Abortion as Gender Transgression

Reproductive Justice, Queer Theory, and Anti-Crisis Pregnancy Center Activism

Bibliographic Data

ID2227265
AuthorsCarly Thomsen (0000-0003-3505-7181, Middlebury College), Grace Tacherra Morrison (Youth Development)
Year2020
Volume45
Issue3
Pages703-730
Publication date2020-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSigns: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/706487
OpenAlexW3009117543
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited30

“Abortion as Gender Transgression” tells the story of End Fake Clinics, a queer reproductive justice student club at the University of California, Santa Barbara, that worked with their student government to make UCSB the only university to ban crisis pregnancy centers from falsely advertising on campus. In this article—the first to analyze anti–crisis pregnancy center activism—we draw from End Fake Clinics’ work to outline the contours of what a queer reproductive justice politic might entail. Through archiving and analyzing End Fake Clinics’ Queering Reproductive Justice workshop, we argue that approaching abortion as a form of gender transgression allows us to recognize deeper connections between queer and reproductive issues, as well as to complicate this very distinction. In the case of End Fake Clinics, creating a queer reproductive justice politic was enabled, we argue, by the deep affective connections developed through the group as well as by participants’ collective belief that their activism would be best when informed by feminist and queer theory. In discussing what we describe as End Fake Clinics’ epistemologically based and affectively bound activism, we expand on the limited feminist scholarship on crisis pregnancy centers and queer theoretical scholarship on reproduction, putting these bodies of thought into conversation in new ways. As reproductive justice activists and scholars have begun to use the phrase “queering reproductive justice” to refer to the reproductive concerns of LGBTQ people, and as increasing numbers of LGBTQ people engage in reproduction, End Fake Clinics provides us with more complicated ways to approach queering reproductive justice beyond such identitarian models

Abortion · Criminal justice · Criminology · Economic Justice · Feminism · Political science · Pregnancy · Queer · Reproductive justice · Scholarship · Sociology · Gender Studies · Law · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Reproductive Health and Contraception · Reproductive Health and Technologies

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