Feminist Theory Club 12/14/21 6:30 pm central Zoom article links below: ADOPTION

This week I'm talking/reading/writing about ADOPTION.  As some of you know, I'm writing a longer form book/collection of essays on the ideas of orphaning, self-orphaning, constructs of Whiteness, legitimacy, and threads from/through a relative's adoption at the end of WWII.

I'm using this blog post to hold some of the articles I'm reading:

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/adoption-politics/

https://nursingclio.org/2017/10/10/buried-secrets-living-children-secrecy-shame-and-sealed-adoption-records/

BOOK I JUST BOUGHT ONLINE THROUGH MY LOCAL BOOKSTORE via BOOKSHOP.ORG:

Owens, Rudy (2018). You don't know how lucky you are:  An adoptee's journey through the American adoption experience BFD Press: Portland, OR.  ISBN 978-0-692-82156-5 www.howluckyuare.com

Adoption Documentary "Closure"

https://tubitv.com/movies/372430/closure?start=true&utm_source=google-feed&tracking=google-feed

Thoughts on interpellation--being told by someone else "unwanted child" yet not identifying as that. The constant political erasure of adoptees and their perspectives, (because to look at the complexities means acknowledging how many who surrender wanted to raise the child but knew they didn't have the resources to do it "properly", giving their babies because of lack of money. extortion by religious orgs who then place the children with paying families) And also, there are people who really don't want to parent, who feel no connection to the child, who are relieved.  And everything in between

People have a right to knowledge about themselves. "Privacy" laws which protect bio parents from children knowing who their biological parents are unjustifiable.  These laws protect the idea of the sanctity of a male-headed nuclear family, cis-het father, mother, legitimate heir to property and the construed benefits of Whiteness.  They protect privacy in the sense that they create the conditions for there to be no claim against the property being dispersed to the legal heir(s) of the [decedent] generation.  Creating the conditions for the selling of white-passing babies, from vulnerable poor women to wealthy white-identifying evangelical Christian cis-het in traditional authoritarian rigid gender role legal marriages.

International adoption laws which don't grant citizenship to the minor kid--wtf.

Adoptees manipulated to always be passive recipients of others' benevolence=mindfuck.

Also have been investigating connections with Tribal Schools, MMIW, Missing Women and Children, forced separations at the border, Christian forces in adoption coercion.  I follow a lot of great writers on twitter who tweet their work, as cited above.

I have a math question I am working to form: there were 3.5 M GIs who returned to the US at the end of WWII, 1945.  There were an estimated 3.5 M adoptions facilitated between the end of WWII and passing of Roe v Wade in early 1970s.  "Estimated" because adoption records were intentionally destroyed without consequence, and places which might have been archives for such records (a hospital which operates in a building which used to be a Maternity Home, for example) did not see it necessary to preserve such documents with their records.  There was an explosion of these types of hospitals and living arrangements for pregnant women in those years, as well as the proliferation of orphanages to care for children.  1945 was the "click" preceding the Baby Boom.  The decades of the 40s and 50s saw the growth of the White middle class, the White suburbs, the White flight from cities, the building of the "good schools" in the suburbs, with their zip codes of high property values, the SAT correlation with zip code.  The click which launched the legitimacy claim connecting white passing Christians cis-het people with their sense of entitlement to a caste above.

(Isabel Wilkerson, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent”)

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