Table of Contents

The Uncanniness of Paternity: An Introduction Chapter One: Becoming a Father Chapter Two: Framed by Kinship: Sensing Family, Sensing Difference Chapter Three: Suffering Uncertainty: Life of the Family, Life of the Law Chapter Four: Voices, Choices, Children: What Does Kinship Do? Epilogue: Precarious Kinship Bibliography

Promotional Information

An important contribution to the anthropology of gay kinship, ten years in the making.

About the Author

Aaron Goodfellow is an independent scholar living in Vermont and the former director of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

Reviews

"Queer kinship is far from 'virtually normal': it remains uncanny. Aaron Goodfellow's in-depth study of gay fathers gives voices and faces to these precarious families. Individual stories illustrate how these men painfully strive to embody norms that leave them at the threshold of family life." -- -Eric Fassin professor of Sociology and Gender Studies, Paris-8 University "Gay Fathers, their Children, and the Making of Kinship is a profound contemplation on the forms of queer sociality in contemporary North America. The portraits of gay fathers and their children lead us, slowly but steadily, into an understanding of how gay men open themselves to an education into what it is to be related and thereby give expression to the uncanny in kinship. What does it take for some who stand in a diagonal relation to law to heal the wounds that are inflicted by law on their forms of intimacy? And how does a son learn to recognize his own father as gay in this scene of instruction where he foregoes the comfort of a ready made appeal to identity politics and instead embraces the indeterminate space of relearning what he already sensed? Is this, perhaps, a description of ethnography as a way of unlearning the concepts we had become too comfortable with? A brilliant book that gets its power from the profoundly understated theoretical claims which nevertheless take your breath away." -- -Veena Das Johns Hopkins University "Gay Fathers, Their Children, and the Making of Kinship is beautifully written, meticulously argued, and painstakingly theorized. Goodfellow demonstrates a mastery of a wide range of theoretical literature, bringing anthropology into conversation with philosophy and invigorating very longstanding debates in anthropology with new insight. This is the most innovative book on kinship since Schneider's American Kinship." -- -Sameena Mulla Marquette University