We are, I believe, currently witnessing the adoption equivalent of the resurgent and unapologetic racism and classism found elsewhere in society as white supremacy and fascism “unstructure” themselves and present fully within dominant discourses. By this I mean to say that there are adopters who present themselves as “perfected caregivers”, despite issues of race or class. There are adopters who no longer hide their loathing of the children temporarily in their care. They no longer feign guarding their privacy, or pretend that they are acting beneficently or charitably. They no longer are attempting to uphold their expected performance.
Category Archives: General Adoption
JS Lee (@jessicasunlee) on Twitter asks: Adoptees: How many names have you legally had? I’ve had at least four. Unsure if I had another name before I reached the orphanage.
NOTE: This was originally a post at my blog; over the years I’ve gotten progressively more heartsick at the unending constant of adoptees in their nation-states of adoption trying to make sense of their trauma via the tools of the dominant culture in their country—the cultures that adopted us. We’ve been advocating our case for […]
I went for a checkup for the first time in a very long time, now that I have this thing called “health insurance” because I’m living and working in Canada. Honestly I was extremely worried; I hadn’t had a proper checkup in ages. There came the moment we all know and dread when my doctor […]
My daughter has asked me for assistance, and I thought it would be good to ask the community here: It seems that in every era since International Adoption became a thing, that it’s become a consideration for family planning, especially among the socially conscientious. Today it’s become the defacto solution for those who are interested […]
I want to ask your thinking about the claim that childhood in North America (at least) has been making children into consumers for decades and that essential to that project has been the “constant stimulation of desire and longing.” Do you see practices underlying adoption and donor conception that reflect that kind of stimulation of […]
I received my original birth certificate today, which confirmed one of my better guesses (based on genetic testing and genealogical research) about the identity of my genetic mother. However, as I had been forewarned would likely be the case, the document contained no information about my father, since (as in many states) birth certificates in […]
A recent study on adoption and suicide suggests genetic (biological) rather than environmental factors play a dominant role in risks for suicide. Researchers used Danish adoption data and compared non-biologically related siblings of orphans (children who had been adopted and biologically related siblings that the orphan did not grow up with. Basically what they looked […]
Jae Ran Kim has referred to Asian adoptees as “the model minority of the model minority”; this came up in an item discussing the arrival of a French Korean adoptee to the government ministerial level in that country [link]. We’ve also discussed the “glass ceiling” which might be described as racism suffered out of the […]
Comments on this, the movie, the musical, the comic strip, the mediation of orphans, popular culture and adoption? [link]
Can you share any “glass-ceiling” moments you might have had in your life when you realized the limits of “meritocracy”, “working hard to succeed”, and other assimilationisms?
In speaking of “rematriation” as opposed to “repatriation”, we take a different and gendered view of our adoptions and our return [link]. I’d like to expand on this with a notion that I have been painfully aware of these past years as I’ve worked with returned adoptees in Lebanon, male and female. As a male […]
Random snippets behind this post include this quote I came across on Twitter [link]: “Getting rid of your Chineseness by losing your accent, it’s like grinding away your face.” —Richard A Lou, artist; from the book War Baby/Love Child It makes me think of a former and historical/egalitarian “cosmopolitanism” or mixing of cultures in an […]
I’m touching back here to a discussion we had about AP entitlement [link], and how our discussions, which we would hope help us “break out” of the status quo discussion of adoption in fact feed back into the “adoption loop” as it were. Recently the reactions to NPR’s mediation of transracial adoption, as well as […]
****This is my first post with TRE and I would like to share my gratitude to Daniel and the other contributors for this space. And for you, readers. I have this memory from 3rd grade. On the surface, it’s a fairly mundane image; I am staring at a piece of paper with a large circle […]
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