Price: $24.95
Page Count: 240
Publication Date: October 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9866671-5-2
“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.
