While the topic of gay marriage and families continues to be popular in the media, few scholarly works focus on gay men with children. Based on ten years of fieldwork among gay families living in the rural, suburban, and urban area of the eastern United States, Gay Fathers, Their Children, and the Making of Kinship presents a beautifully written and meticulously argued ethnography of gay men and the families they have formed. In a culture that places a premium on biology as the founding event of paternity, Aaron Goodfellow poses the question: Can the signing of legal contracts and the public performances of care replace biological birth as the singular event marking the creation of fathers? Beginning with a comprehensive review of the relevant literature in this field, four chapters—each presenting a particular picture of paternity—explore a range of issues, such as interracial adoption, surrogacy, the importance of physical resemblance in familial relationships, single parenthood, delinquency, and the ways in which the state may come to define the norms of health. The author deftly illustrates how fatherhood for gay men draws on established biological, theological, and legal images of the family often thought oppressive to the emergence of queer forms of social life. Chosen with care and described with great sensitivity, each carefully researched case examines gay fatherhood through life narratives. Painstakingly theorized, Gay Fathers, Their Children, and the Making of Kinship contends that gay families are one of the most important areas to which social scientists might turn in order to understand how law, popular culture, and biology are simultaneously made manifest and interrogated in everyday life. By focusing specifically on gay fathers, Goodfellow produces an anthropological account of how paternity, sexuality, and masculinity are leveraged in relations of care between gay fathers and their children.

In this fully revised new edition, Father-Daughter Relationships: Contemporary Research and Issues summarises and analyses the most relevant research regarding father-daughter relationships, aiming to break down the persistent misconceptions regarding fatherhood and father-daughter relationships and encourage the reader to take a more objective and analytical approach. The research is brought to life with compelling personal stories from fathers and daughters, including well-known celebrities and politicians. Boxed quizzes and questionnaires show students how the research can be applied to their own lives while others highlight the relationships between real-life fathers and daughters. Nielsen discusses the father-daughter relationship within a diverse range of family structures, including divorced and separated parents, gay parents, adopted children and children of sperm donors. Covering a wide range of topics, including the father’s impact on his daughter’s cognitive, academic, social and physical wellbeing, ethnic minorities, and incarcerated or abusive fathers, Father-Daughter Relationships: Contemporary Research and Issues gives panoramic view of the most recent research and statistics. This book is essential reading for upper level undergraduate and for graduate students, as well as for practitioners working with families, such as social workers, mental health professionals and family counsellors. It is especially relevant for courses in psychology, sociology, women’s studies, and counselling. Linda Nielsen is a Professor of Adolescent and Educational Psychology at Wake Forest University. A member of the faculty for 35 years, she is a nationally recognized expert on father-daughter relationships.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Guangdong, China, this book asks: what does it mean for Chinese non-heterosexual people to go against existing state regulations and societal norms to form a desirable and legible queer family? Chapters explore the various tactics queer people employ to have children and to form queer or ‘rainbow’ families. The book unpacks people’s experiences of cultivating, or losing, kinship relations through their negotiation with biological relatives, cultural conventions and state legislations. Through its analysis, the book offers a new ethnographic perspective for queer studies and anthropology of kinship.

Provides fresh perspectives on the past, present and future-facing contributions of the anthropology of reproduction. A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology provides a timely and comprehensive overview of the anthropological study of reproductive practices, technologies, and interventions in a global context. Exploring the medical and technological management of human reproduction through a sociocultural lens, this groundbreaking volume reviews past and current research, discusses contemporary debates and recent theoretical developments, introduces key themes and trends, examines ongoing issues of equity, inclusivity, and reproductive justice around the world, and more. The Companion brings together essays by multidisciplinary scholars in fields including sociocultural anthropology, medical anthropology, reproductive health, global public health, Science and Technology Studies (STS), gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies, and environmental studies, to list but a few. Five thematically organized sections address reproductive practitioners and paradigms, global reproductive health and interventions, reproductive justice, the life-course approach to the study of reproductive health, and the future of reproductive technology and medicine. Using clear, jargon-free language, the authors investigate pregnancy and childbirth; fertility treatments; birth control, contraception and abortion; COVID-19 and reproduction; reproductive cancers; epigenetics; social discrimination; gender and sexualities and reproduction for LGBTQIA+ communities; race and reproduction; migration and reproduction; reproduction and war; reproductive health financing; reproduction and disabilities, reproduction and the environment; and other important contemporary topics. A cutting-edge guide to the modern study of reproduction, this groundbreaking volume: Provides an overview of the links between anthropological study and progressive work in medicine, healthcare, and technology Addresses both the challenges and opportunities facing researchers in the field Identifies gaps in current scholarship and offers recommendations for future research topics and methodologies Highlights the importance of ethnographic research combined with critical engagements with other disciplines for the anthropology of reproduction Explores the impact of socioeconomic conditions, environmental challenges, public policy, and legislation on reproductive health outcomes Traces the history of the field and demonstrates how anthropologists have engaged with issues of reproductive justice Part of the acclaimed Wiley Blackwell Companions to Anthropology series, A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology is an essential resource for undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and scholars in medical anthropology, science technology and society, cultural anthropology, ethnology, and gender studies, as well as medical practitioners, policymakers, and activists involved in global and public health and reproductive justice.

This book addresses responses to the predicament of medical and social infertility. It draws on international research to examine the dimensions of reproductive citizenship in relation to decision-making about a range of issues: from fertility preservation and the desirability of family creation as a normative expectation of social participation, to how families manage and negotiate engagement with providers of reproductive materials and services around information disclosure and contact, and how they consider their social obligations and responsibilities in relation to the use of assisted reproductive technology (ART).

In the timber plantations in northeastern South Africa, laborers work long hours among tall, swaying lines of eucalypts, on land once theirs. In 2008, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, timber corporations distributed hot cooked meals as a nutrition intervention to bolster falling productivity and profits. But life and sustenance are about much more than calories and machinic bodies. What is at stake is the nurturing of capacity across all domains of life—physical, relational, cosmological—in the form of amandla. An Nguni word meaning power, strength or capacity, amandla organizes ordinary concerns with one’s abilities to earn a wage, to strengthen one’s body, and to take care of others; it describes the potency of medicines and sexual vitality; and it captures a history of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle for freedom. The ordinary actions coordinated by and directed at amandla do not obscure the wounding effects of plantation labor or the long history of racial oppression, but rather form the basis of what the Algerian artist Kader Attia calls repair. In this captivating ethnography, Cousins examines how amandla, as the primary material of the work of repair, anchors ordinary scenes of living and working in and around the plantations. As a space of exploitation that enables the global paper and packaging industry to extract labor power, the plantation depends on the availability of creative action in ordinary life to capitalize on bodily capacity. The Work of Repair is a fine-grained exploration of the relationships between laborers in the timber plantations of KwaZulu-Natal, and the historical decompositions and reinventions of the milieu of those livelihoods and lives. Offering a fresh approach to the existential, ethical and political stakes of ethnography from and of late liberal South Africa, the book attends to urgent questions of postapartheid life: the fate of employment; the role of the state in providing welfare and access to treatment; the regulation of popular curatives; the queering of kinship; and the future of custom and its territories. Through detailed descriptions, Cousins explicates the important and fragile techniques that constitute the work of repair: the effort to augment one’s capacity in a way that draws on, acknowledges, and reimagines the wounds of history, keeping open the possibility of a future through and with others.

Every picture tells a story, and stories have the power to educate. Looking at two key Jungian archetypes – the father and the shadow – from a challenging perspective, this book investigates the negative, shadowy side of fatherhood and its detrimental effect on children by presenting a collection of stories from all over the world. Blurring the line between fiction and fact, art and academic theory, the book travels across a difficult psychosocial landscape, discussing family life, mental health, and criminality. Mark Holmwood highlights the educational value of these stories whilst exploring the father–child dynamic, adverse childhood experiences, father hunger, asymmetrical power relations, psychological manipulation, narcissism, domestic violence, sexual abuse, patricide, and filicide. Jungian and post-Jungian viewpoints on the bond between fathers and their children are woven into a bigger, interconnected narrative which invites the readers to re-think clinical, sociological, and mythological connections through the lens of modern masculinity and men’s studies. Discussing five different types of negative fathers, the book presents their children’s struggles and underlines their resilience at the same time, emphasising assertion, challenge, questioning, and if necessary, acceptance, all being a part of the complex and transformative psychological process called individuation. Written with a clear and direct style, Shadows of Fatherhood, Jung, and Film will be of interest to mental health professionals, Jungian scholars, students, teachers and researchers in social sciences, humanities, and the arts, as well as general readers with a distinctive interest in men’s studies, father–child relations, and cinema.