Coordinators: My Xerenia Magnusdotter Rafstedt (Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law, University of Oslo)
Description of the meeting
This workshop is motivated by an interest in how the state conditions parenthood. Despite the myriads of relationships of care that exist outside the fold of what is recognized by the state as a parent-child relationship, legal parenthood has a privileged position in contemporary states. It determines whether someone is recognized as a parent in the first place, whether the state will assist their reproduction, as well as the significant responsibilities and rights that parents have in relation to children that are considered “theirs.” Although the state is not necessarily crucial to the making of a baby, it is indispensable to the production of a parent that is legally recognized as such. By interrogating parenthood as a politico-legal product, we tackle questions at the heart of socio-legal scholarship on how legal knowledge and reasoning, epistemic frameworks, expertise, and experience interact in the regulation of people’s lives.
The state’s making of legal parentage takes place within gendered, racialized, heteronormative, classed, and ableist social structures and norms. Hard-won rights for LGBTQI+ people and women are today under attack in many jurisdictions, where the rights of queer families are being challenged and reproductive rights overturned. Furthermore, with changing social norms and technological developments that allow for new forms of parenthood, the question of how states condition legal parenthood has far-ranging and deeply felt implications. The workshop invites work that range from the examination of biotechnological regulation to the construction of legal parenthood.
The first objective is to undertake comparative empirical interrogations of cross-national variation in how parenthood is constructed by the state, as well as across different demographics within the state. We are also interested in alternative conceptualizations and social organizations of parenthood, as part of the project of de-naturalizing parenthood that is crucial to our critical interrogation of its construction.
The second aim is the crystallization of a common research agenda on the state’s governing of parenthood, firmly situated in socio-legal scholarship, but informed by the rich anthropological, sociological, and gender studies literatures on reproduction and family. The workshop will serve as a platform for consolidating disparate academic environments concerned with questions of parenthood and reproductive justice.
To encourage cross-disciplinary conversation, the workshop sessions will be structured according to overarching core questions that run across the workshop theme and the participants’ research interests, such as theorizing parenthood as a politico-legal product and effects and implications of heteronormative legal parentage.
