TRIALOGUES · Emergent Biopolitics of Kinship, Gender and Reproduction: Trialogues from the South
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-02-28 → 2025-02-27
- EU contribution
- €237,768
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Emergent Biopolitics of Kinship, Gender and Reproduction: Trialogues from the South
TRIALOGUES is an interdisciplinary project exploring the biopolitics of kinship, gender, and reproduction in Brazil, Spain, and Portugal. It examines innovative legal processes and their political backlashes, offering theoretical insights for ongoing debates in gender and queer studies. The project is structured around one main strand in Brazil, the primary focus, and two complementary strands in Spain and Portugal, enabled through secondments and short visits. Building on foundational works in moral and political philosophy, feminist scholarship, and queer theory, these strands generate empirically grounded discussions on emerging biopolitics, with particular attention to state mechanisms such as political institutions, social policies, and legislative and judicial frameworks shaping the regulation of non-monogamous relationships, gender identity, and third-party assisted reproduction. Key findings reveal: - The historical weight of monogamy is deeply rooted in the antagonism between Western public order frameworks and the racial "other" in post-colonial contexts, undermining efforts to achieve legal recognition for non-monogamous relationships. - Synergies among "anti-gender" backlash, trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), and trans-exclusionary liberal feminists (TELFs) result in state-centred gender identity frameworks that remain anchored in binary presumptions. These frameworks persist even in self-determination-based legislation, disproportionately affecting non-binary individuals and gender-variant minors. - Inequalities in reproductive access are entrenched in monogamous and heteronormative assumptions, which persist even in progressive regulations of third-party assisted reproduction. These findings contribute to theoretical and policy-oriented debates, providing tools to contest exclusionary frameworks and promote a critical understanding of public order across diverse socio-political contexts, while also identifying transformative potential through inclusive reforms and coalitional resistance.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
TRIALOGUES is an interdisciplinary research project on emerging biopolitics of kinship, gender, and reproduction. It focuses on path-breaking processes of legal innovation and concomitant political backlashes taking place in Brazil, Spain and Portugal in order to offer a singular comparative approach and to provide empirically informed theoretical insights that are relevant for ongoing debates in the intersections among gender and queer studies.Rooted in the field-defining works of moral and political philosophers, recent feminist scholarship and queer theorists have shown the need for interdisciplinary approaches to biopolitical studies. Drawing in this dense intersection between social sciences and the humanities, the proposed research focuses in three countries pertaining to the European and the global south whose recent history is marked by the transition to democratic regimes in which profound transformations of the biopolitics of kinship, gender and reproduction took place over a rather brief period of time. In this sense, the proposed research constitutes an original response to influent criticisms coming from sexuality studies urging a de-centering of the academic focus away from the global north in order to retain the very political impulse of field-defining concepts such as sexual and intimate citizenship. More specifically, the project comprises one main strand to be conducted in Brazil –the country of primary focus– and 2 complementary strands in Spain and Portugal, where research will be enabled through secondments. All three strands are aimed at producing empirically informed discussions of emerging biopolitics with an emphasis in the state logics (e.g. political institutions, social policies, legislative and judicial provisions) involved in the overlapping fields of kinship, gender and reproduction as they unfold through emerging regulations of non-monogamous relationships, gender identity and third-party assisted reproduction.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union