In recent decades, a number of jurisdictions have moved towards more open practices in donor conception, including legislating for the rights of donor-conceived people to trace their donor. In such contexts, the donor’s role is ambivalent. They are not expected to enact a parental role in relation to people conceived from their donation. However, they are expected to ‘be available’ for some form of relationship. Our UK-based research found that donors typically navigate these dual obligations by articulating a moral commitment to ‘following the lead’ of the families they help to create and particularly the people conceived from their donation. In this chapter, we illustrate how sperm and egg donors imagine and enact this commitment but also show that it is easier to say than to do. The embedded nature of donors’ personal lives and relationships create challenges in letting others decide their role in relation to recipient families.

The early days of sociolinguistic research were dominated by theories of language variation as correlations between linguistic variables and sociolinguistic factors including age, gender, class, and ethnicity, among others. Years later, Milroy and Milroy questioned these categories’ explanatory power, proposing Social Network Theory as superior for the study of social groups and relational networks. The basic unit of analysis was thus transferred from social structures to individual and sociocultural identification. Subsequently, linguists studying identity in groups have resorted to a newer concept, that of Community of Practice (Lave & Wenger 1991; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992; 1999). This shift in focus opened the door to sociopragmatic analysis via the observation of interactions and the strategies by which interactants self-identified. In this chapter we overview the progression of these approaches, concentrating on the present-day view that social groups necessarily entail concepts of identity (personal, social and relational).In so doing, we explore current theories and research in sociopragmatics regarding the connection between social groupings, identity and relational networks.