‘Creepy,’ ‘freaky,’ and ‘strange’: How the ‘uncanny’ can illuminate the experience of single mothers by choice and lesbian couples who buy ‘dad’

Abstract

Ethnographic accounts of the kinship practices that emerged in the last few decades with the help of assisted reproductive technologies frequently used the concepts of ‘normalization’ and ‘naturalization’ to explain how ‘pioneers’ of these family forms dealt with their novel experiences. The normalization/naturalization framework, I argue, obscures dimensions of the experiences of single women and lesbian couples who buy ‘donor’ sperm; I use the concepts of ‘the canny,’ ‘the uncanny,’ ‘confabulation,’ and ‘poetic license’ to illuminate these dimensions. Despite, and because of, the fact that these women buy sperm in order to obviate unwanted kin ties with the biological father, the existential status of the sperm and the absent presence of the biological father generate unease. With remarkable frequency, published memoirs of these maverick moms are peppered with synonyms for ‘the uncanny’ – ‘creepy’, ‘freaky’ and ‘strange’. The practices of sexing, naming, clothing, photographing, treating as imaginary correspondents or conversation partners, and purchasing symbolically-related consumer goods and services are used, often with ‘poetic license’, not just to make the strange familiar, but also to accentuate the strangeness of their relationship with the absent presence of the biological father.