Fem Theory and Adoption, Jan 25 6:30 central zoom

I post this blog content on alternating Tuesday mornings as a way to catalogue my evolving ideas and to welcome conversations about articles I read since the last post.  I'll host a zoom tonight for anyone who wants to show up to discuss ideas! (link below)

Categories of readings this week:

This week I've been reading more about adoption, and also reading broadly in feminist theory related to care work and compensation.

I've been exploring concepts from adoption and abortion, eugenics, and creating legitimacy. I've been researching economic arguments for wages for housework and other feminist movements focused on compensating uncompensated work, which is primarily done by women and non-white-passing people.

Article Links: 

1. Dr Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a physicist, the first black woman in a tenure track faculty position.  She's writing about Black woman physics, tying metaphysical ideas with actual particle physics.   Colonization.  Afrofuturism. Imagining better futures. I also got to see her on a zoom panel talking about her grandmother who organized wages for housework/globalWomenStrike.net, her mother who is also a feminist organizer/writer, and herself as granddaughter. My takeaway from that event was the important of establishing/recognizing *autonomy* within/across groups towards creating solidarity with each other. 

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/becoming-martian-prescod-weinstein

2. Patty Krawec describes her blog as "a place where books and ideas rush towards each other and I examine the particles their collision leaves behind." "Freedom is a relation" connects ideas from Mariame Kaba's (who's book "We do this until we free us" I'll starting reading this week) tweets about our obligations to each other, the "doing" of freedom, rather than it's static state.  I follow both of them on Twitter, and they really help me think about designing for a livable future.  

https://pattykrawec.substack.com/p/freedom-is-a-relation?r=4260f&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

3.  Two Patty Krawec articles this time: this one looks at a futurist fiction with a Christian focus, where white people are the victims. https://pattykrawec.substack.com/p/what-goes-around-comes-around?r=4260f

4. There's been a lot of focus on adoption as an alternative to abortion, some of it focused on Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggesting that we no longer need abortion since there are anonymous drop boxes available to drop babies into at fire stations. Adult adoptees have opinions about the framing of adoption as a success story for creating families rather than as a tragedy of poor women feeling obliged to end their parental rights due to lack of money.  Adoption advocates frame adoption as transferring children from insufficient families to (well-resourced) "good" families.  Some orgs which facilitate these transfers of children have horrible histories:  the Catholic Church was deeply involved in the residential schools programs for indigenous children, essentially kidnapping children from their families, coercion to require participation.  Bethany Christian Services has been a leader in Adoption (https://bethany.org), and has been criticized for its history of using social stigmas to encourage unmarried women to relinquish children and creating the secrecy of closed adoption. 

Thinking about these transfers of children from "bad families" to "good families" reminded me of a nazi eugenics kidnapping/adoption program: Lebensborn. Nazis we’re inspired by US/Canadian programs for “managing” indigenous peoples through isolation, residential schools, assimilation. Abortion was encouraged for some populations and denied for others in order to outbreed “non desirables.” SS officers were encouraged to sire blond kiddos with suitably aryan females.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn

What makes a "good" family for adoptees?  What about the child's original home/parents is deemed inadequate for the child to stay? 

https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2022/01/18/adoption-agencies-vs-roe-the-invisible-hand-stirring-the-pot/

5. Link I found from following the global women's strike link:  a group which encourages supporting low-resource parents rather than taking away children for placement with wealthier families. The fees for adopting children can be tens of thousands of dollars.  Sickeningly, white-passing infants are priced higher than children with darker skin.  https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2010/05/14/discount-babies

https://supportnotseparation.blog

6.  Since I'm reading about nazis and adoption, I was reminded of the musical/film Cabaret, and the song 

"Tomorrow belongs to me", an imagined theme song of the hitler youth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6lpT6e8nAA

The musical Cabaret is about a nightclub in 1930s Berlin as nazism was growing.  The video of the song shows children and adults at a picnic, reveling in a future meant for white aryan children, disturbingly devoid of anyone else (which we learned was a principle of nazism). Watching it, I am reminded of Brocks and Kyles, entitled white kids, whose parents are creating the conditions for their future, the fantasy that rich white children will inherit the world.  It's a future without solidarity with poor or non-white children--they are an underclass meant to serve them, dying of climate-change issues, working to death, while the unmasked and insouciant complain about poor service.

7. De-gendering care:  strategies for equalizing who does carework, who does uncompensated work.  Promiscuous care versus structural carelessness https://roarmag.org/magazine/de-gendering-care/

8.  The encyclopedia of Milwaukee!  Yay local history: https://emke.uwm.edu

I've got a lot of text written for a longform book project and need to organize it into chapters/outline for a book proposal, if that's the route it'll take.  Every two weeks I post a blog summarizing articles I've been reading/integrating my ideas, sorta like an annotated bibliography (https://karenlemke.blogspot.com/2022/01/feminist-theories-club-new-year-new-we.html).  It feels a bit like I am avoiding writing the book by re-writing these ideas into different forms, but my ideas keep evolving, and it feels like I am making some progress on understanding what I'm trying to write about, which is the idea that whiteness, as a racialized concept, "orphans" us in many ways, creating separation among us where we would otherwise recognize kinship and inter-relatedness of all peoples, which I argue is needed to build a future which provides for all of our needs.  I'm also interested in doing some sort of zoom/remote activities, called "Indoor Recess" with my teacher buddy/writing/music partner.  I like playing at the senior center.  I like making original music/improv, wondering if anyone else would want to listen to it.

CNatGo

@NaZCasey

·

16h

Is adoption a cult? Let's see: 1.The leader is the ultimate authority 2.The group suppresses skepticism 3.The group delegitimizes former members 4.The group is paranoid about the outside world 5.The group relies on shame cycles 6.The leader is above the law

I've been writing/reading on cults for a few years now. One of the first papers I wrote in college was for a psychology class with the professor who would become my advisor. We were assigned to write about a time in our lives when we experienced a social psychology phenomenon, and I chose to write about my recent experiences with USARMY TRADOC, training and indoctrination, in the basic training I received at Ft Jackson SC weeks earlier, the summer between HS and college. I joined the Army National Guard to help pay for college and to have access to a really great musical instrument while performing with the WI Army NG band. I wrote about ingroup-outgroup reinforcement, sleep deprivation, uniformity of clothing, language and thought, chanting/singing Jodies.

Cult traits seem important to be aware of right now, as many of us are vulnerable, tired, frightened, and there is competition for our consciousness, directing us as consumers not only of products but of ideologies and ways of being. I'm thoughtful of the different organizations I become entangled in, and the ways I have detangled myself out of organizations when I realized I was being manipulated by them. New potential cults for me this week: a weekly music-writing/biz zoom class series, a weekly feminist zoom reading group.

So read some or none of these articles, and join the zoom tonight if you like!

Karen Lemke (she, her, hers) is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting. Topic: Karen Lemke (she, her, hers)'s Personal Meeting Room Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/6477310135?pwd=SW5Vb3ZoRlMxZUh5Q0hmZzJnUENOUT09 Meeting ID: 647 731 0135 Passcode: 3NBTFv One tap mobile +19292056099,,6477310135#,,,,*865523# US (New York) +13017158592,,6477310135#,,,,*865523# US (Washington DC) Dial by your location +1 929 205 6099 US (New York) +1 301 715 8592 US (Washington DC) +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago) +1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose) +1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma) +1 346 248 7799 US (Houston) Meeting ID: 647 731 0135 Passcode: 865523 Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/keqpfUpAcx

Feminist Theories Club, New Year, New We 1/11/12 6:30 pm central zoom

This fortnight I've been reading about adoption in regards to legal history.  I also came across this creepy child-trafficky-ish website. 

 https://giftofadoption.org/partnerships/

Check out how easy it is to enhance your brand with a partnership with this charity. $4000 to [sponsor] a child?

I follow adoptee activists on Twitter, including Tony Corsentino.  I'm directly quoting him below:

(Tony Corsentino)When an adoptive parent tells you when you’re a child that your birth mother loved you so much she wanted you to have a better life, but then shows you when you’re an adult that your reunion with her is a stab in their heart, you see that the system was not designed for you.

Closed adoption means that adoptive parents are not entitled to tell their children anything about why they were relinquished. “They loved you but they couldn’t keep you,” said in ignorance of what actually happened, is as good as a lie, and I think adopted children intuit this.

It isn’t that there is no reason to think it is true. It’s that when APs say it, they cast themselves as participants in a personal relationship to the birth parents that the closed adoption system is expressly designed to foreclose (which is likely why the APs chose it).

Tony Corsentino

@corsent

·

3h

Once I learned my birth mother's actual story I grew deeply resentful of the way people in my life growing up felt entitled to say anything at all about her, or her circumstances, or what might have entered her heart or mind.

His tweets have me thinking about my father's birth mother in 1946, the coercion of women in the baby scoop era via emphasis on their shame, the repercussions for their families for them not upholding the fantasies of being respected in one's church, in one's community. The one-sided slut-shaming of women and complete impunity of the impregnators gob smacks me. I'm connecting it to the growth of the suburbs, the shaping of consumer ideals, including the ideal family, the male-headed white-passing Christian church-attending traditional gender-role expressing nuclear family federal policy starting with the New Deal designed for. I think of my local family history shaped by the Mason-Dixon Line that is the Waukesha/Milwaukee county line, to the west all things built with white exclusivity since 1840s, the settler colonial state which erased Indigenous presence except in town names with lots of "O"s and "auk"s in them. White-owned Homestead Act farmland, churches cleaved by Abolition sympathy (these churches voted not to support Abolition and lost half their church. Today are still anti-LGBT, white Evangelical organizations which resist science about covid or the truth about who won the 2020 election). To the east, the other white-centric settler colonial state, built on ancient trade routes, 400 years of multi-lingual, somewhat multi-cultural water-based trade, where Black and other non-white people are allowed to live and also experienced intentional demolition of neighborhoods due to the interstate and other disinvestments.

I'm connecting these feelings to what I wrote about after attending a business improvement district oriented "future of Milwaukee" event where many of the speakers seemed to think we should design appealing tourist centers in the city for [rich white] people from the suburbs to consume, without regard for the people who actually live in the city and what may be accessible and desirable for us which could also be responsibly monetized to satisfy the developer's fantasies.

Also, I'm connecting that idea of developer's fantasy to the story of the Rio Grande Farm Park. Whose fantasy is getting developed? :)

"Identity and Personhood: Advocating for the Abolishment of Closed Adoption Records Laws," by Jessica Colin-Greene (Connecticut Law Review, 2017)

https://opencommons.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1368&context=law_review

The article summarizes brief history of legal adoption in US from colonial settler project Massachusetts informal agreements for young people to serve as a means of cheap labor/apprenticeship/indentured service. Then it got too exploitative/abusive so state erected some protections for child

Constructing whiteness: The 1917 MN law re privacy in these transactions/agreements.

This article is taking me a bit to finish reading, but Twitter folk have been guiding me to legal arguments about closed adoption, ie keeping secret from the adoptee information about birth parents to protect the wholeness of the idea of the new family and also creating an absence of transparency where potential trafficking may occur. Adoptee advocates assert that their right to know information including medical history about themselves is more important than privacy promises to birth parents, sperm donors and adopting parents.

https://sojo.net/articles/refusing-be-comforted-krawec. Being in Accountable Relationship

https://annehelen.substack.com/p/other-countries-have-social-safety

Women as the US Social Safety Net, "intensive parenting expectations"

zoom link:

Karen Lemke (she, her, hers) is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting. Topic: Karen Lemke (she, her, hers)'s Personal Meeting Room Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/6477310135?pwd=SW5Vb3ZoRlMxZUh5Q0hmZzJnUENOUT09 Meeting ID: 647 731 0135 Passcode: 3NBTFv One tap mobile +19292056099,,6477310135#,,,,*865523# US (New York) +13017158592,,6477310135#,,,,*865523# US (Washington DC) Dial by your location +1 929 205 6099 US (New York) +1 301 715 8592 US (Washington DC) +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago) +1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose) +1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma) +1 346 248 7799 US (Houston) Meeting ID: 647 731 0135 Passcode: 865523 Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/keqpfUpAcx