Written by Jung Chen.
Image credit: Exhibition of LOVE x FAMILY = 20+, 20 Years of LGBTQ+ Families in Taiwan by Taiwan LGBT Family Rights Advocacy / Facebook.
When Ben first held his newborn son, he wept. ‘That was the moment I would never forget in my life,’ he told me. ‘I was so moved I could not talk properly. It was wonderful beyond any words.’ What made the moment so overwhelming was not only the joy of new fatherhood but the long journey that had preceded it. As a teenager in Taiwan, when Ben came to terms with being gay, he assumed that fatherhood was off the table forever. After a long reproductive journey undertaken with his husband and their families, he became the happy father weeping in the delivery room, holding a child he had once been certain he would never have.
Ben is one of the 53 gay fathers and fathers-to-be I spoke with for my PhD project on Taiwanese gay men’s cross-border reproductive journeys. In Chapter 10 of the edited volume Feeling Taiwan: Emotions in Everyday Politics, Social Movements, and Research Practices, I draw on their lived experiences to develop the concept of ‘affective relatedness’: how emotions move people towards a long-desired queer parenthood, and how they also flow, sometimes unexpectedly, between researchers and the people they hope to understand.
Beyond ‘deliberate’ reproductive planning: Feelings as motivations
Since 2019, Taiwan has been the first country in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage. Yet the celebration of marital rights has not extended to reproductive rights for Tongzhi couples. While the Assisted Reproduction Act restricts assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and donor gametes to married, infertile, opposite-sex couples, surrogacy remains illegal in any form, and joint adoption was only fully extended to same-sex couples in May 2023. For gay men in Taiwan who want to become biological fathers, the only feasible path is a costly cross-border one. After Thailand and Russia became unavailable in 2014 and 2015, this route runs almost exclusively through clinics and agencies in the United States, where the industry is well established and legally protected.
Once we recognise how constrained and expensive these paths are, a question lingers: what actually drives gay men to undertake the journey at all? Existing literature and journalistic writing lean towards rationality. Gay men make ‘careful,’ ‘deliberate,’ ‘planned’ decisions, researching, calculating, and budgeting throughout. This is true, but it is not the whole picture. What I learnt from my interlocutors is that, beneath the ‘spreadsheet fertility’ and the carefully crafted timelines, their itineraries to parenthood begin in feeling: hope for a future child, the intimate ache of belonging, the sense that a particular kind of life is still possible.
Emotions as relational and orientational: picturing future fatherhood
These feelings are not merely private. They are also collective, shared, and circulating between people. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion, I treat affect as something that moves between bodies, sticking to objects and orienting people towards or away from particular futures. Ahmed argues that emotions are fundamentally relational, involving a ‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’ in relation to the objects of feeling. Building on this, ‘affective relatedness’ captures how gay fathers and intending fathers feel bound to a child who does not yet exist, and how that imagined relationality energises everything else: the months of research, the visa paperwork, the cross-border travel, and the careful negotiations with families and clinics.
Tsou-Tsou was waiting for a surrogate to be matched with him and his husband in the United States when we first spoke. He described their journey as a kind of pregnancy. ‘Women go through pregnancy to become mothers. I feel something similar when dealing with paperwork and complicated processes. Our gestation started when we did the research and went through providing sperm, IVF, and implantation. It is our gestation.’ Tsou-Tsou’s body would never carry their child, yet the emotional contours of his journey, the happiness, anguish, and joy, were no less real. ARTs and the assistance of third parties (the egg providers and surrogates) not only enable them to conceive and gestate a baby. These arrangements made gay fatherhood thinkable in the first place. Building on Marcin Smietana’s notion of ‘reproductive thinkability’ and Dana Berkowitz’s ‘procreative consciousness,’ I introduce ‘reproductive aspirations’ to capture the affective intentionality that draws gay men towards a future of queer fatherhood, even when heteronormative scripts in Taiwanese society have long implied they have no place there. To borrow Jack Halberstam’s phrase, gay men craft a ‘queer temporality’ in which their futures can be imagined through logics that lie outside heteronormative birth, marriage, and reproduction.
I also frame this making of fatherhood as a form of ‘queer relatedness,’ drawing on the anthropologist Janet Carsten’s concept of relatedness, which examines forms of connection beyond the biological and social dichotomy in conventional kinship. To root the analysis in the Taiwanese context, I borrow Yu-Ling Huang and Chia-Ling Wu’s reading of yuan (緣) as a flexible, malleable, and queer way of thinking about how connection is made within and beyond the family. The gay fathers in my study were, in this sense, queering yuan, cultivating new forms of belonging that did not resemble the heteronormative family but were no less real and no less full of feeling.
Feelings as research objects and methodological resources: Affective relatedness between interlocutors and researcher
The second meaning of ‘affective relatedness’ concerns the connection between researchers and the people they speak with. I am a queer woman and a sociologist working on LGBTQ+ family-building in Taiwan, not a gay man who has lived the experience of longing and planning for a child. During fieldwork, I conducted interviews from a position of professional distance while also entangled in my interlocutors’ feelings and reflecting on my own. Many of them asked me, often early on, why I was interested in researching gay fathers. When I told them I was a lesbian who had also thought about having children, the conversation often shifted. They became more willing to share, and asked about my own feelings. Sometimes I answered, and the interview moved towards something more intimate: a form of friendship, or a shared feeling among people who considered themselves part of a queer community.
I came to think of these feelings in two ways. First, my queer identity functioned as an ‘entry ticket’: a visible shared positionality that allowed gay fathers to lower their guard and share intimate life stories with a stranger like me. Without it, many of those stories might never have surfaced. Second, the sharing went both ways. When I disclosed my own hopes and uncertainties about my queer identity and reproductive plans, we entered what I describe as a ‘gift-giving cycle’ of emotional exchange. Drawing again on Ahmed, who notes that emotions accumulate over time as a form of affective value, I came to see that the trust between us was not given at the outset but built up across our exchanges, accruing through reciprocal storytelling.
These formulations matter beyond my own research. Social scientists working on intimate or marginalised topics often face the dilemma of how much of themselves to bring into the field. The dominant academic principle still privileges detachment and objectivity, yet for those of us studying communities to which we partially belong, detachment is almost impossible. Recognising affective relatedness as both a research object and a methodological resource is one way to take seriously the feminist argument that situated knowledge, partial perspectives, and emotional engagement can be sources of insight rather than obstacles to it.
Recognising the fragility and contingency of affective relatedness
It is also important to acknowledge that affective relatedness can be fragile and contingent. My interlocutors and I did not always agree, and on topics where we found ourselves on opposite sides, I had to withdraw to a more ‘professional’ researcher position. Such tensions should not, however, become reasons to give up on trying to understand, to feel, and to connect. Like yuan itself, affective relatedness is contingent and changeable, pulling people together at one moment and apart at another. Recognising this fragility seems to me an important part of conducting emotion-attentive research with both care and rigour.
The chapter sits within Part III of Feeling Taiwan, titled ‘Intimacies, Sexualities, and Feeling Attached/Unattached,’ which turns to the affective structures governing desire, kinship, and intimacy in contemporary Taiwan. The volume, edited by Po-Han Lee, Alvaro Martinez-Lacabe, and Yu-chin Tseng, gathers scholars who treat emotion as both an object of analysis and a method of research. My chapter shows that, even in something as seemingly logistical as cross-border assisted reproduction, emotions still do consequential work.
From my research journey, I gradually learnt that emotions are not the soft underside of gay men’s reproductive practices, nor a sentimental addendum to legal constraints and fertility economics. They are conditions of possibility. Without the affective relatedness that intending gay fathers cultivate with their imagined future children, the journey to fatherhood would not begin. And without the affective relatedness that interviewers and interlocutors craft together, often contingently, much of what we know about queer family-making in Taiwan would remain unsaid. These are the small registers of affective relatedness that make Taiwan, and our research on it, feel like something we are part of rather than something we observe from above.
Jung Chen is an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge. Her research spans medical sociology, gender studies, the social studies of reproduction and LGBTQ+ studies, with a focus on how medical technologies, social norms and inequalities become entangled. Her PhD thesis examined how gay fathers navigated cross-border third-party reproduction, arguing that their queer reproductive practices involved both resistance to and accommodation of normativities. Her current projects examine egg donation in Taiwan and overseas, and the intimacies and family-making practices of transnational same-sex couples.
This article was published as part of the special issue on ‘Feeling Taiwan’.