Adoption Identity And Kinship

Author : Katarina Wegar
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300146387
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Adoption, Identity, and Kinship written by Katarina Wegar and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sociologist Katarina Wegar offers a new perspective on adoption and the search debate, placing them within a social context. She argues that Americans who are embroiled in adoption controversies have failed to understand how much the debate, adoption research, and the experience of adoption itself are affected by persistent social beliefs that adopted children are different from and somehow inferior to children reared by their biological families. Wegar begins by considering the historical and legal development of adoption and of sealed-records policies, showing how kinship ideology, the helping professions, and gender issues intersect to frame adoption policies and the ongoing debate. Drawing on articles in social work and mental health journals, activist newsletters, and autobiographies by search activists, as well as on popular images of adoption portrayed in talk shows and other media, she analyzes the rhetoric to reveal the unconscious biases that exist. She concludes with a discussion of ways in which adoption reformers can avoid perpetuating harmful and confining images of those who participate in adoption.

Author : Ellen Herman
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226328074
Total Pages : 394 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Kinship by Design written by Ellen Herman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What constitutes a family? Tracing the dramatic evolution of Americans’ answer to this question over the past century, Kinship by Design provides the fullest account to date of modern adoption’s history. Beginning in the early 1900s, when children were still transferred between households by a variety of unregulated private arrangements, Ellen Herman details efforts by the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the Child Welfare League of America to establish adoption standards in law and practice. She goes on to trace Americans’ shifting ideas about matching children with physically or intellectually similar parents, revealing how research in developmental science and technology shaped adoption as it navigated the nature-nurture debate. Concluding with an insightful analysis of the revolution that ushered in special needs, transracial, and international adoptions, Kinship by Design ultimately situates the practice as both a different way to make a family and a universal story about love, loss, identity, and belonging. In doing so, this volume provides a new vantage point from which to view twentieth-century America, revealing as much about social welfare, statecraft, and science as it does about childhood, family, and private life.

Author : Kimberly D. McKee
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252051122
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Disrupting Kinship written by Kimberly D. McKee and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-03-02 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Korean War began, Western families have adopted more than 200,000 Korean children. Two-thirds of these adoptees found homes in the United States. The majority joined white families and in the process forged a new kind of transnational and transracial kinship. Kimberly D. McKee examines the growth of the neocolonial, multi-million-dollar global industry that shaped these families—a system she identifies as the transnational adoption industrial complex. As she shows, an alliance of the South Korean welfare state, orphanages, adoption agencies, and American immigration laws powered transnational adoption between the two countries. Adoption became a tool to supplement an inadequate social safety net for South Korea's unwed mothers and low-income families. At the same time, it commodified children, building a market that allowed Americans to create families at the expense of loving, biological ties between Koreans. McKee also looks at how Christian Americanism, South Korean welfare policy, and other facets of adoption interact with and disrupt American perceptions of nation, citizenship, belonging, family, and ethnic identity.

Author : Judith S. Modell
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 9781571810779
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Sealed and Secret Kinship written by Judith S. Modell and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2002-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adoption is a controversial subject in the United States, particularly in the last 30 years. Why that is and how public attention affects the decisions made by those who arrange, legalise and experience adoption forms the subject of this book.

Author : Susan Devan Harness
Publisher : University of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 1496219570
Total Pages : 355 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bitterroot written by Susan Devan Harness and published by University of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-03-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2019 High Plains Book Award Winner for the Creative Nonfiction and Indigenous Writer categories In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her “real” parents. He replied that they had died in a car accident not long after she was born—except they hadn’t, as Harness would learn in a conversation with a social worker a few years later. Harness’s search for answers revolved around her need to ascertain why she was the target of racist remarks and why she seemed always to be on the outside looking in. New questions followed her through college and into her twenties when she started her own family. Meeting her biological family in her early thirties generated even more questions. In her forties Harness decided to get serious about finding answers when, conducting oral histories, she talked with other transracial adoptees. In her fifties she realized that the concept of “home” she had attributed to the reservation existed only in her imagination. Making sense of her family, the American Indian history of assimilation, and the very real—but culturally constructed—concept of race helped Harness answer the often puzzling questions of stereotypes, a sense of nonbelonging, the meaning of family, and the importance of forgiveness and self-acceptance. In the process Bitterrootalso provides a deep and rich context in which to experience life.

Author : Katarina Wegar
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813538426
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Adoptive Families in a Diverse Society written by Katarina Wegar and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adoptive Families in a Diverse Society brings together twenty-one prominent scholars to explore the experience, practice, and policy of adoption in North America. While much existing literature tends to stress the potential problems inherent in non-biological kinship, the essays in this volume consider adoptive family life in a broad and balanced context. Bringing new perspectives to the topics of kinship, identity, and belonging, this path-breaking book expands more than our understandings of adoptive family life; it urges us to rethink the limits and possibilities of diversity and assimilation in American society.

Author : Carol J. Singley
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190454245
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Adopting America written by Carol J. Singley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-29 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American literature abounds with orphans who experience adoption or placements that resemble adoption. These stories do more than recount adventures of children living away from home. They tell an American story of family and national identity. In narratives from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, adoption functions as narrative event and trope that describes the American migratory experience, the impact of Calvinist faith, and the growth of democratic individualism. The roots of literary adoption appear in the discourse of Puritan settlers, who ambivalently took leave of their birth parent country and portrayed themselves as abandoned children. Believing they were chosen children of God, they also prayed for spiritual adoption and emulated God's grace by extending adoption to others. Nineteenth-century adoption literature develops from this notion of adoption as salvation and from simultaneous attachments to the Old World and the New. In domestic fiction of the mid-nineteenth century, adoption also reflects a focus on nurture in childrearing, increased mobility in the nation, and middle-class concerns over immigration and urbanization, assuaged when the orphan finds a proper, loving home. Adoption signals fresh starts and the opportunity for success without genealogical constraints, especially for white males, but inflected by gender and racial biases, it often entails dependency for girls and children of color. A complex signifier of difference, adoption gives voice to sometimes contradictory calls to origins and fresh beginning; to feelings of worthiness and unworthiness. In writings from Cotton Mather to Edith Wharton, it both replicates and offers an alternative to the genealogical norm, evoking ambivalence as it shapes national mythologies.

Author : Kathryn A. Mariner
Publisher : University of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520299558
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contingent Kinship written by Kathryn A. Mariner and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a small Chicago adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption, Contingent Kinship charts the entanglement of institutional structures and ideologies of family, race, and class to argue that adoption is powerfully implicated in the question of who can have a future in the twenty-first-century United States. With a unique focus on the role that social workers and other professionals play in mediating relationships between expectant mothers and prospective adopters, Kathryn A. Mariner develops the concept of “intimate speculation,” a complex assemblage of investment, observation, and anticipation that shapes the adoption process into an elaborate mechanism for creating, dissolving, and exchanging imagined futures. Shifting the emphasis from adoption’s outcome to its conditions of possibility, this insightful ethnography places the practice of domestic adoption within a temporal, economic, and affective framework in order to interrogate the social inequality and power dynamics that render adoption—and the families it produces—possible.

Author : Frances J. Latchford
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 0773557997
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Steeped in Blood written by Frances J. Latchford and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What personal truths reside in biological ties that are absent in adoptive ties? And why do we think adoptive and biological ties are essentially different when it comes to understanding who we are? At a time when interest in DNA and ancestry is exploding, Frances Latchford questions the idea that knowing one's bio-genealogy is integral to personal identity or a sense of family and belonging. Upending our established values and beliefs about what makes a family, Steeped in Blood examines the social and political devaluation of adoptive ties. It takes readers on an intellectual journey through accepted wisdom about adoption, twins, kinship, and incest, and challenges our naturalistic and individualistic assumptions about identity and the biological ties that bind us, sometimes violently, to our families. Latchford exposes how our desire for bio-genealogical knowledge, understood as it is by family and adoption experts, pathologizes adoptees by posing the biological tie as a necessary condition for normal identity formation. Rejecting the idea that a love of the self-same is fundamental to family bonds, her book is a reaction to the wounds families suffer whenever they dare to revel in their difference. A rejoinder to rhetoric that defines adoptees, adoptive kin, and their family intimacies as inferior and inauthentic, Steeped in Blood's view through the lens of critical adoption studies decentres our cultural obsession with the biological family imaginary and makes real the possibility of being family in the absence of blood.

Author : Ivan Brady
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 0824883780
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Transactions in Kinship written by Ivan Brady and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays that follows up on "Adoption in Eastern Oceania" by Vern Carroll. Most were presented at a symposium during the First Annual Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) meeting in 1972.