Queering Kinship

This book examines the dynamic understandings and practices of same-sex intimacies, queer parenting, and queer family making in urban Guangdong, China. 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? Based on yearlong ethnographic fieldwork, this book explores the various tactics queer people employ to have children and to form queer or ‘rainbow’ families. It unpacks people’s experiences of cultivating, or losing, kinship relations through their negotiation with biological relatives, cultural conventions, and state legislations. It argues that non-heterosexual people’s tactics of forming and sustaining mutuality/jiban in their loving and parenting relationships both reproduce and transgress assumptions about ‘blood and biology’ and its centrality in the knowledge of kinship, in that way also blurring the symbolic distinctiveness of blood kin and queer relations. Through its analysis, the book offers a new ethnographic perspective for queer studies and the anthropology of kinship.