STANFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
  
Cover of Queering Reproductive Justice by Candace Bond-Theriault
Queering Reproductive Justice
An Invitation
Candace Bond-Theriault



August 2024
272 pages.
from $28.00

Hardcover ISBN: 9781503638716
Paperback ISBN: 9781503639584

CITATION

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Reviews

The futures of reproductive justice and LGBTQIA+ liberation are intimately connected. Both movements were born out of the desire to love and build families of our choosing—when and how we decide. Both movements are rooted in broader social justice liberationist traditions that center the needs of Black and brown communities, the LGBTQIA+ community, gender-nonconforming folks, femmes, poor folks, parents, and all those who have been forced to the margins of society. Taking as its starting point the idea that we all have the human right to bodily autonomy, to sexual health and pleasure, and to exercise these rights with dignity, Queering Reproductive Justice sets out to re-envision the seemingly disparate strands of the reproductive justice and LGBTQIA+ movements and offer an invitation to reimagine these movements as one integrated vision of freedom for the future.

Candace Bond-Theriault asserts that for reproductive justice to be truly successful, we must acknowledge that members of the LGBTQIA+ community often face distinct, specific, and interlocking oppressions when it comes to these rights. Family formation, contraception needs, and appropriate support from healthcare services are still poorly understood aspects of the LGBTQIA+ experience, which often challenge mainstream notions of the nuclear family, and the primacy of blood-relatives.

Blending advocacy with a legal, rights-based framework, Queering Reproductive Justice offers a unified path for attaining reproductive justice for LGBTQIA+ people. Drawing on U.S. law and legislative history, healthcare policy, human rights, and interviews with academics and activists, Bond-Theriault presents incisive new recommendations for queer reproductive justice theory, organizing, and advocacy. This book offers readers an invitation to join the conversation, and ultimately to join the movement to that is unapologetically queering reproductive justice.

About the author

Candace Bond-Theriault, JD., LL.M. is a lawyer, writer, mother, and social justice advocate working at the intersections of law, policy, reproductive health rights, racial justice, LGBTQIA+ liberation, economic justice, and democracy reform. She is Adjunct Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University, and Associate Director for Movement Building at Dēmos: a think tank for the Racial Justice Movement. Her writing has been published in The Nation, SELF magazine, Ms. Magazine, Colorlines, the Root, Blavity, Rewire, the Advocate, the Grio, and the Huffington Post.

"Queering Reproductive Justice will inspire new, necessary conversations about the simultaneity of the struggle for reproductive autonomy and the fight for LGBTQIA+ liberation. This book demonstrates that our advocacy and scholarship are dangerously impoverished when we conceptualize these movements as separate. Bond-Theriault provides us with a framework for imagining – and achieving – an enriched future for all."

—Khiara Bridges, UC Berkeley Law

"Candace Bond-Theriault offers a needed framework for queering reproductive justice that celebrates and integrates the core tenets of LGBTQIA+ and Reproductive Justice movement-building while calling for their expansion into a needed single framework that takes up liberation and human rights. The net-result is a brilliant, clear, and essential field-guide for building racial, gender, economic and sexual justice."

—Laura Mamo, author of Sexualizing Cancer: HPV and the Gendered Politics of Cancer Prevention

"This book is a great introduction to the queering reproductive justice movement-building framework, and a critical read for anyone committed to the process. Bond-Theriault weaves together activist and scholarly voices to ground sexual and reproductive politics in this new approach. Her carefully researched and highly accessible book is a passionate call for individual and collective action."

—Marlene Fried, Hampshire College