisioning the children’s preferred futures. Snapshots from these domains, complemented with stories of different-sex parents, will reveal how dialectics of absence and abundance are always at work in the hierarchies that produce babies—queer or unqueer. Alluding to the notion of double-liminality, I conclude with the epistemological challenges involved in this informal project and the ontological paradoxes of coexisting in time as babies and parents.