Diving in: Connecting Reproductive Justice,Sexualities,and Knowledge Production

Abstract

This essay considers how attention to reproductive justice can facilitate cross-pollination between scholars of reproduction and scholars of sex and sexuality. By applying common aspects of grassroots reproductive justice practice—Creatively visioning; Confronting our fault lines; Connecting the dots at our margins and solidarities; and Community building—to common areas of scholarly knowledge production, sociologists may be able to advance our shared interest despite an increasingly fraught academic terrain.

Reproduction has become a hot topic in sociology, moving from a niche research area to a popular site of inquiry for both emerging and seasoned scholars alike. This brings scholars of sex and sexuality and scholars of reproduction closer together. This shift will potentially benefit both groups because the academic separation between reproduction and sex has stymied progress given that political efforts to restrict sexual activities are coordinated to provide the groundwork to restrict reproductive activities (Almeling and Omar 2025). Yet, a mistake scholars new to reproduction make in claiming “reproductive justice” (RJ) as their motivation is approaching their work as if reproductive justice equates to adding a new topic to their research agenda (e.g., abortion restrictions) or new populations to their studies (e.g., Black trans parents). Instead, doing work grounded in RJ is about simultaneously holding the complexity of a theory, framework, movement, and praxis developed by women of color (Luna and Luker 2013).

Reproductive Justice emerged from the minds and bodily experiences of activists, particularly Black women, organizing around reproductive issues in alliance with other minoritized communities. As with many theories developed by women of color, reproductive justice has radical implications (Ross et al. 2017). In this vein, committed researchers cannot carelessly adopt the same theoretical and methodological tools of sociology and expect that their research will magically lead to reproductive justice. Rather, researchers must question the norms, assumptions, and practices that lead to the continued cultural and biological suppression of reproduction for some communities and the celebration of reproduction for others. In RJ movement spaces, there is an emphasis on process, relationships, and accountability, which can produce discomfort since this involves successfully managing vulnerability and productive conflict—two skills rarely valued in academia. RJ invites us to develop new practices. Thus, rather than suggest specific theories to engage, this piece focuses on processes that could shift our knowledge production to propel scholarship forward. These processes are Creatively visioning; Confronting our fault lines; Connecting the dots at our margins and solidarities; and Community building.

Intervention 1: Creatively Visioning

Prefigurative politics, particularly when engaging reproductive justice, requires engaging in different community approaches to produce a different outcome (Lin et al. 2016). A scene from a reproductive justice convening highlights some of these approaches:

While it was a warm and humid day in Miami, Florida that July day in 2011, the air conditioning blasted inside the hotel lobby. Low lights were on, although they seemed almost unnecessary with the sun illuminating the space. Low music filled the air, almost covered by the clatter of people talking in a variety of languages. Further back, a curving staircase spanned the back of the lobby. . . .The bottom stair ended near the floor-to-ceiling windows, which highlighted the main attraction that awaited guests: a deck with poolside service. Behind the deck, a wooden boardwalk went on for miles, followed by a dreamy expanse of beach that cuddled the sapphire ocean as far as the eye could see. To the right of the entrance, the slick white floor tile led to the official conference ballroom that would serve as the site for the plenaries

Throughout the following days, hundreds of conference attendees—women, men, and gender-nonbinary people—would pass through that lobby. They would wear everything from African dashikis to peasant blouses to skin-tight leather, with shoes ranging from Converse sneakers to high heels. Attendees wore their hair in cropped cuts, braids, and Afros, in a range of colors, some of which matched Miami’s fauna, and some were even bald. They were of various racial backgrounds and skin tones. Laughter, yelps, and multiple languages filled the air throughout the day. . .The conference organizers noted the beach location purposefully: “We intentionally planned this weekend as a ‘destination conference’ because we know how much Reproductive Justice activists work. It is non-stop and often we do not allow time to take care of ourselves.”

The opening plenary began with a “Welcome to the Indigenous Land” by two women from area tribes. The conference coordinators welcomed us, followed by a city commissioner who awkwardly encouraged us to talk about sex “but not on the boardwalk,” reminding us of the appropriate social norms. . . .Throughout those few days, people shared their experiences in the movements for reproductive health, rights, and justice, laughed, danced, reveled in nature—including a group who went skinny-dipping in the warm water at night—learned from each other, and just breathed. . .It was a reminder that human flourishing meant not just mere existence, but people being able to express their full humanity and have that humanity respected and even celebrated by the people around them. We understood that this was what it could feel like if SisterSong realized its mission: “to amplify and strengthen the collective voices of Indigenous women and women of color to ensure reproductive justice through securing human rights” (Luna 2020:1–2)

I purposely started my book on the women of color-led reproductive justice movement with this vignette from a moment of community and celebration to offer readers a glimpse into what U.S. activists had been creating even amid crisis (Luna 2020). ¹ Irrespective of the presidential administration in power, people of color in the United States, particularly women of color have been under attack. Thus, rather than simply reproduce typical structures, many of the radical movement spaces developed by women of color serve as a microcosm to live what they are proactively visioning, thereby facilitating people experiencing part of their dream in the waking world.

Early reproductive justice activists imagined a world in which reproductive justice had been achieved as being a space of human flourishing and dignity. SisterSong emphasized that reproductive justice (rather than rights or health) centered around: “(1) the right to have a child; (2) the right not to have a child; and (3) the right to parent the children we have” (Ross 2006). ² These activists were aware of histories of reproductive oppression and their political climate, yet dared to imagine something different for their future, something most of their communities had not experienced. They imagined bodily autonomy amid community interdependence; redistribution and recognition; and attention to the both/and of life (Luna 2020, Ross et al. 2001, 2017). This was a bold idea considering that discussions of sex and reproduction, particularly in the United States for communities of color, centered around risk, disease, and constraint (see Barcelos 2020, Cohen 1999, Garcia 2012). Creating a sex-positive (conference) space that emphasized fun and pleasure while challenging oppressive conditions took deliberate effort.

Reproductive justice activists have slowly shifted the discourses about groups and policies, starting from personal experience rather than relying on a focus group testing model of traditional reproductive movement spaces. Activists of color imagined worlds many (White) academics could not. These practices serve as important models from which to learn. More scholars need to look at the work being done on the ground, as movements are often ahead of the academy, and have sustained influence through imagination, even when they do not initially reach their movement goals (Woodly 2021). Some of the most powerful campaigns in shifting expectations around reproduction have been those that take seriously the mandate of reproductive justice to take leadership from people most affected by an issue and think across movements (Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice 2005). Campaigns like “Black Mammas Matter” have led to more awareness that Black people experience maternal mortality at disastrously higher rates than their White counterparts (Black Mamas Matter Alliance, n.d.). Sustained community building like “We Testify” cohorts has helped foster a change in which people who have obtained abortions are honored as important to literally testify when legislators discuss abortion policy or journalists write about the impact of the latest abortion bans (Sherman and Mahone 2024). Further, the We Testify storytellers more closely resemble the people studies show are most negatively impacted by restrictive policies: people of color. While not all researchers can attend a convening or observe congressional testimony, scholars who engage reproductive justice movement spaces developed by people of color will be exposed to a different vision of the world whether that engagement is minimal (e.g., visiting websites) or more extensive (Luna and Luker 2013).

Intervention 2: Confronting Our Fault Lines

As subfields and broader discipline engage in visioning, they must do the continued hard work of confronting—and shifting—how networks shape scholarly knowledge production. In U.S. academia, resources typically flow from departmental prestige (Burris 2004), compounded by friendship and sexual intimacies, which are shaped by gender, race, and class structures. Traditional disciplines like sociology, despite slight demographic changes in the recent decades, remain examples of prototypical White spaces despite slight demographic changes in recent decades (Anderson 2015, Gasman 2016). ³ Many sociologists would likely claim that they abhor segregation, but co-authorships, grant applications, and job networks are deeply structured by racism, sexism, and elitism. ⁴ White sociologists, even when studying people of color (e.g., through research on health disparities, stratified reproduction, segregation, and protest), can be successful in sociology and the academy generally without people of color as instructors, collaborators, interlocutors, article reviewers, or promotion evaluators. I would argue that the reverse is not true.

National borders also shape knowledge production. “Western” sociology, or some would say Global North sociology, dominates intellectual understandings of sociology and has an outsized impact on a variety of intellectual endeavors and other scholarly mechanisms (see Ghassan and Reyes 2024). For example, English-language journals rank higher than non-English-language journals and scholars must know Global North theorists while Global North theorists are not expected to know of theorists from the Global South. U.S. scholars could benefit from attention to how scholars in other countries engage with topics like sexuality and reproduction, whether by attending convenings, reading scholarship, or some other way of learning about how scholars around the world approach their work. For example, in 2024, the Re-worlding Reproduction conference at Pretoria University aimed to “challenge us to rethink the conceptual toolkit of social theory. From where we are situated in Southern Africa, reproduction often remains overdetermined by powerful and moralising frameworks within biomedicine, global health, development, and climate change. This conference presents an opportunity to reconsider US and Eurocentric hegemony in the production of knowledge within reproductive studies” (Re-worlding Reproduction 2024). Statistically, many readers of the Sex and Sexualities journal are part of reproducing “US and Eurocentric hegemony in the production of knowledge within reproductive studies,” which also makes us responsible for reflecting and acting differently when possible. These embodied engagements can aid in reducing problematic claims of representing populations in our research from afar, which typically involve dismissing the knowledge local experts have already produced (Puri et al. 2025).

For English-speaking scholars, understanding why some ideas resonate for certain communities but fail to resonate for other communities could be understood by reading works in other languages or by authors who analyze multi-lingual valences. For example, one study on reproductive justice in Latino immigrant communities goes beyond discussing the limits of “choice” narratives by attending to the specificities of Latino immigrant cultural histories and the implications of the lack of meaningful translation of “pro-choice” in contrast to “reproductive justice” (i.e., justicia reproductiva), which resonates with broader ideas of justice present in Spanish-speaking countries (Onís 2019). While it is laudable for U.S. scholars to insist on decolonial practice and hearing the voices of “the others,” it is a different matter altogether to engage the scholarship produced by scholars working in other languages. Technology could aid in this endeavor. While debates about Artificial Intelligence have understandably centered on the meaning of truth and accuracy for academic knowledge production, as well as negative effects on the climate, AI nonetheless offers some possible remedies for the lack of engagement with non-English-language scholarship. Moreover, some of these remedies will likely become an integrated part of standard software offerings if they are not already. AI can increase the ability to access texts in different languages, offering the opportunity for scholars to learn how national context can contribute to producing different perspectives. As new AI tools are developed, scholars will grapple with well-established human biases that shape technological advances (particularly surveillance practices [Benjamin 2019; Noble 2018]), the ethics of AI use, and the ever-changing guidelines around fair use in academic publication (Khalifa and Albadawiy 2024; Laher 2025). Still, scholars can think critically about how these tools might offer some small patches for our gaping fault lines.

Intervention 3: Connecting the Dots at Our Margins and Solidarities

Reproductive Justice emerged from activists who continued the long decolonial tradition of engaging global social movements. The United States is an empire. Thus, what happens in and through the United States impacts other nations. As Puri et al. (2025:67) argue, “The U.S. and European powers established imperial templates that combined military force with political, economic, and cultural domination, wielding influence across multiple colonies and within their borders. While these older empires persist, newer forms of empire-making increasingly rely on political, cultural, and technological influence.” Domestic social borders and national borders of citizenship are constructs, although they have material consequences and material flows (Açıkgöz 2024). Engaging beyond borders can help interrupt the colonial discourses and practices that pervade scholarship.

Many of the elder founders of the reproductive justice movement—including some who were part of the creation of the phrase—were deeply inspired by participation in international conferences like the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development and the Beijing Conference on women (Luna 2020). Connecting globally was not an accident but part of a solidarity practice. In political theorist Cathy Cohen’s 1997 landmark article, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics,” she makes the key point that we must understand how we are all positioned differently relative to power. Cohen writes, “In narrowly positing a dichotomy of heterosexual privilege and queer oppression under which we all exist, are we negating a basis of political unity that could serve to strengthen many communities and movements seeking justice and societal transformation? How do we use the relative degrees of ostracization all sexual/cultural ‘deviants’ experience to build a basis of unity for broader coalition and movement work?” (Cohen 1997:453). As she explains in the piece, the binary of “queer” versus “heterosexual” doesn’t address marginalization of, for example, straight people of color engaging in non-normative sexual behavior such as single Black mothers who use public assistance and in doing so are vilified by the state, the media, and broader publics. Engaging beyond borders today can and does help us do the work of building a basis for unity that Cohen wrote about almost 30 years ago.

Paying attention to shifting marginalization (and coalition) as Cohen highlights forces us to contend with shifting solidarities as we engage in complex practices. Scholars have excavated long histories of reproductive control (Roberts 1999). Some changes in access to legal rights (e.g., gay marriage), for example, can generate celebration, but also spark debates about assimilation and power (Duggan 2002; Engle and Lyly 2021). Similar concerns about power arise when we consider reproductive debt, an idea I introduce to describe the web of cultural pressures and policies that compel people to have children to be viewed as a successful person. Some people (i.e., the more economically and racially powerful groups) are expected to reproduce and are in “reproductive debt” until they do so (Luna 2025). While more-resourced White, straight, people without children have historically faced social pressure for not paying their appropriate reproductive debt to society, lower-income parents, teenage parents, and other people who “shouldn’t” have children are blamed for supposedly creating massive debt through their reproduction (e.g., as highlighted in 1996 via U.S. welfare reform). Queer people in same-sex partnerships, while historically assumed to be uninterested in paying reproductive debt, are developing nuclear families with the aid of technology, thereby paying reproductive debt while sometimes shoring up traditional ideals of family (Pfeffer 2017). These changes have, in turn, raised questions about what it means to be in solidarity with marginalized reproducers because of unequal relationships of power—especially when reproduction occurs via a global marketplace. For example, one of the tensions raised by newer reproductive technologies is how they can allow wealthier consumers to purchase the bodily products of egg donors and surrogates in other countries to form families (Mamo 2007; Rudrappa 2015; Smietana, Thompson, and Twine 2018). In these cases, it is typically poorer women in other countries (and the United States) who help heterosexual couples, same-sex couples, or single parents live out their reproductive dreams, but we must not pretend that the unequal power relationships do not create reproductive nightmare for other people.

Inequalities involving people and power operate in other ways that are important for us to think about as we reflect on how lessons from RJ and other critical approaches can help us improve our practices. As journalist Steven Thrasher notes in reflecting on continuities between HIV and COVID-19 trajectories: “When we follow the virus—any virus, really—we follow the fault line of our culture” (Thrasher 2022:5). Structural inequalities—both conceptual and physical—place some groups in closer proximity to negative consequences of those fault lines (Thrasher 2022). Thrasher later explains, “Despite the fact that these are very different viruses, with very different properties, lifespans and modes of transmission, they afflict alarmingly alike populations especially in the United States: Black people, Native Americans, poor people, and people who are unhoused or incarcerated. Viruses impact a disturbingly similar group regardless of any pathogens” (Thrasher 2022:11, emphasis in original). These pathways of inequality have far-reaching effects as U.S. researchers and companies influence the advancement of knowledge and technology across a range of applications—from vaccines to in vitro fertilization. Similarly, U.S. crises influence knowledge production in our subfields while simultaneously pointing to the necessity of learning from how colleagues elsewhere have managed threats to their intellectual production, bodies, and lives.

Intervention 4: Community Building

Finally, we will need to consider how processes of building spaces to convene often emerge from interpretive communities (Hancock 2016) and strive to create new ones. Many scholars have illuminated the ways that the U.S. academy is life-draining for people of color, gender expansive people, and scholars born outside of the United States, among others (Muhs et al. 2012, Reyes 2022, Whitaker and Grollman 2018).

Reproductive justice can guide the way here as RJ is a life-building opportunity, rather than a reactive endeavor. As noted by Regina Davis Moss of In Our Own Voice: Black Reproductive Justice Agenda coalition, “Reproductive justice is not just a policy framework . . . .it is a way of life” (In Our Own Voice 2025). By attending to RJ’s emphasis on relationship building, interlocutors at conferences, invite-only events, and other types of convenings, can also become interlocuters on the page. Gatherings like academic workshops can generate knowledge sharing far beyond the initial physical space. These can be convenings that result in a special issue (e.g., the 2016 symposium, “Making Families: Transnational Surrogacy, Queer Kinship, and Reproductive Justice” that brought together international scholars and resulted in the 2018 special issue of Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online (Smietana et al. 2018)) or mini conferences that welcome newer scholars to engage in ongoing conversations and expand their networks (e.g., the American Sociological Association 2024 pre-conference Reproductive Futures: Theory, Innovation, and Justice in the Sociology of Reproduction where multiple senior scholars offered candid reflections on their challenges in the field) or other configurations. While these examples are not the same as reproductive justice movement spaces produced by people of color, they offer elements of examples of positive ways to slightly shift typical academic relationships. Cultivating community, academic or otherwise, is often a continuous practice of unrecognized physical and emotional labor. Yet, activists have offered roadmaps for how people engaged in this work can also derive pleasure (Brown 2019) and hold each other accountable (Brown 2024) when we inevitably make mistakes.

Conclusion

With a constantly changing political backdrop made even more unpredictable by Donald Trump’s re-election, continuing to conduct research in isolated pockets will continue to result in missed opportunities for transformative engagement. For our scholarship to move forward, we need to connect the dots in our analysis of how bodies and resources move differentially in the academy. Further, while social movement spaces can provide some models for change, it is necessary to note that the academy, unlike social movements, is not inherently about disrupting deeply entrenched inequalities and shifting power; and still, an increasing number of sociologists in our subfields are committing to doing so. This work is cross-generational and takes diligence beyond what some of us will live to see. Despite this challenge, sociologists have increasingly attended to joy, pleasure, and fun to do sociology and disrupt the status quo (Abrutyn 2025; Combs 2023, Jones 2025; Luna et al. 2024; Shuster and Westbrook 2024; Winder and Otta 2025), which has long been a part of the philosophy of activist communities, including those organizing for reproductive justice. As foreshadowed by the reproductive justice convening excerpt that I opened this article with, I contend that bringing subfields together with a new vision that offers dignity for all can and should engender fun, pleasure, and joy even as it means committing to intensive groundwork. We will need these joyful experiences to sustain our work, academically and otherwise, for many years to come.