Adoption and Mothering

Edited by Frances Latchford

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.

Contents

Frances Latchford / Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eight: Jenny Wills / Narrating Multiculturalism in Asian Adoption Fiction

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

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

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

Twelve: April Sharkey / Lesbian Adoption: Transcending the Boundaries of Motherhood

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

 Contributors            

About the Author

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.