The Routledge Critical Adoption Studies Reader presents a central source of scholarly approaches arranged around fundamental questions about how adoption, as a complex practice of family-making, is represented in art, philosophy, the law, history, literature, political science, and other humanities. Divided into three major parts, this volume traces the history of adoption and its analogues, identifies major movements in the practice, and illuminates comprehensive disciplinary frameworks that underpin the field’s approaches. This key scholarly and pedagogical tool includes excerpts from scholars such as Judith Butler, Dorothy Roberts, Margaret Homans, Margaret D. Jacobs, Arissa Oh, Marianne Novy, and Kori Graves. It explores a variety of representations of adoption and embraces interdisciplinary discussions of reproduction as it intersects race, ethnicity, power relations, the concept of nation, history, the idea of childhood, and many other contemporary concerns. The Routledge Critical Adoption Studies Reader provides a single-volume resource for instructors or students who want a convenient collection of foundational materials for teaching or reference, and for researchers newly discovering the field. This volume’s humanities perspective makes it the first of its kind to collect secondary materials in Critical Adoption Studies for researchers, who, in taking up cultural representations of adoption, examine cultural contexts not for their impact on the practice over time but for their richness of engagement with the human experience of belonging, kinship, and identity.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Belonging
Part 1:
Foundations, Histories, Frames
Introduction: Beginnings
Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption, by E. Wayne Carp
"Natural Bonds, Legal Boundaries: Modes of Persuasion in Adoption Rhetoric," in Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture, by Judith Modell
"Addressing the Harms of Not Knowing One’s Heredity: Lessons from Genealogical Bewilderment," by Kimberly Leighton
Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, by Dorothy Roberts
Familial Fitness: Disability, Adoption, and Family in Modern America, by Sandra Sufian
Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, by Viviana Zelizer
Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism, by Kim Park Nelson
After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century, by Marilyn Strathern
"Teaching American Literature: The Centrality of Adoption," by Carol Singley
Kin of Another Kind: Transracial Adoption on American Literature, by Cynthia Callahan
Everybody Else: Adoption and the Politics of Domestic Diversity in Postwar America, by Sarah Potter
Part 2
Embodiment and Adoption
Introduction: What We Do With Bodies
Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood: Resisting Monomaternalism in Adoptive, Lesbian, Blended, and Polygamous Families, by Shelley M. Park
A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children, by Margaret D. Jacobs
Family Bonds: Adoption and the Politics of Parenthood, by Elizabeth Bartholet
"Is Kinship Always Heterosexual?", by Judith Butler
Reproducing the State, by Jacqueline Stevens
"The Intimate Politics of Race and Globalization," by Laura Briggs
Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama, by Marianne Novy
Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender, and Kinship, by Sara K. Dorow
Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception, by Sarah Franklin
"The Power to ‘Make Live’: Biopolitics and Reproduction in Blade Runner 2049," by Marina Fedosik
The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy, by David L. Eng
Part 3
Adoption Narratives
Introduction: Telling Stories
"Adoption Stories: Autobiographical Narrative and the Politics of Identity," Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives, by Barbara Melosh
"Adoption Narratives, Trauma, and Origins," by Margaret Homans
Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption, by Catherine Ceniza Choy
A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War, by Kori Graves
To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption, by Arissa Oh
Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging, Mark Jerng
Birthmarks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America, by Sandra Patton
American Baby: A Mother, A Child, and the Secret History of Adoption, by Gabriel Glaser
"Family, Ancestry and Self: What is the Moral Significance of Biological Ties?", by Sally Haslanger
Labor of Love: Gestational Surrogacy and the Work of Making Babies, by Heather Jacobson
"Reckless Abandon: The Politics of Victimization and Agency in Birthmother Narratives," in Adoption and Mothering, by Frances J. Latchford
About the Author :
Emily Hipchen received her PhD in literary studies from the University of Georgia. She is a Fulbright scholar, the editor of Adoption & Culture, co-editor of the book series Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture, and an emeritus editor of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. She is also the author of a memoir, Coming Apart Together: Fragments from an Adoption (2005). She’s an editor of Inhabiting La Patria: Identity, Agency, and Antojo in the Works of Julia Alvarez (2013) and The Routledge Auto|Biography Studies Reader (2015), as well as five special issues, "Adoption Life Writing," "Adoption Studies Research," "Critique as a Signature Pedagogy," "What’s Next? The Futures of Auto|Biography Studies," and most recently, "The Dobbs Issue." She directs the Nonfiction Writing Program as a faculty member in the Department of English at Brown University, where she teaches nonfiction writing and editing.
