Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship / Edition 2

by Kath Weston

Overview

AWARDED: Winner of a Ruth Benedict Prize in Anthropology

This classic text, originally published in 1991 and now revised and updated to include a new preface, draws upon fieldwork and interviews to explore the ways gay men and lesbians are constructing their own notions of kinship by drawing on the symbolism of love, friendship, and biology.

-Graceful. . . . Valuable for the ways it demonstrates that, like race, gender and sexual identity, the meaning of kinship is culturally relative--and susceptible to change. -The Women's Review of Books

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2900231110937
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	10/15/1997
Series:	Between Men~Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies Series
Edition description:	revised edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

Kath Weston is associate professor of anthropology at Arizona State University West in Phoenix.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition
Acknowledgments
1.The Monkey Cage and the Red Desoto
2. Exiles from Kinship
Is Straight to Gay as Family Is to No Family?
Deck the Halls
Kinship and Procreation
From Biology to Choice
3. Coming Out to "Blood" Relatives
Disclosing Sexual Identity
Categorical Understandings (Or, It's All Relative)
Family-Which Family?
Conditional Love
Discursive Locations
Taking Identity, Talking Kinship
Selection and Rejection
4. Kinship and Coherence: Ten Stories
5. Families We Choose
Building Gay Families
Substitute for Biological Family?
Friends and Lovers
From Friendship to Community
Deliberating Difference
6. Lovers Through the Looking Glass
The Looking-Glass Other
Power "Differentials," Relationship "Roles"
The Urge to Merge
Narcissism, Kinship, and Class Convictions
Couples Versus Community
Reflections on Metaphor
7. Parenting in the Age of AIDS
The Lesbian Mother as Icon
Male-Female Revisited: Insemination and AIDS
Of Death and Birth
Blood Relatives Respond
Parents and Persons
8. The Politics of Gay Families
Assimilation or Transformation?
Common Ground
The Big Picture
Reengineering Biogenetics
Appendix
Notes
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

Graceful. . . . Valuable for the ways it demonstrates that, like race, gender and sexual identity, the meaning of kinship is culturally relative—and susceptible to change.

Women's Review of Books

Weston draws upon fieldwork and interviews conducted in the San Francisco Bay area to explore the ways gay men and lesbians are constructing their own notions of kinship by drawing on the symbolism of love, friendship, and biology. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

The first to analyze the historical conditions, social meaning, and political implications of lesbians and gays' appropriating the language of kinship...A fine book.

Contemporary Sociology

Graceful.... Valuable for the ways it demonstrates that, like race, gender and sexual identity, the meaning of kinship is culturally relative—and susceptible to change.

The Women's Review of Books

Weighs in as an important contribution to current debates about family and family values.

American Journal of Sociology

Represents a new direction in lesbian and gay studies and in the anthropology of American culture.

SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

Represents a new direction in lesbian and gay studies and in the anthropology of American culture.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society