The Sofa (ca. 1894–96) | Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec / The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Public Domain
In her forthcoming book Reproductive Justice, Queerly (University of California Press, 2026), Carly Thomsen, a feminist and queer studies scholar, looks at how language deployed in the name of queerness and reproductive justice can end up reinforcing the very structures it is meant to challenge. She warns of “conservative outcomes” wherein terms change but existing norms around family, care, and responsibility stay largely intact. Drawing on her broader humanities work, Thomsen asks how this slippage happens, where the limits of inclusive or gender-neutral language show up most clearly, and what it might actually take—both politically and in practice—to push these frameworks toward something more transformative. As Thomsen discusses in an interview with Gil Bittner, this work extends beyond the page, as Thomsen collaborates with students on interactive, public-facing humanities projects, including a reproductive justice minigolf course and art installations that translate these questions into collective, participatory experiences. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Gil Bittner: You suggest that invocations of queerness and reproductive justice can reproduce conservative assumptions. What are pervasive examples of that slippage, and how do you talk about it in your book?
Carly Thomsen: Reproductive Justice, Queerly is asking us to think critically about moments where discourses of queerness are employed, but the outcome of those discourses is rather conservative. The language of queerness often makes it more difficult to see that what people are arguing and advocating for, is, in fact, just a slight deviation from a deeply heteronormative status quo. Each chapter looks at different things, all of which I would consider typical reproductive justice issues, like surrogacy, paid parental leave, abortion, crisis pregnancy centers, et cetera, and then brings a queer theoretical approach to those topics.
Reproductive justice is a framework that was developed by Black women in the 1990s in Chicago, and what we’re seeing now is the language of queerness and the language of reproductive justice merging. The unlikely and unintended consequence is that men are being centered in conversations about reproductive justice (now, some of those men are gay and some of those men are trans). We’re seeing a shift away from the kinds of imperatives that Black women in the 1990s were naming as central to address, and instead we’re getting a kind of performative, discursive call.
There’s very little attention to materiality. Take paid family/parental leave. It’s assumed to be universally good, and shifting terms from “maternity” to “parental” is treated as a win. For most people who lack any leave, this linguistic shift changes nothing; it mainly allows those already covered to feel self‑righteous: “Look at what we’re doing. We’re acknowledging that maybe there are two men who are parents.” Maybe there are men who are stay‑at‑home dads, and they would be the primary caregiver and take leave. But accommodating two dads or a stay‑at‑home father is only a slight deviation from the norm; it isn’t “queer” in any transformative sense. A queerer move would disconnect paid leave from biological/nuclear family reproduction altogether.
I’m saying where infrastructure for paid parental leave already exists, repurpose it to support social reproduction—the wider labor of life‑making that happens beyond the nuclear family.
It would be beneficial for us to further collectivize care work, but also to give resources for that collectivization, right?
Let people take paid leave to seed community care: to collectivize, resource, and recognize care work already happening outside families.
Take leave to launch a community garden that feeds anyone; train in massage therapy and provide free monthly care; organize a neighborhood snow‑plow collective. That’s reproductive justice, queered—material redistribution and collective care—rather than new language for the same family‑centric policy. We don’t just need new language to talk about the same problems. This is not queer, right?
Bittner: Your work includes collaborative projects with students, such as creating a reproductive justice-themed minigolf course and art installations responding to crisis pregnancy centers. How do those forms expand what it means to do reproductive justice queerly in ways academic writing alone can’t?
Thomsen: I am committed to public humanities and public feminism because this work can reach people that academic writing doesn’t. Access to academic spaces is limited, and even within them, feminist and queer studies are often sidelined. So we need alternative approaches.
Projects like the crisis pregnancy center exhibit and the reproductive justice mini‑golf course weren’t translations of finished ideas; they co‑evolved with the book and shaped it. Knowledge didn’t flow from “expert to public”; it circulated.
In the two and a half weeks it was open, roughly 1,600 people played the minigolf course [and] more than 3,200 unique visitors engaged with the companion website. And who doesn’t like minigolf? It allows people to be invited in and to be surprised. The people who showed up to reproductive justice minigolf are not the same people who are going to pick up Reproductive Justice, Queerly, right? We need more spaces for scholars and students alike to practice public humanities.
Bittner: You argue that queer theory and reproductive justice need each other now more than ever. What does “doing reproductive justice queerly” look like in practice? Method, politics, analytic stance—what form does it take?
Thomsen: It’s all of those: method, politics, analytic—and crucially, collaborative. It needs to move beyond the academy and engage students. With my undergraduate research assistants, we asked how the project could be as queer in form as in content, imagining the book as one piece of a broader, collaborative project.
Students hosted queer art nights where participants read draft chapters, discussed them, and transformed the conversations into art (collage, watercolor, zines). The images became a way to show what resonated with younger readers and made it easier [for them] to give me feedback.
It also moved queer theory beyond course schedules into communal spaces with snacks and making—low‑barrier, public, and fun.
It kept the work lively, spread ideas beyond our six‑person team, and the art appears in the book. The conclusion includes a roundtable with two research assistants to reflect that collaborative process. This process also reminded us that the things we’d been working on for a couple of years were still new and exciting to people hearing them for the first time.
Bittner: What surprised you most while writing—either in research or your own thinking? It seems like this is a topic you had really grounded knowledge in, but you were getting a lot of community feedback.
Thomsen: I expected one chapter to be highly controversial: my critique of the shift from talking about abortion in terms of “women” to gender‑neutral terms like “pregnant people,” “patients,” et cetera. I’m challenging this discursive shift that we’re seeing called for in more left‑leaning, liberal, progressive reproductive justice spaces and queer and trans spaces—to move away from discussing abortion in terms of women to using more so‑called gender‑neutral or gender‑inclusive language, such as “pregnant patients,” “pregnant people,” “callers,” “people who obtain abortions.”
My reasons: We must distinguish roots from ramifications. The root of anti-abortion ideology is misogyny. Transphobia is, of course, dangerous and something we all need to be committed to eradicating. But transphobia is not what animates abortion bans. In fact, many conservatives deny that transness exists. Now, reproductive justice advocates could and should do more to address trans health disparities—but switching to so-called gender inclusive language neither reduces those disparities nor advances abortion rights. It’s easy, symbolic, and and often self-congratulatory. We need commitments to material change, not celebrations of minimal tweaks.
Surprisingly, students with a background in gender/queer studies didn’t find this argument controversial; those without that background did. It turns out that most people could be convinced of this position through talking it out with other people.
The more interesting surprise was how many people approached me privately to say, I’ve thought this for years but was afraid to say it publicly, or noted their organizations were fracturing over these exact language debates.
Bittner: What conversations do you hope the book disrupts, and what new ones do you want it to start?
Thomsen: I hope the book interrupts reflexive celebrations of symbolic change—moments when people feel decisively leftist/queer/feminist—and invites a pause: could we advocate for something more radical, more material, than we assume possible? To think beyond circulating discourse to the material transformations social justice requires. I hope that it encourages people to pause and reflect.
And I hope it serves as an example of scholarship as public, collaborative practice: students and faculty moving ideas into the world through creative, accessible forms—exhibits, games, installations—without waiting to have the perfect skills or credentials. I’m not a formally trained artist. But I am crafty. I think I have a good eye, and I’m into design and aesthetics. But I don’t have any formal training in being a curator. You just have to—I don’t know—care. And believe enough that doing activism differently is possible, and be willing to put the work in to see that difference transpire.
