Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

by Sarah Schulman

The biological basis for inclusion is interestingly replicated in the contemporary state-approved version of the queer family. In these cases, often love creates the interest in having children together, or having children together is an external marker proving love. But in many of these families, sex and reproduction have no relationship. And yet, a kind of simulacra of reproductive sexuality is prevalent when lesbian parents look for donors with biological markers that stand in for a fantasy sexual reproduction between the women. This is most noticeable in cross-racial or cross-cultural female couples in which the women look for donors representing the non-birth parent’s race or close to it, so that the child will resemble an imagined biological melding of the two. Everyone knows that child was not produced by the two women having sex, and yet they choose a biological mix that imagines that it does.