8 Keeping it in the Family: Debating the Bio-Intimacy ... 201turn to an analysis of the Danish and Swedish debates on UT and note
how UT becomes a replacement in body parts enabling Anna to, once
again, become fully (re)productive, an exemplar of what Rose ( 2007 )
calls optimisation and enhancement involving the promise of a hopeful
future. Based on the empirical material, we highlight three discourses
that all centre the bio-intimacy of the existing family-kinship structure.
The fact that the Swedish UTx project employs healthy and, in sev-
eral cases, biologically related and older female donors, is not only
medically ground-breaking but grants, in the stories, the uterus new
biovalue (Waldby 2000 ). Here the uterus departs from its status as an
idle, non-reproductive organ to becoming a family property and a gen-
eration builder of sorts. Brännström comments upon this in an inter-
view to the Associated Press following the first birth of a baby born
from the grandmother’s uterus, saying ‘It’s one uterus bridging three
generations of a family’ (Associated Press 2015 ). In this story, a photo
displaying a baby surrounded by two women (presumably the new
mother and grandmother) reiterates the grandmother’s decision as
immediate yet governed by affects of gratitude and love: ‘was crying and
told her I loved her and thank you for doing this’, the mother recounts
(Associated Press 2015 ). While the grandmother is described as a
‘proud’ woman in her mid-fifties, her surgery is defined as technically
complicated involving the cutting and re-activating of major arteries
and veins—a surgical triumph yet also a form of bio-intimacy in which
the mother-daughter bond is re-naturalised and extended to include a
‘special’ bond between the grandmother and the newborn grandson: ‘It’s
a big thing and he and his grandmother will have this bond for the rest
of their lives’ (Associated Press 2015 ). Moreover, the bio-intimacy rela-
tion is extended to that of the doctor–patient relation in choosing to
give the baby the name Mats (Bränströmm’s first name) as its middle
name.
The bio-intimacy of UT restores a particular straight temporal-
ity in the production of one’s own children including that of a uni-
fied, maternal reproductive body. In her account, Anna recalls the loss
of her uterus as involving the loss of a particular temporality, what
queer scholar Judith Jack Halberstam terms ‘the time of reproduction’
( 2005 : 5): finishing school, getting a 7 to 4 kind of job, and building