On reproductive straightening: Pronatalism, privatization, and queer kin in South Korea

In this article, I examine the heteronormative political and economic consequences of demographic anxieties and pronatalist governance in South Korea and beyond. As economic instability contributes to intergenerational dependence, declining marriages, and low fertility rates in many locations, South Korea’s dramatic case has brought the state to undertake pronatalist policies that tie welfare to heterosexual marriage and parenting. I propose a framework of demographic queering and reproductive straightening to account for how increasingly non-reproductive populations become “queered” in relation to heteronormative ideas of adulthood, and “straightened” through the market incentives of pronatalist policies in return. Building on ethnographic research with queer communities in Korea, I examine how this situation privatizes and constrains queer kinship, caregiving, and reproduction. I suggest that these developments not only ask us to rethink marriage and neoliberalism in queer and feminist theory, but also the political relationships between queer identifying and structurally queered populations.