Materializing "Family Pressure" among Taiwanese Queer Women

This article integrates feminist analyses of patrilineal kinship with the literature on lesbian, gay, and queer family of origin relationships. I argue that discourses surrounding sexuality and families of origin underrepresent women's issues through lack of attention to the embodied and material dimensions of family pressure and support. My fieldwork and interviews with lesbians in Taiwan point to women's unpaid family work, family resource distribution, and housing insecurity as areas where patrilineal family pressures persist into the twenty-first century. These findings emerge from the life stories of queer women in a variety of social and family arrangements, including those married to straight men, those married to gay men, and women who are divorced or unmarried.