{"title":"White Supremacy, Christian Americanism, and Adoption","authors":"Kimberly D. Mckee","doi":"10.1353/ado.2021.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0008","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This essay reflects on adoption’s connections to longer histories of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and other forms of white supremacist violence that disrupt Indigenous families and families of color. Child welfare practices discipline the bodies of children of color and Indigenous children as well as their parents, resulting in forcible separations (e.g., slavery, the Indian Boarding School Project) as well as coercive fostering and adoption practices. Christian Americanism operates as a tool of white supremacy in so far as it is deployed to lay judgement on who is worthy to parent and whose families are worth preserving. Addressing the broad histories of child removal in the United States, this essay calls attention to how the separation of migrant children at the US-Mexico border from 2017 onward is just another example of violent dekinning in an attempt to control and surveil nonwhite families. The past informs the present and futures of both the formation and dissolution of kinship ties.","PeriodicalId":140707,"journal":{"name":"Adoption & Culture","volume":"202 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116169697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Thirty Years as an Historian of Adoption","authors":"E. Carp","doi":"10.1353/ado.2021.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0005","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article is part memoir of my writing about the adoption reform movement, part history of the movement itself, and part history of the evolution of adoption studies. It describes the rise, and sometimes the fall, of those adoption and childhood organizations, conferences, publications, and journals with which I have had a personal relationship. These organizations include the American Adoption Congress, the National Committee for Adoption, Bastard Nation, the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth, the International Conference on Adoption Research, the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture, and the journals Adoption Quarterly and Adoption & Culture. When appropriate, I identify the many activists and scholars with whom, in one form or another, I have had a personal or professional relationship.","PeriodicalId":140707,"journal":{"name":"Adoption & Culture","volume":"152 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123282241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Brief Thoughts on Adoption Scholarship","authors":"Heather Jacobson","doi":"10.1353/ado.2021.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0004","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In this short essay, I contemplate the field of adoption scholarship via two questions posed to me by Emily Hipchen and Marina Fedosik. I first share some brief thoughts on the intersection of adoption scholarship with other areas of inquiry. I posit that adoption could—and should be—better integrated into the larger scholarship on families, including examinations of assisted reproduction. I then share some of the important adoption monographs that have influenced my own research and teaching on families, international adoption, surrogacy, and ART.","PeriodicalId":140707,"journal":{"name":"Adoption & Culture","volume":"159 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134332581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Victorian Childhood and Children: A Conversation with Claudia Nelson","authors":"C. E. Nelson, Emily Hipchen","doi":"10.1353/ado.2021.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0001","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This interview focuses on the question of what adoption studies can bring to childhood studies. Nelson points out that adoption studies, which concern not only adopted children and relinquishing mothers but also adult adoptees and birth mothers late in life, can help to inform investigations of temporality, and perhaps particularly queer temporality. Invoking novels from Frankenstein to Bleak House to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga, this conversation notes that both adoption scholars and scholars of family and age studies must recognize that an adult is not only an adult but also a former child, that adulthood itself is not unitary but a matter of multiple stages and shifting relationships, and that the literature of adoption often overturns “conventional” paradigms of family in multiple ways.","PeriodicalId":140707,"journal":{"name":"Adoption & Culture","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129627982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Interview with Shannon Gibney and Kimberly D. McKee","authors":"S. Gibney, Kimberly D. Mckee","doi":"10.1353/ado.2021.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0002","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Critical Adoption Studies scholar Dr. Kimberly D. McKee interviews writer Shannon Gibney about her creative and critical writing—much of it dealing with issues of transracial adoption, critical race studies, and the after-effects of multigenerational family trauma. The two also discuss trends in adoptee activism, communities, and cultural production.","PeriodicalId":140707,"journal":{"name":"Adoption & Culture","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121912087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rev. of The Best Possible Immigrants: International Adoption and the American Family by Rachel Rains Winslow (review)","authors":"Kira A. Donnell","doi":"10.1353/ado.2020.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2020.0004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":140707,"journal":{"name":"Adoption & Culture","volume":"43 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123655701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Unwed Mother\": Sex, Stigma, and Spoiled Identity","authors":"V. Andrews","doi":"10.1353/ado.2020.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2020.0000","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This paper focuses on the postwar \"unwed mother,\" the discursive construction of her identity in the twentieth century, and the resulting policies and practices that led to the loss of her (usually) firstborn infant to adoption in the postwar adoption mandate. The stigma and spoiled identity attached to being an \"unwed mother\" had a negative impact on the lives of these mostly teenaged young women and girls, the majority for their entire lives. This paper uncovers the illegal, unethical, and human rights abuses perpetrated against these \"gender traitors,\" sexual agents who became pregnant out-of-wedlock, disrupting normative gender roles during a period in which women were expected to create nuclear families within heterosexual marriage.","PeriodicalId":140707,"journal":{"name":"Adoption & Culture","volume":"76 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114762609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Adoption Interruptus","authors":"Frances J. Latchford","doi":"10.1353/ado.2020.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2020.0008","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Queer theory has been brought to bear on adoption studies (e.g., queer parenting or gay and lesbian adoption rights, transracial and transnational adoption), but adoption studies has not meaningfully directed its attention toward sexuality per se. This paper introduces the idea that adoption is a fruitful lens through which to expand understandings of sexual regulation, sexual identities, or sexual intensities, pleasures, and intimacies. It also suggests that analyses of the interplay between meanings of adoption and sexuality are an opportunity to rethink both. It enlivens critical thought surrounding heteronormativity by leveraging adoption as a version of existence that is fundamentally at odds with heterosexuality as a reproductive end.","PeriodicalId":140707,"journal":{"name":"Adoption & Culture","volume":"329 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116834276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Constructing Homonormative Kinship: The Life Worlds and Death Worlds of Gay and Lesbian Adoption in Canada","authors":"Amy Verhaeghe","doi":"10.1353/ado.2020.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2020.0010","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In this essay, I analyze Conceiving Family, a documentary film produced by Amy Bohigian in 2011 about gay and lesbian adoptions in Canada. I argue that this film illustrates how gay and lesbian adoption can be understood to be implicated in hetero- and homonormativity and thus in the naturalization of racial and global inequities, as well as in settler colonialism in Canada. I suggest that the film can be read as a demonstration of how the normative Canadian family is realized in opposition to racialized families, Indigenous families, nonmonogamous family formations, and queer families.","PeriodicalId":140707,"journal":{"name":"Adoption & Culture","volume":"173 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132545259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rev. of La Couleur de l'Adoption [The Color of Adoption] by Manuelle Alix-Surprenant and Renaud Vinet-Houle","authors":"Zeina Ismail-Allouche","doi":"10.1353/ado.2020.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2020.0007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":140707,"journal":{"name":"Adoption & Culture","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123852352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}