Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan

Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan

Families in Focus

Series Editors

Naomi R. Gerstel, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Karen V. Hansen, Brandeis University

Rosanna Hertz, Wellesley College

Nazli Kibria, Boston University

Margaret K. Nelson, Middlebury College

Katie L. Acosta, Amigas y Amantes: Sexually Nonconforming Latinas Negotiate Family

Riché J. Daniel Barnes, Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood, and Community

Ann V. Bell, Misconception: Social Class and Infertility in America

Amy Brainer, Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan

Mignon Duffy, Amy Armenia, and Clare L. Stacey, eds., Caring on the Clock: The Complexities and Contradictions of Paid Care Work

Anita Ilta Garey and Karen V. Hansen, eds., At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild

Heather Jacobson, Labor of Love: Gestational Surrogacy and the Work of Making Babies

Katrina Kimport, Queering Marriage: Challenging Family Formation in the United States

Mary Ann Mason, Nicholas H. Wolfinger, and Marc Goulden, Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower

Jamie L. Mullaney and Janet Hinson Shope, Paid to Party: Working Time and Emotion in Direct Home Sales

Markella B. Rutherford, Adult Supervision Required: Private Freedom and Public Constraints for Parents and Children

Barbara Wells, Daughters and Granddaughters of Farmworkers: Emerging from the Long Shadow of Farm Labor

Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan

AMY BRAINER

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brainer, Amy, author.

Title: Queer kinship and family change in Taiwan / Amy Brainer.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2018] | Series:

Families in focus | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018012993| ISBN 9780813597614 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813597607 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Transgender children—Taiwan—Family relationships. | Sexual minority youth—Taiwan—Family relationships.

Classification: LCC HQ77.95.T28 B73 2018 | DDC 306.7608350951249—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012993

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2019 by Amy Brainer

All rights reserved

Portions of this work appeared previously in New Identities or New Intimacies? Reframing ‘Coming Out’ in Taiwan through Cross-Generational Ethnography, Sexualities 21, no. 5–6 (2018): 914–931; Patrilineal Kinship and Transgender Embodiment in Taiwan, in Perverse Taiwan, ed. Howard Chiang and Yin Wang, 110–128 (New York: Routledge, 2017); Materializing ‘Family Pressure’ among Taiwanese Queer Women, Feminist Formations 29, no. 3 (2017): 1–24; and Mothering Gender and Sexually Nonconforming Children in Taiwan, Journal of Family Issues 38, no. 7 (2017): 921–947.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Bringing Families of Origin into Focus

2 Meanings of Silence and Disclosure

3 (Queerly) Carrying on the Family

4 Gender and Power across Generations

5 Strategic Normativity: Sex, Politics, and Parents

6 Siblings and Family Work

Conclusion

Appendix A: Naming and Language

Appendix B: Interviewees

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan

1

Introduction

Bringing Families of Origin into Focus

On my way to an interview, I got off at the wrong train stop in between Kaohsiung and a small town in Pingtung, the southernmost county of Taiwan. I was in fact only one stop shy of the correct station, but I got off prematurely because I had not seen a building for many kilometers and thought I must be headed the wrong way. In a flurry of texts and emojis, my host Coral Lu assured me that I was on the right track and that she was on her way to pick me up. She added that I might not recognize her because she would have a masculine appearance (男性的樣子 nanxing de yangzi). When we met one another at a trans gathering in Taipei some weeks earlier, she wore a stylish dress, heels, and full makeup. Coral alternates her daily gender presentation, sometimes donning a masculine appearance as conventionally expected of her male sex but usually opting for the feminine appearance with which she feels especially happy and at ease. At the time of our interview, Coral was in her early forties and worked in the family business on the first floor of the home she shared with her parents.

As it turned out, I had no trouble recognizing Coral, not only because hers was the lone car to pull into the station but also because she looked no different than any person might when changing clothes, her quiet elegance as perceptible in jeans as in a dress. Coral drove me to her family home, and we conducted our interview in the semiprivacy of her bedroom. The interview was punctuated by the arrival of her grade-school-age niece and nephew, who darted boisterously in and out of the room. At one point, her nephew climbed up on the arm of a chair and pointed out his own rooftop from Coral’s window. I did not know how many members of the Lu family I would meet that day. In the end, I met her brother, her sister Fanyu (whom I also interviewed), her sister’s daughter and son, her mother, and several family friends. I canceled my plans for a return trip to Kaohsiung and spent the day with this family as they visited at home, walked together in a nearby park, posed for photos by a pond, teased Fanyu’s seven-year-old daughter about her funny haircut (she had recently earned herself the nickname little rooster by cutting off a chunk of hair on the back of her head), and ate dinner in the food court of the local Carrefour. Our conversations about Coral’s gender mingled with other everyday topics, such as shopping for clothes and plans for an upcoming holiday.

This sort of day was typical of my fieldwork with queer people and their families in Taiwan. A visit to interview one family member often spiraled into a whole-family affair due to shared and closely proximate living arrangements. While some people chose to be interviewed at places and times that maximized their privacy, others welcomed family members to chime in or urged them to be interviewed too. Contrary to stereotypes about the relative conservatism of people in southern versus northern and rural versus urban Taiwan, I found ample variation among families across the region. Coral’s small town, southern, lower-middle-class family is more comfortable with her gender fluidity than many of the urban, northern, upper-class families of LGBT people in this research. While some of these presumably more cosmopolitan families worried about public perceptions and blocked mobility due to sexual impropriety, Coral’s family accepted her presence and her contributions to their small business with a quiet pragmatism. Coral’s elder brother had two children by marriage, one girl and one boy, and this eased the pressure on Coral (the second son of the family) to give her father posterity by having sons of her own.

Early in Coral’s life, her mother sought advice from a spiritual advisor who told her that Coral would always be this type of person (這樣的人 zheyang de ren). This sense of determinism somewhat relieved Coral’s mother of the pressure to alter her child’s life path. In fact, Fanyu told me that their mother often picks up women’s clothing and accessories for Coral to wear. But, she added with a chuckle, Coral doesn’t like the things my mother buys because she says they are too mature-looking.¹ In this moment, the issue Fanyu chose to highlight was not her mother’s confirmation of Coral’s gender through the act of buying clothes but a common disagreement about fashion between two people of different ages.

This is not to say that gender is a nonissue for the Lu family or for Coral herself. In fact, Coral felt that her siblings sometimes downplayed gender too much—they did not acknowledge the significant challenges it had created in her life relative to theirs. For many families, silence is a way of coping with alternative genders and sexualities, but these silences mean different things to people of different ages, gender and sexual locations, and family roles. In other families, gender and sexuality are at the center of intense scrutiny and even daily conflicts.

For the Lus, as for each of the families in this book, negotiations about gender and sexuality take shape through the particularities of sex, birth order, social class, counsel received from spiritual advisors and other trusted sources, and everyday ways of relating to kin. My interviews with Coral, Fanyu, and other queer and straight informants provided important data for this analysis. But it was the interactions at unpredictable moments—piled into a van driving to Carrefour, running into a cousin in a crowded night market, walking in the park with an elderly parent, and children’s happy interruptions—that added the texture and depth I hope to convey in a small measure in these pages.

Between August 2011 and January 2013, I conducted eighty interviews with queer people and heterosexual family members hailing from eleven of Taiwan’s thirteen counties. I interviewed people ranging in age from their twenties to their seventies, with experiences spanning a period of profound social and family change in Taiwan. I also looked across cohorts within families. Many people lived or had grown up in multigenerational households, and their cross-generational relationships were microcosms of larger changes taking place in the society. Sometimes this created frustration as people struggled to communicate with family members whose cultural reference points clashed with their own. But very few people walked away from these relationships. By choice, duty, necessity, or a combination of these, families retained a central place in people’s minds and often in their daily lives.

The themes that I explore in this book are based on people’s thoughts, actions, and choices about how best to arrange and maintain their family relationships and ways that these choices are variously enabled and constrained. At its heart, the book is about family change and continuity as a gendered phenomenon. I identify emerging and enduring ideas about parenthood, intergenerational care, and the gendered division of family work and resources as key sites of negotiation for Taiwanese queers and their heterosexual kin.

Studies of lesbian and gay (and, to a lesser extent, bisexual) families of origin often center on parental pathways to acceptance of their LGB children and the impact of acceptance or lack thereof on children’s well-being.² Judeo-Christian and Anglophone Western contexts have received the most attention. These studies make valuable inroads to our understanding of the individual and interpersonal journeys of such parents and families. However, we still know very little about family-of-origin relationships among gender and sexually nonconforming people in a majority of the world and about the structural and historical forces that make different kinds of relationships possible. This book joins a small but growing number of studies that aim to fill this gap.³

The Setting: Queers and Their Families in Late Twentieth- and Early Twenty-First-Century Taiwan

The people whose stories populate these pages have birth years spanning from the 1940s to the 1990s. During this period, Taiwan transitioned from a primarily rural, agrarian society to a highly urbanized and industrialized society with the features of late capitalism, accompanied by a tenfold increase in per capita income in constant dollars.⁴ My eldest informants were children during the transfer of colonial power from Japan to the Kuomintang (KMT), or Nationalist Chinese Party, in the 1940s. The KMT violently suppressed the local population and imposed martial law from 1949 to 1987, then the longest period of martial law in world history. About half of the people in this research formed their sexual, ethnic, and national identities in this context. Some connected their contemporary queer activism to earlier struggles for democracy. Vibrant cultures of dissent, including Taiwan’s feminist and sex rights movements, took root under KMT repression and came to bloom in the period after martial law.⁵ These movements critiqued and at times successfully transformed family laws, policies, and practices as part of their ongoing projects of cultural and social transformation. Younger informants inherited these efforts, coming of age in a flourishing multiparty democracy and civil society. Their ideas about family life and relationships are bound up with these social, economic, and political changes in ways that I explore throughout the book.

Today’s queer youth have radically different lives from their predecessors. For cohorts reaching adulthood in the second half of the twentieth century, early marriages arranged by parents rapidly gave way to later marriages and dating cultures as young people began to choose their own lovers and spouses.⁶ The total fertility rate peaked at 7 in the 1950s and then declined steeply to 2 by 1984 and to 0.895, among the lowest recorded in the world, by 2010. Changes in fertility were not merely a response to development but a political project, achieved through a comprehensive family-planning campaign carried out with U.S. aid.⁷ Recent pronatalist initiatives have had a modest effect; as I write this introduction (in 2018), the fertility rate in Taiwan remains below replacement level.⁸ Opportunities for people to create lives outside the institution of marriage have increased as well. The proportion of Taiwanese women ages thirty-five to thirty-nine who have never married quadrupled from 4 percent in 1980 to 16 percent in 2005, and research suggests that women who have not married by their late thirties are unlikely to marry or become mothers.⁹ Between 1970 and 1990, the divorce rate tripled across all age groups, an increase produced in part by changes in women’s economic situation and greater gender parity under the law.¹⁰ Women’s labor-force participation rose steadily in the postwar period, and those born after 1950 have longer and more continuous working lives, with fewer interruptions precipitated by marriage and childbearing.¹¹

Other aspects of gendered family life have changed comparatively little. Tensions arise from the disconnect between women’s growing opportunities outside the home and persistent subordination within it.¹² Women continue to do the vast majority of the unpaid work, including cleaning, shopping, cooking, childcare, eldercare, and uncompensated labor in family-run businesses.¹³ Men continue to receive a disproportionate share of family property and other assets and to hold more authority in family decision making.¹⁴ Women are still expected to prioritize the needs of their husbands’ kin over those of their own parents and natal families.¹⁵ And while more people are delaying marriage or leaving unsatisfying marriages, there has not been a concomitant rise in cohabitation or extramarital births. Emiko Ochiai writes in her analysis of this phenomenon, There is still a very strong wall between marriage and other intimate relationships in East Asia.¹⁶

This book examines the consequences of these changes and continuities on queer family-of-origin relationships. Bearing in mind that family change is a dialectical process—families are not just receptacles but conduits of change in their own right—I also discuss ways that queers and their heterosexual parents, siblings, and grandparents participate in projects of social and cultural transformation. The families in this study do not merely react but also resist, rework, and reimagine kinship and family structures and norms.

Outreach to Parents of LGBT Children

In recent years, families of origin have gained visibility and voice in Taiwan’s sex rights movement and in public conversations about queer issues. Asia’s first organization for parents of LGBT children, Loving Parents of LGBT Taiwan (同志父母愛心協會 Tongzhi Fumu Aixin Xiehui), was officially registered in 2011 by the mother of a transmasculine child. Other queer organizations have created programs for heterosexual family members as well. Core members of these groups work to educate and support families and to model parental acceptance of lesbian and gay sexuality. Parent volunteers meet privately with other mothers and fathers, speak in schools and other public places, and appear in the media to share their stories. Some have been featured on popular talk shows, profiled in magazines, and invited to give speeches at annual pride festivals and at fund-raising galas hosted by queer groups.

However, the public visibility I have described is still limited to quite a small group. It is often the same parents who participate in all these different contexts. Most people with sexually nonconforming family members are not connected to the LGBT movement and do not know other queer people or families like theirs. Siblings and grandparents play a pivotal role in daily family life but are virtually invisible in queer spaces. In this regard, there is still much work to do to engage families of origin, particularly those who are unlikely to seek community support or resonate personally with queer political organizing.

Further, it is not only queer groups that reach out to parents of LGBT children in Taiwan. Conservative organizations, many of them affiliated with Christian churches, provide similar types of resources to parents, including books, websites, and events featuring counselors and psychiatrists who assure parents that, in most cases, a child’s heterosexuality and gender normativity can be restored. Less than 4 percent of the population of Taiwan is Christian. Most people affiliate with Buddhism (20%), Taoism (15%), and/or more loosely organized religious practices, often referred to in academic literature as Chinese folk religions (45%), with another 15 percent reporting that they are nonreligious.¹⁷ Buddhism, Taoism, and the more loosely organized religious practices do not take an official stance against homosexuality. Thus, in Taiwan, objections to homosexuality have not focused on sin and morality in ways that are likely to be familiar to readers coming from a Christian, Muslim, or Jewish context but rather on maintaining and reproducing the patrilineal family and hierarchical gender relations. Yet despite their small numbers, Christian groups have identified social anxieties about changes in gender and sexual behaviors and have successfully organized to direct these anxieties into a variety of measures blocking sex-positive and queer-friendly legislation,¹⁸ as well as appealing to parents with promises of change that the LGBT groups do not offer.

I also interviewed queer and queer-affirming heterosexual Christians for this research. In fact, the number of Christians in my study is about 8 percent, exceeding their number in the general population. The antigay positions taken by certain groups surely do not represent the views of all Taiwanese Christians, including queers who find comfort and meaning in this spiritual tradition.

Transnational (Anti)Queer Organizing

Taiwan is a small country geographically with a high degree of transnational mobility, and indicators of this mobility were present in my fieldwork.¹⁹ Some informants had lived, studied, or traveled abroad and acquired new perspectives that they meshed with their existing family structures and values. Others maintained cross-border and sometimes cross-continent intimate relationships. Whether through Taiwanese gay men performing K-pop dance routines in a nightclub, a trans woman traveling to Thailand for her surgery, or a young queer person choosing to study abroad, in part, to gain some distance from her hypervigilant family of origin (all phenomena I observed among my informants, which have been documented by other researchers as well), these transnational flows are an integral part of Taiwan’s queerscapes.²⁰

Both queer and conservative parent groups draw on transnational discourses of family and sexuality to make their claims. Queer organizations seek funding from and collaboration with international bodies while also providing support to more nascent organizations in neighboring countries. Similarly, antigay groups acquire funding and other support from international (often U.S.-based) churches and ministries.²¹

Global antigay organizing runs counter to the myth that transnational discourses, especially those originating in the West, will be ever more tolerant of lesbian and gay sexuality, while local discourses will always be