Roundtable: Queering Reproductive Justice
Please RSVP by clicking on the button below.
Join the Reproductive Justice Graduate Student Working Group for a roundtable discussion on queering reproductive justice through an interdisciplinary approach. Speakers will include Tamara Lea Spira, author of Queering Families; Carly Thomsen, author of forthcoming book Reproductive Justice, Queerly; co-creator of the Queer Birth Project Katherine Sobering; obstetrician-gynecologist Aileen Portugal; and feminist health communication scholar Robyn Adams.
As more queer people are participating in reproduction, often through assisted reproductive technologies and their stratified global markets, questions around queer reproductive justice are ever salient. The roundtable will discuss the in/justice issues experienced by both queer individuals and by other marginalized social groups implicated in queer reproduction. In doing so, the roundtable will pose questions about whether queering reproductive justice can expand notions of reproduction and queerness, leading to a reflection on what “queering” means, both in scholarship and in activism.
About the speakers
Robyn Adams (they/them) is a Black, transmasculine, nonbinary lesbian, friend, community-based doula, multihyphenate artist, and Black feminist health communication scholar. As a reproductive justice warrior, their primary work builds power with Black queer and trans individuals by centering their experiences through storytelling, aiming to better understand the material and lived needs that necessitate reproductive justice for all. Adams’s work in Black queer reproductive justice has recently earned them recognition as a lifetime fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as opportunities to present their research at the National Library of Medicine and the Society of Family Planning. Currently, Adams is the 2025-26 Activist/Scholar in Residence in Publicly Engaged Humanities for Social Justice at Southwestern University, funded by the Mellon Foundation, where they are teaching Black feminist reproductive justice storytelling and working on their book “Black Queer Stories: Reproductive Justice and the Politics of Erasure,” under contract with the University of California Press.
Aileen Portugal, MD, is a third year Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility Fellow at Washington University School of Medicine. She completed medical school at Southern Illinois University and residency in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Portugal’s clinical and research interests focus on improving access to fertility care for historically marginalized communities, including language concordant care for Spanish-speaking patients and expanding pathways to assisted reproductive technologies. As a member of the LGBTQ community who built her own family through reciprocal IVF, she brings both professional and lived experience to conversations about reproductive justice, queer family building, and equitable access to care.
Katherine Sobering is a sociologist whose research and teaching focuses on understanding how inequalities are produced and disrupted in everyday life. She is an expert on qualitative research methods, through which she studies gender, work, and family in the U.S. and Latin America. Her award-winning book, The People’s Hotel: Working for Justice in Argentina, details how worker-recuperated businesses in Argentina produce possibilities of equality in the workplace. Sobering is an associate professor of sociology and faculty affiliate in women’s and gender studies at the University of North Texas.
Tamara Lea Spira (she/her) is a community organizer and interdisciplinary feminist and queer theorist whose work lies at the intersections of critical race, Latin American, and transnational American Studies. She is currently a professor of queer studies and American studies in the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University. Spira obtained her PhD in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at UC Santa Cruz and was also UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Cultural Studies at UC Davis.
Spira is the author of Queering Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times (University of California Press, 2025) and Movements of Feeling: Feminist Radical Imaginations in Neoliberal Times (University of Washington Press, under contract). Her writings on the intimate politics of neoliberalism, racial capitalism, and state violence have also been published in venues including Boundary2, Feminist Formations, Feminist Studies, Feminist Theory, Identities, Signs, and Abolition Feminisms. Her new book project “Life Before Conception: Gamete Personhood in a time of Ecocide,” examines the legal conferment of personhood to preborn life accompanying the intensified forms of premature death that greet the majority of the world’s children — and the planet itself — in a battle over futures. She is also at work on a collection of prose poetry called “Two Deathbeds and the Tending of Fires.”
Spira’s academic work and public scholarship are informed by her longstanding participation within anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and transnational feminist, queer and reproductive justice movements, and she is the co-founder of several parent-led grassroots organizations prioritizing the most marginalized youth. Along with Mariangela Mihai, Spira is a co-convener of The Living Futures Lab, a collaborative multimodal archive that centers multimedia storytelling, live community art shows, and podcasts to highlight youth-led community efforts to dream-up, articulate, and enact futures befitting of all children, the planet, and her inhabitants.
Carly Thomsen is associate professor of English and creative writing and core faculty in the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. She is the author of Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming (University of Minnesota, 2021) and the producer of a related documentary film, In Plain Sight. She co-edited Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader (Routledge, 2025) with Hemangini Gupta, Kelly Sharron, and Abraham Weil. Her book Reproductive Justice, Queerly, is in press (University of California, 2026). Her work on LGBTQ and feminist activism, queer rurality, crisis pregnancy centers, abortion, and feminist pedagogy is published in various journals including Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Political Geography, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Feminist Studies, Human Geography, Feminist Formations, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice. Thomsen’s public-facing work includes a reproductive justice mini golf course, leading public feminism fellowships and curating related art exhibitions, and writing for the public, including for The New York Times and Ms. Magazine. She is a co-editor for the Reproductive Justice book series at the University of California Press.
Image: The Queer Birth Project (2022) Liss LaFleur and and Katherine Sobering. Photo courtesy the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas.