ABSTRACT
This chapter opens a conversation among theories of (trans)gender subjectivity and embodiment in Taiwan, such questions as those posed provocatively by Freeman and Butler, and the analytic potential of “transing” across kinship and family studies. Specifically, the chapter asks: Are there ways to imagine perverse or alternative genders not as abstracted from or always at odds with kinship and family, but embedded within, articulated through, and transformative of these modes of social organization and relatedness? What do transgender standpoints contribute to the study of patrilineal kinship and family change in Taiwan? On another side of the same coin, how can kinship studies deepen our knowledge of queer and transgender subjectivities, beyond the description of family as a site of struggle and oppression (although it is often that, too)? In the areas of kinship and family studies in Taiwan, a rich and ever-growing body of scholarship seeks to understand how political, economic, social, and cultural changes influence, for example, sex, pleasure, love, relationships, reproduction, and kin obligations.1 Yet the larger frameworks of heterosexuality and sex/ gender congruency remain patently underexamined in the family literature. Meanwhile, efforts to queer kinship within the social sciences mainly focus on the relationships forged among queer individuals and whether and how these are discernible as new family forms. Such approaches engage “kinship proper” primarily as a foil or as a site of rupture from which queer family projects manage to depart. While recognizing the value of such disruptions, this chapter takes a different approach, delving into more “traditional” modes of kinship to see how gender and family are co-constituted in ways that also enable transgen-
der possibilities. Writing about female homoeroticism in India, Gayatri Gopinath notes that it is “precisely within the cracks and fissures of rigidly heteronormative arrangements that queer female desire can emerge” (2005, 153). In a similar spirit, this chapter examines transgender desire and embodiment as it emerges from the cracks and fissures of normative gender and family arrangements existing in Taiwan in the early twenty-first century. My analysis is grounded in a conceptualization of gender and kinship as mutually constructing relational processes. Returning to the conversation Elizabeth Freeman opened between kinship theory and queer theory (building here on Gayle Rubin’s now canonical definition of a sex/gender system), “Kinship makes bodies not only (or not even primarily) through procreation, but also through the process of gendering them male or female” (2008, 301). As I will show, this process of gendering renders kinship not merely an obstruction to transgender existence, but also, at times, an instrument of transformation and gender subversion. Theories of kinship as performative, flexible, and processual have entered Chinese and Taiwanese family studies as well, although their reception in these fields was initially somewhat slower than in other areas of family research (Yan 2001). Yunxiang Yan attributes this lag to the construction of Chinese kinship as overdetermined by Confucianism and formalist approaches to patrilineal descent. New approaches to kinship studies, particularly those that are sensitive to Schneider’s (1984) paradigm-changing critique of the field, generally emphasize the turn toward processual kinship and everyday practice as a departure from more static conceptualizations of descent and genealogy. For Yan, as for others working to unmoor family scholarship from a “traditional Chinese family” shown to exist in an orientalist imaginary more than in any empirical or material sense, this includes departure from a specific overemphasis on the patriline.2 In the following pages, I expand on this position to show how patrilineal descent is itself socially accomplished and negotiated. Of the many overlapping sites where such negotiations occur, I have chosen to focus on family rituals, cross-generational care work, and shifting relational categories, or what I describe as “family transition,” as these unfold within a narrative of transgender embodiment. My emphasis in this part of the chapter is on the ways in which patrilineally derived roles and rituals “make” gendered bodies. I then examine how family transitions and care work intersect with contemporary medical and psychiatric discourses of gender transition. I conclude the chapter by considering how this analysis might be elaborated in relation to other transmasculine and transfeminine standpoints, with differential access and relations to gendered power.
