Gay Fathers, Their Children, and the Making of Kinship

Aaron Goodfellow

Published by Fordham University Press 2015

Gay Fathers, Their Children, and the Making of Kinship

Aaron Goodfellow

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823266067

Overview
Contents

About this book

Gay Fathers, Their Children and the Making of Kinship’ explores the status of fatherhood when paternity can no longer be tied to procreative sex. It addresses how the anxiety associated with securing the paternal relation is assuaged when the biological anchors that commonly assure paternity are not readily available.

Author / Editor information

Goodfellow Aaron :

Aaron Goodfellow is an independent scholar living in Vermont and the former director of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

Reviews

—Sameena Mulla:
“Gay Fathers, Their Children, and the Making of Kinship is beautifully written, meticulously argued, and painstakingly theorized. Goodfellow demonstrates a mastery of a wide range of theoretical literature, bringing anthropology into conversation with philosophy and invigorating very longstanding debates in anthropology with new insight. This is the most innovative book on kinship since Schneider’s American Kinship.”

—Eric Fassin:
“Queer kinship is far from ‘virtually normal’: it remains uncanny. Aaron Goodfellow’s in-depth study of gay fathers gives voices and faces to these precarious families. Individual stories illustrate how these men painfully strive to embody norms that leave them at the threshold of family life.”

—Veena Das:
Gay Fathers, their Children, and the Making of Kinship is a profound contemplation on the forms of queer sociality in contemporary North America. The portraits of gay fathers and their children lead us, slowly but steadily, into an understanding of how gay men open themselves to an education into what it is to be related and thereby give expression to the uncanny in kinship. What does it take for some who stand in a diagonal relation to law to heal the wounds that are inflicted by law on their forms of intimacy? And how does a son learn to recognize his own father as gay in this scene of instruction where he foregoes the comfort of a ready made appeal to identity politics and instead embraces the indeterminate space of relearning what he already sensed? Is this, perhaps, a description of ethnography as a way of unlearning the concepts we had become too comfortable with? A brilliant book that gets its power from the profoundly understated theoretical claims which nevertheless take your breath away.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Introduction: Uncanny Kinship Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Sensing Kinship Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	30
2. Voicing Kinship Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	55
3. Suffering Kinship Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	90
4. Inheriting Kinship Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	124
5. Precarious Kinship Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Pages
- Main content: 192
Keywords: Kinship; Intimacy; Fatherhood; sexuality; Family; Gay; LGBTQ; Queer

eBook

Published: June 1, 2015
ISBN: 9780823266067