Fraught Families, Queer Elders, and the Virtue (and Vices) of Filial Piety

Filial piety is a fraught topic for many queer people. In recent decades, scholars have begun documenting the struggles of queer persons confined in harmful family structures by societal, familial, and personal expectations. These studies are most detailed in Confucian-influenced cultures where filial piety (xiao, hyo, oyakoko, etc.) is named and celebrated explicitly as a virtue. However, the experiences documented have analogs in other contexts. It is a familiar story: queer individuals are expected to conform to previous generations’ expectations for sexuality, they may delay or even refuse coming out due to parental pressures, and they may experience greater physical and psychological distress as a result. In short, for many queer people, family is as likely to be a source of harm as a source of healing, and filial piety traps them in these harmful situations.

From this all-too-common queer experience has sprung the radical suggestion that the problem is not just filial piety, but the family itself. Sophie Lewis and ME O’Brien have grounded their family abolitionist arguments in feminist and queer theory. Their critiques share with other authors like Lee Edelman a suspicion that the family, along with roles like “mother” and “child,” have been so co-opted by capitalism and unjust systems that the only just way forward is to imagine a world without these concepts as we know them.

Now consider a critique from a very different direction: Jesus promised to divide households, setting children against their parents and parents against their children (Matthew 10:35-36; Luke 12:52-53). When approached by his family, Jesus asked “Who are my mother and brothers?” and pointed instead to his disciples (Mark 3:31–35; Matthew 12:46–50; Luke 8:19–21). In the New Testament more broadly, adoption repeatedly supplants biological descent as the framing concept for relationship, focused on the chosen family in the community of believers.

There is therefore good reason to be skeptical about family, especially for those working at the intersection of queer and religious studies. And, yet, there is also a growing literature on the importance of chosen family and alternative kinship structures in queer communities. Not only as an ideal to replace the harms done by families of origin, but also as a practical necessity, chosen family plays an important role in many queer individuals’ lives. And such family can be more than remedial: even queer individuals who enjoy positive relationships with their biological relatives may still benefit from relationships with chosen family members who share in the experience of being queer in a heteronormative society.

That said, queer families are not impervious to internal failures either. In particular as out queer communities have become increasingly intergenerational (due to factors that include, but are far from limited to, greater HIV/AIDS survival rates), ageism and discrimination have grown as well. On the other hand, there is also increasing awareness that queer elders, and their unique experiences, are valuable resources that ought to be honored and preserved. Yet here too there is a risk of reductive tropes: either idealizing exemplars (e.g., the “pioneer” or “survivor”) or perpetuating restrictive stereotypes (e.g., the “daddy” who has no desire to identify as such).

This is all to say that the reality of queer chosen family means that we cannot escape the need to reflect on better and worse ways of relating within family structures. In this paper, I argue that reengagement with a most unlikely virtue—that of filial piety—can help us do so. Of course, the virtue will require significant revision, in light of the measurable harms being inflicted on those trapped by the virtue’s traditional understanding. Here the empirical and ethnographic results of queer studies, the thorough philosophical reflections of a tradition like Confucianism, the queer theoretical challenges to the traditional nuclear family, and a similar Christian skepticism can stand in fruitful tension with one another.

If filial piety is indeed a virtue, then like all virtues it will have sibling vices of excess and defect. Clearly, traditional conceptions of the virtue have not done a good job navigating these failures. Family’s skeptics help us identify and avoid these vicious risks. And queer experience of chosen family can help us reconceptualize the relationships within which filial piety is an orienting concept, focusing more on the features of relationships in question (the goods conferred by intergenerational relationships; the need to give and receive support across one’s lifespan; etc.) than the accidents of biogenetic relation (here again, adoption is also relevant).

What follows is a thick description of the sort of obligations queer communities owe their elders. As already suggested, this description avoids trite idealizations of queer elders, for it is exactly at times of practical necessity and/or moral failing that a virtue like filial piety becomes pertinent. In this way, filial piety can become a helpful concept amid the precarity and unconventionality of queer life and queer families, rather than a conceptual tool for heteronormative oppression.

Representative Bibliography: 

Alan Chan and Sor-Hoon Tan, Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and History; 

CM Davis, “Kin/folk: On queer models of collective beholding” in Theology & Sexuality, 29 (1); 

Lee Edelman, No Future; 

Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family; 

Kate McClean et al., “Letters from Queer Elders” in Journal of Homosexuality 72 (3); 

ME O’Brien, Family Abolition; 

Stephen G Post, “Adoption Theologically Considered” in The Journal of Religious Ethics 25 (1); 

Stephanie Mota Thurston, “Family Abolition and an Abundance of Care” at The Political Theology Network; 

Kathi Weeks, “Abolition of the Family” in Feminist Theory 24 (3); 

Xumeng Xie, “The (im)possibilities of queer girlhoods: Chinese girls negotiating queerness and filial piety” in Global Studies of Childhood 13 (2); 

Lai-Shan Yip, “Seeking Compassion Amid Unwelcoming Environments” in Queer Ministers’ Voices from the Global South