Synopses & Reviews
In
The Feeling of Kinship, David L. Eng investigates the emergence of andldquo;queer liberalismandrdquo;andmdash;the empowerment of certain gays and lesbians in the United States, economically through an increasingly visible and mass-mediated queer consumer lifestyle, and politically through the legal protection of rights to privacy and intimacy. Eng argues that in our andldquo;colorblindandrdquo; age the emergence of queer liberalism is a particular incarnation of liberal freedom and progress, one constituted by both the racialization of intimacy and the forgetting of race. Through a startling reading of
Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark legal decision overturning Texasandrsquo;s antisodomy statute, Eng reveals how the ghosts of miscegenation haunt both
Lawrence and the advent of queer liberalism.
Eng develops the concept of andldquo;queer diasporasandrdquo; as a critical response to queer liberalism. A methodology drawing attention to new forms of family and kinship, accounts of subjects and subjectivities, and relations of affect and desire, the concept differs from the traditional notions of diaspora, theories of the nation-state, and principles of neoliberal capitalism upon which queer liberalism thrives. Eng analyzes films, documentaries, and literature by Asian and Asian American artists including Wong Kar-wai, Monique Truong, Deann Borshay Liem, and Rea Tajiri, as well as a psychoanalytic case history of a transnational adoptee from Korea. In so doing, he demonstrates how queer Asian migrant labor, transnational adoption from Asia, and the political and psychic legacies of Japanese internment underwrite narratives of racial forgetting and queer freedom in the present. A focus on queer diasporas also highlights the need for a poststructuralist account of family and kinship, one offering psychic alternatives to Oedipal paradigms. The Feeling of Kinship makes a major contribution to American studies, Asian American studies, diaspora studies, psychoanalysis, and queer theory.
Review
andldquo;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 andlsquo;liberalandrsquo; 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.andrdquo;andmdash;Lauren Berlant, author of The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture
Review
andldquo;The Feeling of Kinship is a timely examination of the persistence of racial and national differentiation within the privileged investments of andlsquo;queer liberalismandrsquo; 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.andrdquo;andmdash;Lisa Lowe, University of California, San Diego
Synopsis
Explores the material and psychic impact of Asian transnational and queer social movements on family and kinship in the late twentieth-century.
Synopsis
Provides 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.
About the Author
David L. Eng is Professor in the Department of English, the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America, also published by Duke University Press, and a co-editor of Loss: The Politics of Mourning and QandA: Queer in Asian America.