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!

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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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Feminist Theory Club 12/28/2021 EARLY 5 pm central time Adoption Articles zoom linked below

Watch "Don't Look Up" on Netflix 

 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/26/id-like-to-know-who-my-parents-are

Tony Corsentino

@corsent (twitter handle)

"we need to bring into the mainstream the idea that adoption, as an industry, functions to transfer social wealth from the materially poorer to the materially richer."

She escaped an abusive “home” which today we might describe as creating Adverse Childhood Experiences.

Her abuser(s) engaged in

1. Physical Abuse

2. Suspected Sexual abuse

3. Verbal

4. Emotional

5. Isolation

6. Torture

7. Retaliation

8. Jealousy

9. Intentional Cruelty

She craved love, stability, kindness, connection, safety, encouragement, opportunities to fulfill her dreams wrt education, archeology, music.

Her early experiences of "love", "family", "mothering" did not prepare her for success in marriage or other long term relationships. 

She tried to parent but was not able to.

She didn't have the benefit of being able to "go home" as a safety net.

She surrendered custody of her children.

The concept of being "deserving"

Who "deserves" to be a parent?

The ways we stone women who fail to be perfect mothers.  The ways we condemn as an individual personal failing to not have a baby/family rather than examine the material conditions which make "having a family" look impossible, unattainable.  That June Cleaver was propaganda.  The white suburbs were DESIGNED to be white-only spaces, with good schools.  That women resented

https://www.propublica.org/article/a-mother-needed-welfare-instead-the-state-used-welfare-funds-to-take-her-son?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

The worship of the WWII white dude GIs who came home, impregnated girls and skipped town, who fathered second families without a care, whose second family refused to have any curiosity about their half-siblings.  Not even to notify them about the death of their father.

Maybe I should go out of my way to contact the half-siblings of my ex-husbands, to tell them the last known contact info I had for my-ex-in-laws.  Isn't that also a level of complicity? I know that there is an abandoned kin relation but I also do not know how to reach that offspring.

my dad's blood family--we do not have "family traditions" in common, like holiday recipes or traditions.  We don't exchange cards, except for perhaps this year I may receive a card from my cousin.  No other second cousin or farther keeps in touch.  We barely do.  Thinking of my cousin with whom I spent early christmases who just lost his parents, and I don't even have his phone or email address to reach out to him.

The surrendering mother, the abandoning father

The one criminalized, institutionalized via welfare structures, manipulated economically by the state (you made too much this month to qualify for benefits)

The other receiving no consequence for his abandonment, who also had the gaul to excoriate "welfare mothers" parasiting men's pay through wage garnishment, non-payment of child support, on and on

The cruelty of white-identifying men damaged by war, returned to a GI bill-fueled housing and education bonanza for them and only them, amplifying their importance as the male breadwinner of nuclear family.

My great uncle who didn't like chicken so no one could eat chicken in the household.

Bullies, Tyrants.

Normalized violence, terrorization of children who behaved.

Can only imagine how "bad" children (gender non-conforming, LGBT) would have been treated.

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Feminist Theory Club Solstice Edition, Sunset local time socially distanced Drumming Circle

https://sojo.net/articles/refusing-be-comforted-krawec

Join me virtually in humming or drumming or making whatever joyful noise you care to at sunset in your location today.

I'm meditating on what I'm listening for/looking for in the new light, where I'll be sending my energies, what I am drawn towards.  I'm grateful to be as I am, hopeful in transformations, part of a whole.

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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Feminist Theory Club 11/30 6:30 central via Zoom, article link

Hello feminist theory friends! Tomorrow is Tuesday Feminist Theory Consciousness Raising Zoom, and I’m sharing an article we can discuss at 6:30 central.

https://www.feministgiant.com/p/write-dangerously-heal-slowly?justPublished=true

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https://www.feministgiant.com/p/write-dangerously-heal-slowly?justPublished=true

Finding the orphans

 https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/professor-answers-call-to-find-boarding-school-children?fbclid=IwAR3Lp3HzMgyAEqdtKL-lkWgzQki83DqtAA37BaK-vExs9VABlypFDvDyyLE

working at schools with cemeteries—a white one and a black one. A white one and a Spanish one. An acknowledged one, and a place where people picnic and play frisbee on the grass over the unmarked graves. 

Trying to find “Timmy”, a boy who was fostered with his family for a few months, who went back to an orphanage that doesn’t exist anymore. Where’s the archive of their records? Were the books just tossed when the school closed?

Orphaning and belief in the power of whiteness—orphaning is supposed to create and protect and preserve whiteness. It makes nuclear families possible. Ka-boom.

It felt like finding a needle in the haystack to get a genetic match to confirm paternity of a father who abandoned woman with child. Now I will try to find Timmy too. Mapping kin relations, sorta like genealogy but based on the people we temporarily considered family, non blood relations. No quantum shared. No needle, no haystack.

I am family oriented, but in a different way.