So FT ie3-Qi227 fit FA PE VE SL TE 50 A ee Santen zene moe MULAWEORST: HER, HSL PR Gib eee Ji wl) 2014 ee wy fh & Wifi ___ seers ateShanghai International Studies University QUEERING "AMILY: GENDER AND SEXUALI IN THREE TURN-OF- MILLENNIUM AMERICAN FILMS A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate School and College of English In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements for Degree of Master of Arts By Lin Jing Under the Supervision of Professor Zhang Hongling December 2013,SACK ROE H AA RSEPSR AREOLA SF ak AREA OF SOMO BUR. SCH ELENA Sh, eee FETA A RMA Ce SRS BLAH AR, HAL A SR ELIOT ACA DLAI E ARE TIT SC SRE PA BSH, LA Sceb Dh aim TSB. A AMD TS AO SH, HATS PTR SR AL AA See: Td S20: 2 © A 3 B ean AT AASES TMPERCTIOREL HAERIOSCASLE, FELIS GB ASR RIE CANT TRAE OIA EM, SOE CURE. AGE LAO aA AR LATTA AR SURRI THOR, TURABE, macnstia AS AREMIC RAIL. WT RETO, BRIERE Ps. sencrase, dh Se UMoRe pA} El S Wh BB: 2 6.75 2 EM Dee 12 A 208ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. It’s unbelievable that Iam now close to the end of a journey set in motion more than 2 years ago. And when [try to reflect on my growths throughout this life phase, T realize most of them have been facilitated by the pursuit of an MA degree, especially by finishing a MA thesis project. The truth is, this journey would not be possible at all, let alone so rewarding, had I not been helped by so many loving people during this period. First of all, T owe my sincerest and deepest gratitude to Professor Zhang Hongling. She is the one who has encouraged me to accumulate IC knowledge patiently at the first year of my MA study when I felt so lost in the vast ocean of abstruse articles ; she is the one who has guided me around when I was stuck in the baffling process of choosing a thesis topic; she is the one who has tried her best to instruct me about literature and theories during my writing despite our physical distance; she is the one who has encouraged me when I felt frustrated and had no enough courage to carry on writing a thesis, 8400 km and 7 hours away from my home university. Without those all-out supports from her, this. projec I owe my special thanks to Professor Steve Kulich, the director of our IC program as well as the loving father of our big IC fami . To begin with, he inspired us to develop scholarly habits and help each other in our study at the first MA year. For the past 2-plus years, he has persisted in writing us well-informing emails with heart-warming greetings. He also tried his best to collaborate with Professor Michael Steppat to facilitate our writing our IC thesis in Bayreuth, To me, he is like apersonification af intercu lot from. My friends, Gou Yue, Xia Wen, Wang Shujing, Gan Lu and Vaughan have also assisted me tremendously in my thesis writing process by both helping me with access to useful literature and spiritually supporting me. Last but not least, I want to thank my parents for their constant financial and emotional aids throughout my MA study. In fact, without their cultivation of certain important dispositions in me for the past 24 years, I won ’t be able to h_ whatever I have accomplished so far in terms of this MA journey. All those unknowingly contributed to my tudy all share my heartfelt gratitude.ABSTRACT As more and more LGBT families become undeniable reality in the modern societies, the negotiation is also brought into attention between two supposedly opposite discourses, namely queerness and family. Queer kinship as an alternative conceptualization and phenomenon has since the 1990s received booming attention from both the academic world and the media. While the postmodern feminists are attempting to make two distinctive discourses talk to each other meaningfully, in the media especially the ema the representation of queer families is also growing. ‘Though both the concept and the phenomenon of queer kinship might not be new to the media and the academics, to study queer family representations from a renewed postmodern kinship theorization remain a scarcely explored field. Therefore this project has undertaken to investigate the queer family representation in three turn-of- the-millennium American films with the help of contemporary kinship theories, queer theories and most importantly queer kinship theorizations. This attempt is not just about the communicative dialogue between two differing theories. It is also in essence an intercultural communication between supposedly opposing subcultures originating from varying discourses: hetero-normativity vs. queerness, nationalism vs. universalism, identity vs. fluidity. This project, therefore, wishes to explore more meaningful ways for those different subcultures to communicate with each other more productively instead of othering each other into muteness, through studying the subve fe ageney regained in the power negotiations within a queer family. Key words: queer family, gender, sexuality, power, identityHEE SEAS SERA Fg BEA A ARE EE AG SEE I, 60 AF ARIE BLESS ADEA Ay Te BAR Ae HE FAC J Pa THA (1) oa BIE 5 HAE, APS AL SE AY IF 90 EPR FS AUB SAE ME Ak, LER FU TE a SJL BE RE A A AXVUE WR AMMACZ 2 AGL A EOE ER Re, PRL TAO LR REARS) REE, Lp aA A NA A REAR ATR AREER ANT EL, PEAS APC. fal BTA SIA RAY SREB, ALISO, SEI, HF HERE, UMAR, RVI EME AL, FRR BET AUR ET AEE, TENG JL ARE th SF — A PA LA IE Reta: LAKE, TEA, te, BURL, SATABLE OF CONTENTS. ABSTRACT(English) . ABSTRACT(Chinese)... LIST OF TABLES .. Introduction 1.1 Contextualization ... cvcnnentnntnnenenne 1 1.2 Relevance to Intercultural Communication. 1.3 Literature Review. 1.4 Research Questions and Chapter Layout Chapter One Theoretic Frameworks BAUR cnimnsmnmnnierconneinassmmaavornmnaamnrill 2.2 Queerne: 2.3 Queering Kinship. Chapter Two Disrupting Gender Categories 3.1 Mimicry by the Gay Couple. .2 Parody by the Lesbian Parents . 3.3 Parable of the Transgender.. Chapter Three Deconstructing Family Structure... 42 4.1 Separated or Connected. jarvis 44 4.2 Inside or Outside 31 4,3Triangular or Not 58 Chapter Four Unveiling Family Secrets .e 64 5.1 1 Just Want A Grandchild. .e 66 5.2 We Are A Perfect Family a2 5.3 God Made Me For A Reason .. TT Conclusion 5.1 Findings 84 6.2 Limitations and Suggestions for Future Studies ......... 88 WORKS CITED ..-cccecencee soctnnntnntnnnnnnnennnse 1LIST OF TABLES Still Image 1.1.1 Wai Tung Doing Exercises (00:01:48) 23 Image 1.1.2 Simon Joking with Patient (00:02:23). 24 Still Image 1.1.3 Father with Mother (01:40:02)... 28 Still Image 1.1.4 Wai Tung with Simon (01:40:12)... 128 Still Image 1.2.1 Butch Nic and Femme Jules (00:06:57). 30 Still Image 131 Bree Simulating Pxtta Feminine Woman I (00-02-00) 26 Image 1.3.2 Bree Simulating Extra Feminine Woman II (00:02:23) 36 Still Image 1.3.3 Stanley with High School Girlfriend (00:14:47) 37 Still Image 1.3.4 Bree among Cowboys (00:54:37). Still Image 2.1.1 First Dinner Scene in Wedding (00:31:08)... Still Image 2.1.2 Third Dinner Scene in Banquet (00:42:41), Still Image 2.1.3 Simon Unrecognized by the Gao Family (00:34:17).........000+00+0-48 Still Image 2.1.4 Table Looked Another Way (01:41:12)... 49 Image 2.1.5 Family Brought Together (01:41:28)... ans <0 Still Image 2.2.1 First Dinner Scene in Kids (00:05:08) cana S2 Il Image 2.2.2 Family Dinner with Paul (01:13:19) 54 Still Image 2.2.3 Paul Pouring out Liquor (01:13:09). 54 s 2.3.1 First Dinner of Bree’s Family (01:09:40), 60 Still Image 2.3.2 Second Dinner of Bree’s Family (01:19:58). Still Image 2.3.3 Calvin, Bree and Toby (01:03:44), 63 Still Image 3.1.1 Father Talk with Wai Tung (00:28:46) IL Ima, Still Image 3.1.2 Father Talk with Simon (01:36:27, Dialoguel.1.1 Reconciliation at Dinner (00:04:00-00:04:5 1) 25 Dialogue] .1.2 Mother Talking to Son in Cassette (00:00:39-00:02:07).. el) Dialogue1.2.1 A Few Talks about Gardening (00:47:54-00:48:1 1 & 01:00:27- 01:00:57). 32 Dialogue 2.1.1 Running Into Old Chen (00:43:59-00:46:11). AT Dialogue 2.2.1 Jules Picking at Nic (00:19:39-00:20:23).. 55 Dialogue 2.2.2 Jules Quarreling with Nic (01:01:47-01:02:59) 56 Dialogue 3.2.1 Jules Asks for Forgiveness (011:34:00-01:34:52). 75 Dialogue 3.2.2 Jules Explains Sexuality (00:23:45-00:24:06)...... Dialogue 3.3.1 Mother Judges Bree Unfairly (01:10:11,457 -01:10:27).. Dialogue 3.3.2 Bree’s Family’s Reaction to Taboo (01:10:54- 01:11:27).Introduction A house divided against itself cannot stand. -Abraham Lincoln y and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live. -Mary Catherine Bateson 1.1 Contextualization Uncertainty is unprecedentedly permeating in the postmodern era which we are living in now with various identity categories gradually losing their stable meanings. As repeatedly argued by the deconstructionists, our understanding of what we are does not come from side, but from the culture. According to the film historian Richard Dyer, especially in the case of sexuality, it comes from the movie (cit. in: Epstein & Friedman, 06:21--06:30). ince the film technology was newly developed in the late nineteenth century when the concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality also began to prevail in Western science. it thus can provide a record of how human. sexuality has been understood and represented over its 100-plus-year history (Benshoff & Griffin, 2004, 6). Given the controversy of the concept, the representation of human sexuality especially the non-heterosexual variations throughout the American cinema are unsurprisingly debatable and yet somehow truthful. The queer characters in the American films since its beginning went through being invisible, ridiculed, ignored and dreaded until the 1990s when a collective of independent filmmakers began to take on creating an unconventionally hybrid genre of queer films addressing equally sophisticated issues (Benshoff & Griffin, 2006, 10). This trend of filmmaking is conceptualized by B. Ruby Rich as the New Queer Cinema (2004, 53). By dra 1g from a collage of styles ranging from the AIDS activist videos, avant-garde cinemas 1and even Hollywood films to represent the complex nature of gender and sexuality instead of the simplified “positive images” or “happy endings”, it “breaks down filmic categories such as genre, fiction, realism, and documentary -~- as well as deconstructs essentialist concepts of history, race, nation, gender, and sexuality” (Benshoff and Griffin, 2006, 222). This experimental trend continue into influencing the new century while another group of filmmakers start to return to more conventional forms expressing still provocative issues, though relatively less confrontational compared to those of the more radical New Queer Cinema. As reasoned by Benshoff and Griffin, at the dawn of the new millennium and particularly after the events of September 11, 2011, queer activists now prefer an assimilationist politics over dramatic social changes (2006.269). Thus, many queer filmmakers today focus on domestic issues such as marriage and childrearing, revealing the queer embracing the same traditional desires as the straight have. ‘What is unique about these new millennium queer~ -folk movies is that they try to make two supposedly incompatible discourses talk to each other meaningfully so as to put pressure on the grand hetero-normative narrative. According to Michel Foucault's nineteen-century conceptualization, the “regime of sexuality” (queer) operates beyond the sphere of law whereas the “regime of alliance” (kinship)” is strictly regulated by law (Cf: Foucault, cit. in: Freeman, 295). On the one hand, as argued by feminists since the 1970s, the family/kinship has acted as a pivotal institution of patriarchal hegemony and oppression based on a strict gender/sex system. On the other hand, sexuality freedom as advocated by a queer perspective clearly questions the heterosexual reproductive monogamous kinship structure.Admittedly, the radical queer attitude is obviously in conflict with a conventional kinship conceptualization. However, some postmodernist theorists have also begun to think about how to integrating this two seemingly countervailing domains without necessarily scarifying each other’s essences. Despite the obstinate hetero-normative imperative, an inexorable reality is that more and more LGBT families and communities among other alternative forms of “lived relationality” (Freeman, 295) are rapidly growing in the modem society. In a new century such as ours, it is highly urgent and rewarding to embrace new approaches toward kinship since in reality people are experiencing more and more kinds of relationalities that cannot be easily explained by the traditional discourses any more ~ if they ever could. As a highly prevailing form of mass media equipped with both acoustic and visual representational techniques, the cinema has undeniably taken an important role in initiating these new approaches. Therefore, I have chosen three movies from the new millennium queer genre to explore through the representation of the queer family how a renewed kinship conceptualization might actually work in tandem with a queer discourse, as opposed to conventional scholarships. Two of my primary texts, the Wedding Banquet (1993) and The Kids Are All Right (2010) can be safely classified as this “queer as folk” Turn- of- Millennium Cinema while Transamerica (2005) has inherited more from the New Queer Cinema. Despite this slightly difference in genre, these three films all more or less center on conceptualizing a certain kind of queer family, nuclear or extended: Banquet is about a Chinese-American gay couple coming under pressure from Chinese parents wanting an offspring to carry the family name while Kids an American lesbian familyovercoming the threat of coming into contact with the biological doner and Transamerica a man-to-woman transgender trying to reconnect with her unknown son and her conservative Christian-Jewish family stubbornly against her wish to be a woman, While those three turn-of-the-millennium American films also deal with seemingly traditional family issues, they are still highly subversive in the way they put together queerness with family. This project thus wishes to explore how the queer family is conceptualized in these three comparable films by scrutinizing the performative nature of gender and sexuality as well as their constant power negotiations in its representations. 1.2 Relevance to Intercultural Communication Not to mention the connection between sexuality, gender and culture, the underlying goals of the project have self-evidently defined it as an intercultural communication, Exploring queer family is not just about connecting the queer theory with a kinship theory, but instead it is in essence a communication between supposedly opposing subcultures, the heteronormative with the queer, the national with the global and as well as the modern and the postmodern. Worshiping a long-established familial ideal, the heteronormative subculture highly values heterosexual marriage, gender division, and blood tie (Collins, 1998), which imaginably have resulted in sexism, racialism and ni onalism among other inequalities. On the contrary, queer subculture though also asking for state acknowledgement, embraces gender subversion and blurs boundaries. Therefore, to inform the established familial paradigm with an alternative queer imagery is in fact a complicated power dialogue between the heterosexual imperative and other minority sexuality subcultures.Apart from sexuality subcultures, my project also aims to connect a closed national discourse with a more border-crossing global discourse. Two of my primary texts are about traditional extended families against a globalized backdrop, namely a Chinese Confucius family and a reserved India-Jewish family in the USA, rendering necessary an interaction of the dividing national culture and the including global culture. Last but not least, investigating the queer family is nothing but reconsidering traditional famili values in a highly modernized era, rendering it certainly a process to communicate traditional cultures with modern cultures. ‘Time-honored values like loyalty, unity, belonging, membership are intentionally juxtapositioned with openness, rootlessness, universalism so as to show how a constantly negotiation of opposing discourse are of huge significance to the survival of the whole humanity in the postmodern context. 1.3 Literature Review While it is relatively underexplored to study family and kinship cinematic representations from a queer perspective in American studies, there is already a large scholarship investigating diasporic sexualities, queer citizenship as well as the postcolonial cultural crush between different sexuality subcultures in family dramas, such as on one of my primary text, Wedding (1993). For the other two primary texts, there is currently not much academic research done on them because they are relatively new in terms of release date (with Kids in 2010 and Transamerica in 2004). For example, Lo wrote “The Politics and Aesthetics of ‘Asian American’ Sexuality in Ang Lee’s Cross-Cultural Family Dramas” in 2008. Well aware of the fact that it is difficult to pin down “Asian American Cinema” as a specific genre, his 5research, however, argues that “the ritualization af human sexuality” exists as one of the “underlying themes and stylistic tropes” that belongs emphatically to “Asian American Cinema”. Through a comparative study of Ang Lee’s Wedding and The Ice Storm, Lo comes to the conclusion that what characterizes “Neo-Asian American Cinema” should be the constructions of a generalized “Other” under multiple intersections of differences (e.g. sexual, generational, of cultural “Other”) extending well beyond the single dimension of racial difference of being a Asian living in the United States, He then continues to reason that those multiple otherness may be superstructures over the two most fundamental otherness: “womanhood in a patriarchal context, and manhood in an era where the patriarchy is threatened (2008)”. Specifically, he analyzes the combination of nuanced editing, blocking, and framing strategies in the films to expose how the patriarchy establishes, though seemingly benign family rituals such as dinner, wedding banquet and family photo shooting in Weilding, “rules of social conduct on the basis of the innate differences in male and female sexuality” (2008). This article analyzes the negotiation between sexuality and patriarchy from a more general context than the much focused space within a family, which should be paid more attention when it comes to the power structure within the queer family itself. What’s more in my research the sexuality dimension will be emphasized while other dimensions such as race and nation diminished, D. L Eng’s “Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora in A: American Studies” in 1997 is a response to the late 1990s Asian American domestic claims to home and nation-state. The article tries to theorize a new approach to Asian American studies by bringing about a productive dialogue between Asian AmericanStudies and queer smdies He first contextualizes this approach in a postmodern era marked by a definitive shifting away from a politics of cultural nationalism to a politics of transnational culturalism. He then briefly presents how this approach can be applied to analyze the intersection of queerness (straightness) and diaspora (whiteness) in Wedding. Here queerness is employed as a broader methodology “intersecting Asian American identity formation across multiple axes of difference and in dynamic ways” (1997, 40). The integration of queerness as a methodology into looking at traditional fixed identity (such as citizenship) is inspiring for my research to combine queemess with kinship conceptualization. Finally, in the article of “Globally Chinese at the Wedding Banquet” (2003), Fran Martin presents us a postcolonial analysis of the cultural crush and negotiation between the traditional Chinese sexuality subculture and the modern American sexuality subculture as represented in Wedding. Specifically, he investigates how the reproduction of the Chinese fatherly authority in a global context is allowed through the mechanism of “open secrets” (147), especially the Chinese mianzi and filiality discourses. Against earlier scholarly opinions arguing that the tolerance of homosexuality characterizes the re-imaginary of the Chinese patriarchal authority, he explores how this system strengthen itself through the sacrifice of the understated female character Wei Wei as well as other multi-coded family secrets. His research emphasizing the postcolonial reproduction of patriarchy in the modern society through more subtle mechanisms is inspiring for my research in that the secret mechanism has indeed played an important role in my primary texts. However, my research will dig deeper into the open secret system by studying its intersection with family rituals as well as social taboos.1.4 Research Questions and Chapter Layout This research will employ the concepts of family, gender, sexuality, space, queerness and kinship theories, and cinematic methods to investigate three major questions: a) How are the gender norms intentionally played out and thus subverted in the queer family? b) How do spaces constructing the queer family interact with the traditional familial discourses of patriarchy and genealogy? c) How does the queer family undermine the traditional kinship discourse of reproduction and marriage? Therefore, the subsequent chapter will firstly introduce three major theoretical frameworks that are employed in the following analysis chapters. The first to be introduced is Colli * framework of traditional family ideal, consisting of s dimensions: hicrarchy, territory, blood ties, membership, genealogy and planning, While this framework is created to analyze how gender, race and nation among other systems of difference intersect in family rhetoric and practices (Collins, 62), four of its dimensions. namely hierarchy. territory. blood ties and membership also applies well to analyzing the queer families. Then it is explained why Judith Butler's conceptualization of sexual and gender identity performativity is highly relevant for looking at how gender categories are performed and challenged in my primary texts. Finally the concept of queer kinship theorized by Freeman is interpreted in the way how this conceptualization ‘The American ural w the reading of he three filn queer genre is also briefly introduced at the end of this chapter to explain why certain features of the queer films are also highlighted in my following analysis chapters. In the beginning of each following analysis chapter, a specifie concept such as gender, space and the open secret system will be briefly introduced, since each concept are very important not just as tools but also as investigated aspects throughout the whole chapter. The second chapter mainly investigates the screening of sexuality 8and gender in the queer families. The gender hinary, namely the masculinity and femininity stereotypes, such as in the aspect of clothing style, make-up, naming, profession, dialogue patterns among other characterization techniques accompanied by visual and acoustic editing techniques, are purposely mimicked by the queer characters to highlight the gender/sex system as the core of naturalization for the traditional kinship discourse. In the third chapter, the spaces that constitute the family, for example the dinner table, the car, the living room, the garden and the kitchen are notable contents in the films and are revealing of the power relationship between the family members. The spatial relationalities, such as the presence or the absence of the father figure as the heading patriarchy symbol, the gendered division of household and paid work, genealogical separation of family membership, are deliberately created though however differently in the three films, to reveal the inconvenient lingering effects of traditional familial discourse even after queerness is introduced (0 the family. Through spatial analysis, four dimensions of the traditional family ideal, namely hierarchy, blood tie, territory and membership are called into question. ‘The final chapter is mostly about how the queerness of the queer family are coded or normalized into traditional family discourse. The transgressing secrets, such as the heterosexual affair, the sperm donor/the surrogate mother, the incest taboo, are subversive in the way that they transgress regulating familial norms and yet not revolutionary enough in that they remain closeted in the grand patriarchal system instead of gaining public recognitions. Familial tropes, family practices and other family-related discourses are also scrutinized in this chapter.My projected conclusion is: hy deliberately employing stereotypes of the traditional family ideal as well as normative sexuality and gender norms, these three tum-of-millennium American films make sense the possibility of integrating queerness into the family without explicitly providing meaning for it, as different from the experimental New Queer Cinema. Their efforts however are accomplished not without sustaining the discourse of the patriarchy as well as nationalism, 10Chapter two Theoretic Frameworks Evocative of the inescapable cross-border travels in a global era, Edward Said’s metaphor of “traveling theory” (1983) vividly addresses the legitimacy as well as risks for borrowing theories from one discipline to another. However, in literary and cultural studies, it seems an inevitable trend to embrace interdisciplinary methodologies and theories, given the prevailing influences of sociologists or philosophers such as Miche! Foucault and Judith Butler in textual analysis, overt or unconscious. Considering literature and culture as one of the most difficult words to be defined, it is impossible to specify what it should include and thus how it should be studied. Especially for this research, sociological theories such as family and kinship conceptualizations and gender theories will be appropriated and modified to study the cinematic representations of queer family. Nevertheless, those theories are merely frameworks, namely general guidelines for conducting this research. The most foundational method is still textual analysis, which in this case, focuses mostly on images and conversations in the films. What's more, give that the texts are not just visual but also acoustic, decor and acoustics are also included into the analys 2.1 Family Given booming interdisciplinary studies and the ever-changing reality of the phenomenon itself, it is beyond all doubt impossible to provide an all-encompassing and transhistorical account of family as an analytical concept. However, it is still practicable to locate a working model among numerous contemporary conceptualizations for investigating family as a major power institution in modem westem societies, as represented in my three turn-of-the millennium American films. u‘Throngh exploring the historical deployment of sexuality, Michel Foucault in the 19" century has notably made innovative observations about family among various cultural and social institutions as a rich focal point for complex power negotiations (1978). Specifically, he examines how the body gains significance (e.g. the incest taboo) in the power interactions between the husband and the wife, and between the parents and the child, As also argued by abundant feminist revisions after Foucault, family has mainly functioned as a regulating system consisting of specific gender norms based on s -xually body differences. Particularly, the distinguished sociologist Patricia Hill Collins has provided a six-dimensional model of family, demonstrating how 1 gendered social organization works as a privileged exemplar for intersectionality of gender, race, class, and nation in the context of the United States (1998). Even though Collins’ intersectional analysis extends well beyond family into other social practices, her model does provide insights into the family structure itself in the first place, rendering it highly applicable to my primary texts. It should be as well noted that this model is about how a traditional family ideal is appropriated to govern family practices instead of about any particular lived realities of U.S. American family. According to Collins, the imaged traditional family ideal is formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, namely a unit consisting of a heterosexual couple that produces their own biological children, Defined as a “natural or biological arrangement based on heterosexual attraction” (1998:63), this monolithic family imaginary has mainly exerted its hegemonic power through the following six domains: 1) manufacturing naturalized hierarchy, 2) looking for a home: place, space and territory, 3) on “blood ties”: family, race, and nation, 4) membership has its privileges:rights, obligations and rules, 5) family genealogy: inheritance and the family wage and 6) family planning. Firstly, the hierarchal dimension of the traditional family ideal naturalizes U.S. hierarchies of gender, age, wealth and sexuality, assuming a male headship that privileges masculinity as a source of authority. Territory concerns gendered division of space. Not only are the home spaces distinct from the public, but also within the private spheres women and men assume distinctive roles. Believing that “families has assigned places where they truly belong” (Jackson and Penrose 1993), images of territory approves segregation within a unit as well as requires strict rules that distinguish insiders from outsiders. Blood ties illustrate the significance of biology in definitions of family and naturalize the bonds among members of kinship networks. This dimension relies largely on social taboos eschewing transgressing behaviors like pre-marital martiage, interracial marriage, etc. Membership, namely notions of belonging to a family, is accrued by both privileges and responsibilities. Besides acces to entitlements, individuals incur differential responsibilities that depend on their placement in family hierarchies and thus subordinate to prescriptive duties. Finally, genealogy is about intergenerational transmission of family wealth, resulting in reproduction of class differences over time while planning is about control over women’s sexual and reproductive capacities based on eugenic thinking, which has been central to women’s oppression. With all dimensions briefly reviewed here, is obvious that they are somehow entangled with each others and a clear-cut separation of them is not only unattainable but also deceiving in my actual text analysis. Nevertheless, while Collin’s model has proved productive in understanding intersectional inequalities in the United States, it Bis na doubt also highly worth applying to my texts, so as to put pressure on the hegemonic family ideologies and enables “notions of family that reject hierarchical thinking"(Collins, 77). However, a sociological anatomy about the family as a major power institution is a just a starting point, to add to it queer theories developing from the humanities still yields more intriguing and rewarding ideas. 2.2 Queerness Queer theory evolved in wake of increasing theoretical interests in sexuality, particularly through the inventive observations of Michel Foucault. It also developed in the wake of the AIDS epidemic when gay and lesbian groups in the mid-1980s deliberately appropriated the term queer supposedly pejorative to facilitate rebelling assertions of deviance to challenge dominant ideas of normalcy and appropriateness. For poststructuralist critics, queer cerebrates the dismantling of gay/straight binary while in reality numerous LGBT activists have been enabled by the same label to take rebellions against a culture of heterosexism. One the one hand, feminist traditions remains || about queer theory, wondering whether postmodern queer theory skeptis can provide an identity for actual political actions to be taken since the traditional feminist politics assumes that there must first be a preexisting subject in order for political actions to be undertaken. One the other hand, departing from the foundationalist feminist theorizing of identity pol , postmodern queer thinkers gives more credits to the queer theory, reasoning that the ever constituting subject is able to assume agency in the illimitable process of signification itself. In a nutshell, queer theory sets out to interrogate the naturalness of heterosexuality and gender injunctions without dictating another set of restricting norms for conventional identity discourses to hold on to.Notably, Indith Butler's theorization of gender performativity first developed in her provocative work Gender Trouble (outlined in the 1990 first edition and updated in the 1999 second edition as well as other subsequent publications) made founding contribution to the field. Her theorization is an attempt to “locate the political in the very signifying practices that establish, regulate and deregulate identity” through a “critical genealogy of the naturalization of sex and of bodies in general” (1999:188). In other words, she uses the same critical inquiry Foucault defined as genealogy to expose the foundational categories of sex, gender and d . designated as origins and causes, as effects of institutions, practices, and discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin (1999:xxix). Her critical genealogy of gender categories is conducted in three very different domains: language, psychology and body. The first domain examines how language constructs the categories of sex via two converging regimes of power/discourse, namely heterosexuality and phallogocent m and what kinds of cultural practices produce subversive discontinuity and di sonance among sex, gender, and desire and call into question their alledged relations? The psychology domain reviews psychoanalytic and feminist accounts of the incest taboo as the mechanism that tries to enforce discrete and internally coherent gender identities within a heterosexual frame. This prohibitive or juridical structure is shown both to instate compulsory heterosexuality within a masculinist sexual economy and to enable a critical challenge to that economy. The last domain concerns the cultural construction of the bodies and propose a set of parodic practices based on a peformative theory of gender acts that disrupt the categories of the body, sex, gender and sexuality and occasion their subversive resignification and proliferation beyond the binary frame.(1999:xxx-xxxi) 1sAware of the unnecessary hinarism of free will and determinism within which the traditional feminist discourse is trapped concerning the constituted status of idemtity, Butler's task here is not to celebrate each and every new possibility qua possibility, but instead to redeseribe those possibilities that already exist within cultural domains designated as culturally unintelligible and impossible (1999:189). In other words, Butler's reconceptualization of gender idemtity as a generated effect, a practice, and a signifying practice opens up possibility of “agency” that are insidiously foreclosed by foundationalist scheming of identity. 2.3 Queering Kinship In traditional kinship discourses, the reproduction of the child has been rendered as the key to the transmission of a distinctive culture and the maintenance of ri 7 purity. Particularly, by uncritically upholding the Freudian and Lacanian Oedipal structure, those structuralist discourses insist that the heterosexual parenting is indispensible for a child’s initiation into the symbolic order and thus becoming a subject well aware of sexual differences (Butler, 2002). Through this logic, the non- normative forms of sexual arrangements other than the heterosexts norm shouldn't be recognized by the nation for the sake of reproducing culture, as if culture itself were a self-standing, self-sufficient and static entity. Pointing to the discontinuities between the “post-kinship” studies in anthropology and the lagging psychoanalysis studies, Butler (2002), however, calls into question the presupposition of the incest taboo as a fundamental prohi ion contributing to the child’s sexual formation in the Freudian model. Moreover, she unveils how the incest taboo has worked in tandem with the miscegenation taboo in p discourses to underlie new forms of European racism in the context 16of “a Purope heset by opening orders and new immigrants” Moving further heyond racial purity, Butler even advances that the non-heteronomative sexual parenting has in fact become the scapegoat for not just the transnational immigrants, but also the modern reproductive technologies among many “unnatural” practices in a global context. Given the plain self-contradictions of the naturalization discourses, the clear cut border between culture and nature turns itself into a fiction. ‘Through her theorization of a compatible queer kinship, Butler has shown how the queering of kinship is highly valuable to not only renewing our understanding about the fami , but also to rearticulate culture, nation and even humanity as a whole, which survive only through constant challenges reexamination, and self-renewing. While Judith Butler boldly suggests the interaction of the queer/sexuality discourse and the kinship discourse, Elizabeth Freeman (2007) explicitly explores the ways the queer/sexuality discourse and the kinship discourse can meaningfully speak to each other, mentioning Butler as a point of reference. Building on Butler’s theory of performance and performativity as well as other desconstructivist thoughts, she proposes a new perspective to look at kinship as dynamic durable “renewal” relationality beyond procreation instead of a static “dependency” narrowed spatially aas well as temporarily. Specifically, she elaborates and advances Pierre Bourdieu’s mode of “practical kinship” ( Cf: Bourdieu, cit. in: Freeman, 305) while critiquing several structuralist models such as David Schneider's biogenetic model and Levi-Strauss’ social exchange model. For Boudieu, kinship is, effectively, “the utilization of connections”, the practice of a set of acts “that may or may not follow the officially recognized lines of alliance and descent, and that in any case take precedence over the latter in 7everyday life” (Freeman, 2007, 305) His model challenges dominant notions of what kinship is while still retaining its ground in bodily relations. Specifically, he borrows from Marcel Maus * concept of “habitus” to imagine queered kinship as enacted by bodily learned and shared dispositions, stance or schema. In these sense, habitus is also_a replicative system, but not necessarily a heterosexually reproductive one. Habitus, argues Freeman, provides duration not only for otherwise mortal bodies, but between bodies otherwise separated in time. To combine queer theory with kins! theory turns out to be very inspiring. Just as Freeman (2007) herself comments, “whereas the procreative models treat the production of culture as if it were an extension of biological reproduction or childrearing, the model of habitus invites us to think of biological reproduction as simply one possible mode of cultural production” (306). After all, in a new century such as ours, it is highly urgent and rewarding to embrace new approaches toward kinship since in reality people are experiencing more and more kinds of lived relationalities that cannot be easily explained by the traditional discourses any more — if they ever could. This chapter will not provide definitions of specific cinematic techniques that are examined in the primary texts, since the definitions of those techniques are already established conventions in literary studies especially film studies. It will, instead, give a brief review of American queer cinema as a genre, explaining why certain features of this genre are chosen to be analyzed in my following chapters. In terms of the genre of American queer cinema, Benshoff and Griffin are two crucial scholars by bringing together seminal writings through co-editing Queer Cinema, the Film Reader (2004). In the introduction, they tries to define this genrethrough explaining why the volume are organized into four parts, demonstrating four major ways to define “queer film” among other ways: an authorial voice, a character, a mode of textual production and a type of reception practice. So a queer film can be a film directed or produced or written by a non-heterosexual director, producer or screenwriter, or a film presenting non-heterosexual characters, or a film produced by LGBT friendly, avant-garde and independent filmmaking modes, or a film read from a queer viewing position. Admittedly, having queer characters are a bottom-line standard for my choice of the text. Nevertheless, to be able to read the film from a queer perspective is the deciding principle for this research. That is to say, the three films reflect a certain way of looking at sexuality and family that are considered as queer by the researcher. Therefore, the following chapters will sometimes comment on those queer production or authorship aspects as well in addition to the investigations of queer characterizations in the films. Besides the fact that American queer cinema genre is inventive in its way of dealing with the queer topic, the cinematic techniques also have the advantages in rendering the representation more comprehensive. Cinematic means such as nuanced editing, added acoustic and visual elements, camera angles and lightings prove to be inductive to reveal the power relations in the queer family. For example, the montage, namely the “mounting” or editing of film shots, is a very effective way to connect images otherwise loosely presented. Images filled with symbolic colors such as a background of a vast grayish yellow prairie tells a lot more about the cowboy’s pioneering spirit in the US American context. A sarcastic tone in a seemingly an obedient reply reveals contradictory emotions of the characters.During the introductions of the theoretical frameworks, it is also. undoubtedly clearer that there has already existed much research respectively on family studies, gender studies, kinship studies as well as the genre of American queer cinema. However, as suggested by the intersectional studies of Butler and Freeman, itis still highly worth exploring to combine the queer theory and kinship theory to examine cinema, a field of the popular culture in which the family thematic has already been very mature while sexuality is also thriving. And in the case of this project, it is to connect these two subtly interconnected theories into looking at three selected turn-of- the-millennium independent American queer family dramas, which hopefully will offer some relatively new or at least inspiring readings of the films, which in turn will also shed some light in rethinking family, gender and sexuality. Chapter three Disrupting Gender Categories Gender as a discourse refers to one of the most foundational regulating system characterized of the modern society. It consists of rest ting prescriptions on the male ideal and the female ideal through rhetoric and categories, excluding other gender possibilities beyond this binary framework and yet at the same time allows chances for reclaiming agency. In addition to this working synchronic definition, it is also important to briefly review the diachronic development of this concept so as to understand why this definition is favored over other definitions. “Gender” was firstly theorized in the early 1970s by the second wave feminists Aware of the demarcation between the biological sex differences and the meanings people attaches to it- A distinction system mostly notably epitomized by Simone de Beauvoir’s famous declaration that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ 2»