Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan

By Amy Brainer

SERIES: Families in Focus

Rutgers University Press

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.

Brilliantly researched and elegantly written, Brainer’s study infuses the campaign for equality with a human flavor. We are treated to first-hand accounts of the pressures from coming out and carrying on the family, parenting and cross-generational conflicts, class normativity, and sibling relations. Anchored by Taiwan’s millennial turn, this timely and moving book unveils how integral natal families are to queer individuals’ personal fulfillment and aspiration for social change.' Howard Chiang, author of After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China

Brainer adds new insights about the ways that queer Asians, specifically Taiwanese, negotiate alternative sexualities and genders within a family context and how members of their families help in this negotiation.’ Chong-suk Han, author of Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gayasian American

A milestone in the understanding of queer kinship, getting family-of-origin experiences into its core, this book takes the reader through a fascinating travel into queer family lives while providing an insightful, decolonising questioning of current meanings of silence and disclosure, choice and responsibility. Chiara Bertone, coeditor of Queerying Families of Origin

Recommended. Choice

WBEZ 'Worldview' 'Same-Sex Marriage Legalized in Taiwan' interview with Amy Brainer WBEZ "Worldview"

It is easy to understand why this book won the Ruth Benedict Prize for outstanding contributions to anthropology on LGBT topics: Brainer’s documentation of queer relationships in Taiwanese families successfully challenges the models that have long framed queer subjectivity as a process of individualization....Brainer’s analysis of queer possibilities across an interconnected life course raises important questions for scholars of gender and kinship. Anthropology & Aging

Brilliantly researched and elegantly written, Brainer’s study infuses the campaign for equality with a human flavor. We are treated to first-hand accounts of the pressures from coming out and carrying on the family, parenting and cross-generational conflicts, class normativity, and sibling relations. Anchored by Taiwan’s millennial turn, this timely and moving book unveils how integral natal families are to queer individuals’ personal fulfillment and aspiration for social change.' Howard Chiang, author of After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China

Brainer adds new insights about the ways that queer Asians, specifically Taiwanese, negotiate alternative sexualities and genders within a family context and how members of their families help in this negotiation.’ Chong-suk Han, author of Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gayasian American

A milestone in the understanding of queer kinship, getting family-of-origin experiences into its core, this book takes the reader through a fascinating travel into queer family lives while providing an insightful, decolonising questioning of current meanings of silence and disclosure, choice and responsibility. Chiara Bertone, coeditor of Queerying Families of Origin

Recommended. Choice

WBEZ 'Worldview' 'Same-Sex Marriage Legalized in Taiwan' interview with Amy Brainer WBEZ "Worldview"

It is easy to understand why this book won the Ruth Benedict Prize for outstanding contributions to anthropology on LGBT topics: Brainer’s documentation of queer relationships in Taiwanese families successfully challenges the models that have long framed queer subjectivity as a process of individualization....Brainer’s analysis of queer possibilities across an interconnected life course raises important questions for scholars of gender and kinship. Anthropology & Aging

AMY BRAINER is an assistant professor of women's and gender studies and sociology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

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