Queering Families - (Sexuality, Identity, and Society) by Carla A Pfeffer (Paperback)

About the Book

While there is a growing body of literature on transgender men's experiences, relatively little exists to document the experiences of their partners. In Queering Families, Carla A. Pfeffer brings these experiences to life through interviews with the group most likely to partner and form families with transgender men: non-transgender (cisgender) women.

Book Synopsis

Ozzie and Harriet, move over. A new couple is moving into the neighborhood. In the postmodern era, advances in medical technologies allow some individuals categorized female at birth to live in accordance with their gender identities, as men. While a growing body of literature on transgender men's experiences has come to the forefront, relatively little exists to document the experiences of their partners. In Queering Families: The Postmodern Partnerships of Cisgender Women and Transgender Men, Carla A. Pfeffer brings these experiences to light through interviews with the group most likely to partner and form families with transgender men: non-transgender (cisgender) women.

Drawing upon in-depth interviews with fifty cisgender women partners of transgender men from across the United States and Canada, Pfeffer details the experiences of a community that often seems unremarkable and ordinary on its surface. Cisgender women who partner with transgender men who are socially "read" as male are often (mis)perceived as part of a heterosexual couple or family. Yet not all cisgender women who partner with transgender men are comfortable with this invisible existence and comfortable normativity. Instead, many of the cisgender women Pfeffer interviews hold deeply-valued queer identities that may be erased in their partnerships with transgender men.

Queering Families details the struggles and strengths of these postmodern "Harriets" as they work to build identities, partnerships, families, and communities. Pfeffer's interviewees discuss the implications of visibility and invisibilty in their everyday lives as they face barriers or pathways to legal and social inclusion. They carve out new lexicons for partners' bodies and their own sexualities, transformed through gender-affirming hormones and surgeries. They plan and construct families with and without children, some drawing upon alternative reproductive technologies to bear the biological offspring of their transgender partners.

With remarkable depth and insight, Queering Families explores a shifting social landscape that challenges the very notion of what constitutes a "same-sex" or an "opposite-sex" relationship, marriage, or family.

Review Quotes

"Queering Families is a wonderfully in-depth and refreshing look at the often-misunderstood relationships of trans individuals." -- Aleander Young, MA, APA - Society for the Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity

"Overall, Queering Families is a welcome addition to the literature on family, gender, and sexualities and would fit well in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in sociology andwomen, gender, and sexuality studies. The writing is accessible and not bogged down with academic jargon. The book even includes a glossary for readers less familiar with trans and queer terminology. Notably, cis partners of transmen will likely celebrate this book as an important resource for navigating their own relationships. Queering Families furthers knowledge about postmodern partnerships and paves theway for greater understandings of family configurations that defy the boundaries of normativity." -- Elroi J. Windsor, Salem College, American Journal of Sociology

"A nuanced and well-researched study of the common and sometimes controversial phenomenon of relationships and family-building between cisgender women and transgender men. Pfeffer trace the connections butch and femme, cis and trans, lesbian indentification and identity "border wars" with compassion and thorough methodology. A substantial close read on expanding concepts of family and identity. Excellent for academic and queer theory collections." --Over the Rainbow Books

"Pfeffer's stated goal is not to produce generalizable conclusions about transmen and their cisgender women partners, but rather to pay attention to the nuances of these lives that are often overlooked and undertheorized. On the whole, she is incredibly successful in creating a book that is both groundbreaking in its focus and interesting to read. Moreover, the book demonstrates the potential of truly intersectional analysis of qualitative data-providing systematic insights and complexity while keeping a human face on the story...Readers interested in moving beyond simple, and often stereotypical, renderings of transgender people will appreciate Pfeffer's unwillingness to rest on orthodox gender role expectations, and her dedication to uncovering what she calls the 'unwieldy and shape-shifting social institution' of the family." --Gender & Society

"Queering Families is an extraordinary book that simultaneously challenges mainstream conceptions of family and exposes the very real struggle of even the most radical of queers to envision family labor in new and feminist ways. Nuanced but highly readable, Pfeffer illuminates that families are not best understood as a set of static roles, but as dynamic relationships marked by ever-shifting identities, bodies, and sex practices. A must-read for scholars and students of the family." --Jane Ward, Professor and Vice Chair, Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of California, Riverside

"Carla Pfeffer takes one of the first deep dives into the lives of cisgender partners of transgender men, as they navigate the complexities of identity, sexuality, intimacy, normativity, labor, visibility, family, and community. Enlivened by these women's voices, the book gives us new queer tools for rethinking interpersonal lives and family institutions." --Joshua Gamson, University of San Francisco, Author of Modern Families: Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship

"In Queering Families, Pfeffer expands the inquiry into the postmodern family condition by looking beyond family structure to examine the relational nature of gender and sexual identities themselves. Her research with the partners of transmen reveals in careful detail the quotidian care, emotion and identity work they do to shore up their trans* partners' genders, even in moments when the reality of that gender threatens their senses of self, of relationship or of community. It is an intimate glance into the profoundly social nature of our roles as husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends and lovers, an important contribution to the sociology of family, gender, sexuality and identity." --Tey Meadow, Department of Sociology, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Harvard University

"Perhaps the most profound contribution of this book is to show that families-which so many of us consider the bedrock of modern civilization-are not biologically ordained; they are of our own choice and choosing. Examining ciswomen who are partnered with transmen, Pfeffer skillfully avoids the twin pitfalls of characterizing these relationships as radical subversions or mere mirrors of heteronormativity. Analytically sharp yet also exquisitely sensitive, Queer[ing] Families lifts a scholarly veil behind which we see the shape-shifting cultural meanings and material expressions of queer partnerships and family forms in the twenty-first century." --Amin Ghaziani, author of There Goes the Gayborhood?

"What does it mean to be in a post-modern partnership? By examing the family lives of cis women and trans men, Carla Pfeffer reveals problematic assumptions that govern social policy, scholarship on and shared knowledge about families. In doing so she helps to chart a path toward a society based on an ethic of care, justice and inclusion. This book is a must read for scholars of family, gender and trans studies." --CJ Pascoe, Associate Professor, Undergraduate Program Director; Department of Sociology, University of Oregon

"Queering Families brings the personal and relational experiences of cis women partnered with trans men into clear relief. Recognizing the diversity of interviewees' experience, this analysis makes sense of participants' deeply personal accounts of what their partnerships mean for their own gender and sexual identities, community memberships, distribution of household and relational work, familial relationships, and experiences of sex and sexuality. Insightful and sensitive, Queering Families details the constraints, challenges, and threats these cis women navigate as well as the remarkable ways in which they transform our notion of family." --Katrina Kimport, PhD, Assistant Professor, Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, University of California, San Francisco

"With its theoretical and empirical sophistication and insight, Queering Families: The Postmodern Partnerships of Cisgender Women and Transgender Men compels us to reassess many of our assumptions regarding sexuality, gender, family, and identity. It asks us to seriously reconsider simple binaries-man/woman, same-sex/opposite-sex, straight/gay. It forces us to reflect on the very meaning of family and to appreciate the increasing diversity of family forms and other relationships. Carla Pfeffer's scholarship on the experiences of cisgender women who are in relationships with transgender men easily-and thankfully-distinguishes itself from most research on the transgender population and on 'transgressive' relationships. This is an engagingly written, cogent and exciting book." --Brian Powell, James H. Rudy Professor of Sociology at Indiana University and author of Counted Out: Same-Sex Relationships and Americans' Definitions of Family

"A wonderfully in-depth and refreshing look at the often-misunderstood relationships of trans individuals. The author focuses on the relationships of cisgender women and transgender men to illustrate the complexities some trans individuals must navigate on a day to day basis. The postmodern ideology is interwoven within the book through the language and narratives provided by case examples and the cultural understanding of the trans community."

--APA Division 44 Newsletter

About the Author

Carla A. Pfeffer completed her doctoral work at the University of Michigan. She currently holds a joint appointment in Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina. Her research, employing qualitative and mixed-methods approaches, considers thorny intersections between social stigma, identity, resistance, and structure.