The Feeling of Kinship - 9780822347323

In The Feeling of Kinship, David L. Eng investigates the emergence of "queer liberalism"ùthe 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 "colorblind" 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 Texas's antisodomy statute, Eng reveals how the ghosts of miscegenation haunt both Lawrence and the advent of queer liberalism.

Eng develops the concept of "queer diasporas" 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.

"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 looks at transnational adoption as an exemplary scene of contemporary intimacy in the United States. The Feeling of Kinship 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 Culture