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:

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