Kinship with strangers: adoption and interpretations of kinship in American culture PDF
Preview Kinship with strangers: adoption and interpretations of kinship in American culture
Kinship With Strangers : Adoption and title: Interpretations of Kinship in American Culture author: Modell, Judith Schachter. publisher: University of California Press isbn10 | asin: print isbn13: 9780520081185 ebook isbn13: 9780585134949 language: English Adoption--United States, Kinship--United subject States, United States--Social life and customs. publication date: 1994 lcc: HV875.55.M64 1994eb ddc: 362.7/34/0973 Adoption--United States, Kinship--United States, United States--Social life and States, United States--Social life and subject: customs. Page iii Kinship with Strangers Adoption and Interpretations of Kinship in American Culture Judith S. Modell UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley / Los Angeles / London Page iv University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press London, England Copyright © 1994 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Modell, Judith Schachter, 1941- Kinship with strangers : adoption and interpretations of kinship in American culture / Judith S. Modell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-08118-8 (alk. paper) 1. AdoptionUnited States. 2. KinshipUnited States. 3. United. StatesSocial life and customs. I. Title. HV875.55.M64 1994 362.7´34´0973dc20 92-37617 CIP Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 Page v To my children, Jennifer and Matthew Page vii CONTENTS Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii 1 American Adoption: A Kinship with Strangers 1 Part One: The Setting: American Adoption Policy 2 In the Best Interests: The Background of American 19 Adoption Policy 3 This Child is Mine: The Mechanisms for Delegating 36 Parenthood Part Two: The Experience of Adoptive Kinship 4 The White Flag of Surrender: Birthparent Experiences of 61 Adoption 5 Everyone Else Just Has Babies: Becoming an Adoptive 91 Parent Page viii 6 The Chosen Child: Growing Up Adopted 115 Part Three: The Revision of Adoptive Kinship 7 Just My Truth: The Adoptee Search for a Birth Family 143 8 Lost to Adoption: The Birthparent Search for a 169 Relinquished Child 9 A Child of One's Own: Being an Adoptive Parent 200 Part Four: Conclusion 10 A New Kind of Kinship: The Implications of Change 225 in American Adoption Notes 239 Bibliography 261 Index 275 Page ix PREFACE This book originates in and is representative of the interpretations of the people I interviewed. With training in anthropology that included a particular focus on kinship, I also began the project with a general sense of the experience of adoption in the United States. As I began to collect interviews, however, I realized how little I had brought those two domains together and, by contrast, how effectively the people I met had used their experiences of adoption to analyze kinship. The people I interviewed are self-selected: if not members of a support group (some were, others were not), they were all willing to examine a complicated part of their lives with me. This did not mean they spoke out because they had taken a critical stancethey may or may not have. Rather, a critical stance and an analytic perspective emerged from personal, digressive, uncertain, joyous, confident, and angry anecdotes. Virtually every interview with birthparent, adoptive parent, or adoptee took well over two hours. In a majority of cases, I saw the person several times, for further interviews, at group meetings, or at adoption conferences. Our lives were not intertwinedmy work does not represent classic "participatory" fieldworkbut people's interpretations of kinship did emerge over time and in different settings. Although I do write, at times, as if "all" birthparents, or adoptive parents, or adoptees, experience adoptive kinship the same way, obviously that is not true: members of the triad did not always agree with one another, even when Page x their experiences had been similar and their attendance at support group meetings equally faithful. Rather than present diverse points of view, I have tried to convey the gist of the birthparent, the adoptive parent, and the adoptee experience of this kind of kinship in late twentieth-century American society. And though my argument mutes the particularities of this experience, it is built out of the multiple perspectives and positions individuals conveyed. While writing, I did not always find it easy to resist the temptation to let my interviews dominate the text. As it is, there are substantial sections in which my voice gives way to their voices, not simply because I succumbed to temptation but also (and primarily) because the birthparents, adoptive parents, and adoptees I interviewed are the "first order" analysts of the data. They were critical, and self- consciously so, about the terms of their relationships. They were also critical of the significance of "fictive" in being related. What is the content of a relationship that reflects or simulates a real relationship? The dichotomy of real and fictive (or "not real") pervades the everyday experiences of members of the triad. The dichotomy is not an abstraction or a theoretical point, but an aspect of daily interaction, manifested in the variety of ways in which people clarified what they meant by "real parent'' in conversations with me. Chapters 2 and 3 describe the context of this kinship. These chapters are somewhat different in approach from the subsequent chapters, primarily because they depend more thoroughly on secondary sources and on observer rather than participant analyses of adoptive kinship. The chapters do, however, indicate the extent to which a century and a half of developments in law and policy shape individual experiences of adoption in the 1980s and 1990s. The material in chapters 2 and 3 constitutes the backdrop for the experiences and interpretations foregrounded in chapters 4 through 9. Embedded in discussions of adoption are cogent critiques of the assumptions of a fictive kinship, of the significance of biology in cultural interpretations of relationship, and of the importance of "blood" for a person's identity. These are powerful issues. In addition, almost everyone remarked on the lack of attention paid to adoption when so much attention is paid to the related issues of abortion, surrogacy, child abuse and neglect, and American family values. I hope my book will correct that. For adoption is not just about parent- child relationships, it is also about identity, "blood," culture, and nature. Furthermore, it is about
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