Demeter Press | Adoption and Mothering

Price: $24.95

Page Count: 240

Publication Date: October 2012

ISBN: 978-0-9866671-5-2

Adoption and Mothering is an international and interdisciplinary collection that examines birthmothers and adoptive mothers; it investigates debate, discourse, and the politics of adoption that surrounds them and impacts contemporary notions of motherhood as biological and non-biological kin in North American contexts. Written by authors from disciplinary perspectives in the humanities and social sciences, its essays offer critical perspectives on adoption and mothering that challenge institutionalized ideas, assumptions, pathologies, and psychologies that are used to interpret birthmothers and adoptive mothers. Its authors interrogate questions of race, gender, disability, class and sexuality as they relate to the experience, identity, and subjectivity of ‘mothers’ who are marked by the institution of adoption. It investigates historical and contemporary themes, language, law, and practices that concern mothering in closed and open adoption systems, and in transracial and transnational adoption. It critically explores the expectations, scrutiny, and liminality that birthmothers and adoptive mothers often face. It looks at imperatives that mothers be the keepers of culture, potential adversaries, and borderland mothers. In effect, it creates a productive and exciting dialogue between birthmothers and adoptive mothers to challenge traditional notions of motherhood.

“This book will appeal to a wide variety of audiences: students, lay people, and academics alike. The articles, all enlightening and wellwritten, employ a variety of disciplines to shed light on novel topics in adoption and to elucidate more familiar ones. Even those very familiar with adoption scholarship can expect some aha moments.” -Martha Satz, adoptive mother, writer and assistant professor at Southern Methodist University

Acknowledgements

Introduction
Frances Latchford

One
Denial of Self: Birth Mothers, Non-disclosure Adoption Laws, and the Silence of Others
Karen March

Two
Good Mothers, Bad Mothers, Not-Mothers: Privilege, Race and Gender and the Invention of the Birthmother
Nicole Pietsch

Three
A Birthmother’s Identity: [M]other Living on the Border of (Non)Motherhood
Katherine Sieger

Four
The Birthmother Dilemma: Resisting Feminist Exclusions in the Study of Adoption
Kate Livingston

Five
Reckless Abandon: The Politics of Victimization and Agency in Birthmother Narratives
Frances Latchford

Six
Re-Thinking Motherhood and Kinship in International Adoption
Sarah Wall

Seven
Mothering Chineseness: Celebrating Ethnicity with White American Mothers of Children Adopted from China
Amy E. Traver

Eight
Narrating Multiculturalism in Asian Adoption Fiction
Jenny Wills

Nine
Adoptive Mothering: A Transracial Adoptee’s Viewpoint
Judith Martin and Gail Trimberger

Ten
Are You My Mother? How Transracial Adoption Provides Insight into Who Can be a Mother and Who Can be Mothered
Elisha Marr

Eleven
Knowing You Made a Difference: Mothering Adopted Children with Hidden Disabilities
Alice Home

Twelve
Lesbian Adoption: Transcending the Boundaries of Motherhood
April Sharkey

Thirteen
Culture, Law and Language: Adversarial Motherhood in Adoption
Richard Uhrlaub and Nikki McCaslin

Contributors

Frances Latchford is an Associate Professor in the School of Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto. Her adoption research is informed by feminist social and political philosophy that utilizes continental, poststructuralist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic, and queer theories of subjectivity. Currently, she is completing a monograph, Steeped In Blood: Crimes against the Family under the Tyranny of a Bio-genealogical Imperative, which considers the production of ‘family’ experience through discourses of family, adoption, sexuality and incest in the modern Western context. She has also published articles examining drag and transsexuality in theatrical performance, queer identity, subjectivity, same-sex rights, and ethical knowledge.

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Adoption and Mothering

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