"Brilliantly researched and elegantly written, Brainer’s study infuses the campaign for equality with a human flavor. We are treated to first-hand accounts of the pressures from coming out and carrying on the family, parenting and cross-generational conflicts, class normativity, and sibling relations. Anchored by Taiwan’s millennial turn, this timely and moving book unveils how integral natal families are to queer individuals’ personal fulfillment and aspiration for social change."
~Howard Chiang, author of After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China
"Brainer adds new insights about the ways that queer Asians, specifically Taiwanese, negotiate alternative sexualities and genders within a family context and how members of their families help in this negotiation.”
~Chong-suk Han, author of Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gayasian American
"A milestone in the understanding of queer kinship, getting family-of-origin experiences into its core, this book takes the reader through a fascinating travel into queer family lives while providing an insightful, decolonising questioning of current meanings of silence and disclosure, choice and responsibility."
~Chiara Bertone, coeditor of Queerying Families of Origin
"Recommended."
~Choice
~WBEZ "Worldview"
"It is easy to understand why this book won the Ruth Benedict Prize for outstanding contributions to anthropology on LGBT topics: Brainer’s documentation of queer relationships in Taiwanese families successfully challenges the models that have long framed queer subjectivity as a process of individualization....Brainer’s analysis of queer possibilities across an interconnected life course raises important questions for scholars of gender and kinship."
~Anthropology & Aging
Using this as an analytical tool, it can be used to target/gender conventional construction, ideology and Knowledge production presents a rather powerful critique.
~Journal of Women's and Gender Studies
