Description
Book SynopsisProvides a theoretical analysis of how Asian migration and diaspora support the consolidation of gay and lesbian family and intimacy in our colorblind age, and develops a poststructuralist account of kinship.
Trade Review“
The Feeling of Kinship is a timely examination of the persistence of racial and national differentiation within the privileged investments of ‘queer liberalism’ in its particular focus on the rights to affective union in domesticity, privacy, and family. Here, as elsewhere, David L. Eng demonstrates his gifts of critical precision and elegant presentation.”—
Lisa Lowe, University of California, San Diego
“Spanning psychoanalysis, law, and aesthetics, and reading richly and with passion, David L. Eng's
The Feeling of Kinship looks at transnational adoption as an exemplary scene of contemporary intimacy in the United States. This is a fearless book that knows and feels what it means to have to defend oneself from the ‘liberal’ place in which one lives; what it means racially, sexually, and legally to have to be defensive in a nation that identifies itself with freedom.”—
Lauren Berlant, author of
The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American CultureTable of ContentsPreface ix
Introduction: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy 1
1. The Law of Kinship:
Lawrence v. Texas and the Emergence of Queer Liberalism 23
2. The Structure of Kinship: The Art of Waiting in
The Book of Salt and
Happy Together 58
3. The Language of Kinship: Transnational Adoption and Two Mothers in
First Person Plural 93
4. The Prospect of Kinship: Transnational Adoption and Racial Reparation (with Shinhee Han, Ph.D.) 138
5. The Feeling of Kinship: Affect and Language in
History and Memory 166
Notes 199
Bibliography 225
Index 239
