Queering Chinese Kinship

What does it mean to be queer in a Confucian society in which kinship roles, ties, and ideologies are of such great importance? This book makes sense of queer cultures in China—a country with one of the largest queer populations in the world—and offers an alternative to Euro-American blueprints of queer individual identity. This book contends that kinship relations must be understood as central to any expression of queer selfhood and culture in contemporary cultural production in China. Using a critical approach—“queering Chinese kinship”—Lin Song scrutinizes the relationship between queerness and family relations, and questions Eurocentric queer culture’s frequent assumption of the separation of queerness from blood family. Offering five case studies of queer representations across a range of media genres, this book also challenges the tendency in current scholarship on Chinese and East Asian queerness to understand queer cultures as predominantly counter-mainstream, marginal, and underground. Shedding light on the representations of queerness and kinship in independent and subcultural as well as commercial and popular cultural products, the book presents a more comprehensive picture of queerness and kinship in flux and highlights queer politics as an integral part of contemporary Chinese public culture. “The book makes a strong contribution to Asian queer studies through an in-depth theorization of queer kinship in the Chinese context, a comprehensive coverage of different types of queer media and popular culture, and an innovative discussion of homonormativity in the context of contemporary China. In a fast-developing and very competitive academic field, this book stands out as an important contribution.” —Hongwei Bao, University of Nottingham “Queering Chinese Kinship represents the cutting edge of Chinese queer studies. Its sophisticated media analyses and provocative theoretical contentions reveal two central paradoxes: the interdependence of queerness and kinship despite China’s notoriously homophobic patriarchal familism, and the flourishing of queer public culture in spite of its infamously restrictive media environment. Brilliantly demonstrating how queer possibility emerges through a confluence of familial, media, state, and market forces, this book is a joy to read and a major contribution to the field.” —Fran Martin, University of Melbourne

In Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities, John Wei brings light to the germination and movements of queer cultures and social practices in today's China and Sinophone Asia. While many scholars attribute China's emergent queer cultures to the neoliberal turn and the global political landscape, Wei refuses to take these assumptions for granted. He finds that the values and pitfalls of the development-induced mobilities and post-development syndromes have conjointly structured and sustained people's ongoing longings and sufferings under the dual pressure of compulsory familism and compulsory development. While young gay men are increasingly mobilized in their decision-making to pursue sociocultural and socioeconomic capital to afford a queer life, the ubiquitous and compulsory mobilities have significantly reshaped and redefined today's queer kinship structure, transnational cultural network, and social stratification in China and capitalist Asia. With Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities, Wei interrogates the meanings and functions of mobilities at the forefront of China's internal transformation and international expansion for its great dream of revival, when gender and sexuality have become increasingly mobilized with geographical, cultural, and social class migrations and mobilizations beyond traditional and conventional frameworks, categories, and boundaries.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Guangdong, China, this book asks: what does it mean for Chinese non-heterosexual people to go against existing state regulations and societal norms to form a desirable and legible queer family? Chapters explore the various tactics queer people employ to have children and to form queer or ‘rainbow’ families. The book unpacks people’s experiences of cultivating, or losing, kinship relations through their negotiation with biological relatives, cultural conventions and state legislations. Through its analysis, the book offers a new ethnographic perspective for queer studies and anthropology of kinship.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Guangdong, China, this book asks: what does it mean for Chinese non-heterosexual people to go against existing state regulations and societal norms to form a desirable and legible queer family? Chapters explore the various tactics queer people employ to have children and to form queer or ‘rainbow’ families. The book unpacks people’s experiences of cultivating, or losing, kinship relations through their negotiation with biological relatives, cultural conventions and state legislations. Through its analysis, the book offers a new ethnographic perspective for queer studies and anthropology of kinship.

First published in 1983. Professor Paul Chao writes Chinese Kinship in the line of the Chinese tradition; it is in this tradition that cultural complexes, such as family structure and kinship in relation to religious, political and economic organizations, are expounded by analysis of concepts and supported by historical documents. For the anthropological study of kinship is indispensable as a supplement to important historical work on basis of written documents. Professor Chao has made, in the main, a study of kinship in China of all known periods. He has taken the points of view of social anthropology and has also given a history of his topic.

Includes bibliographical references.

The contributors to this volume assert the importance of queer kinship to queer and trans theory and to kinship theory. In a contemporary moment marked by the rising tides of neoliberalism, fascism, xenophobia, and homo- and cis-nationalism, they approach kinship as both a horizon and a source of violence and possibility. The contributors challenge dominant theories of kinship that ignore the devastating impacts of chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and racialized nationalism on the bonds of Black and Indigenous people and people of color. Among other topics, they examine the “blood tie” as the legal marker of kin relations, the everyday experiences and memories of trans mothers and daughters in Istanbul, the outsourcing of reproductive labor in postcolonial India, kinship as a model of governance beyond the liberal state, and the intergenerational effects of the adoption of Indigenous children as a technology of settler colonialism. Queer Kinship pushes the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of queer theory forward while opening up new paths for studying kinship. Contributors. Aqdas Aftab, Leah Claire Allen, Tyler Bradway, Juliana Demartini Brito, Judith Butler, Dilara Çalışkan, Christopher Chamberlin, Aobo Dong, Brigitte Fielder, Elizabeth Freeman, John S. Garrison, Nat Hurley, Joseph M. Pierce, Mark Rifkin, Poulomi Saha, Kath Weston

Winner of the 2019 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Single-Authored Monograph Interweaving the narratives of multiple family members, including parents and siblings of her queer and trans informants, Amy Brainer analyzes the strategies that families use to navigate their internal differences. In Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan, Brainer looks across generational cohorts for clues about how larger social, cultural, and political shifts have materialized in people’s everyday lives. Her findings bring light to new parenting and family discourses and enduring inequalities that shape the experiences of queer and heterosexual kin alike. Brainer’s research takes her from political marches and support group meetings to family dinner tables in cities and small towns across Taiwan. She speaks with parents and siblings who vary in whether and to what extent they have made peace with having a queer or transgender family member, and queer and trans people who vary in what they hope for and expect from their families of origin. Across these diverse life stories, Brainer uses a feminist materialist framework to illuminate struggles for personal and sexual autonomy in the intimate context of family and home.