Families We Choose

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

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 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 Represents a new direction in lesbian and gay studies and in the anthropology of American culture. SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society This book demands--and deserves--thorough and careful reading...A well-documented work for gay studies collections. Library Journal Weighs in as an important contribution to current debates about family and family values. American Journal of Sociology

• 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