206 C. Kroløkke and M.N. Petersen
organisations have been quiet, but the question about gay male repro-
ductive citizenship has emerged in the Danish debates in relation to nar-
ratives about gay couples, who have had children or who dream about
having children through surrogacy. Surrogacy enables such a citizenship
project, as voiced by the neoliberal discourse in particular. The bio-inti-
mate economy of altruism frames this project within an already scripted
heteronormative kinship-making structure. Although UT is not debated
as a citizenship project, the technology is re-situated as a form of patient
rights combined with the right to motherhood through the replacement
of the uterus as a necessary organ and the renaturalisation of mother-
hood. Although highly complicated, the technology of UT appears less
ethically problematic than surrogacy. Where surrogacy emerges as a dis-
turbance, if not a destruction, of the heteronormative bio-intimacy of
procreation, and thereafter becomes stabilised in the promise of altru-
ism and the following re-organising of the unified family, UT emerges as
already embedded within the heteronormative bio-intimacy of altruism
and the promise of keeping reproduction within the family.
Uterine exchanges reveal how new links are continually made
between reproduction/medicine/commerce and underscore how
reproduction, and the struggle over cultural meanings, is always
political. Whereas the uterus in UT cases gets positioned as vacant
and potentially going to waste (Bharadwaj 2012 ), when extracted
or employed by the recipient woman, the uterus is recycled in what
comes to be understood as a meaningful way. Uterine exchanges
involve what Bharadwaj ( 2012 ) refers to as a supplemental detour.
In the case of UT, the supplemental detour necessitates the perma-
nent removal of an organ, which is temporarily (and for a maxi-
mum of two pregnancies) positioned in another female recipient kin
body—keeping reproduction within the recognisable genetic bio-
intimate encounter of the (extended) family. In cases of commercial
surrogacy, the surrogate (not only the uterus but the whole person)
is positioned as a temporary substitute or proxy (Bharadwaj 2012 ).
Whereas the uterus, in UT cases, is temporarily transplanted for
a maximum of two pregnancies and then extracted and discarded;
in commercial surrogacy cases, the supplement surrogate mother is
erased. Her supplemental body is employed for the gestational time
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