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.