Blue-Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love

by Gailey, Christine Ward

• ISBN13: 9780292721272
• ISBN10: 0292721277
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-12-07
• Publisher: Univ of Texas Pr

Summary

Most Americans assume that shared genes or blood relationships provide the strongest basis for family. What can adoption tell us about this widespread belief and American kinship in general? Blue-Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love examines the ways class, gender, and race shape public and private adoption in the United States. Christine Ward Gailey analyzes the controversies surrounding international, public, and transracial adoption, and how the political and economic dynamics that shape adoption policies and practices affect the lives of people in the adoption nexus: adopters, adoptees, birth parents, and agents within and across borders. Interviews with white and African-American adopters, adoption social workers, and adoption lawyers, combined with her long-term participant-observation in adoptive communities, inform her analysis of how adopters' beliefs parallel or diverge from the dominant assumptions about kinship and family. Gailey demonstrates that the ways adoptive parents speak about their children vary across hierarchies of race, class, and gender. She shows that adopters' notions about their children's backgrounds and early experiences, as well as their own "family values," influence child rearing practices. Her extensive interviews with 131 adopters reveal profoundly different practices of kinship in the United States today. Moving beyond the ideology of "blood is thicker than water," Gailey presents a new way of viewing kinship and family formation, suitable to times of rapid social and cultural change.

Author Biography

Christine Ward Gailey is Professor of Women's Studies and Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. She is also the author of Kinship to Kingship: Gender Hierarchy and State Formation in the Tongan Islands.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Profiling Adoption in the United States Today	p. 1
"Kids Need Families to Turn out Right": Public Agency Adopters	p. 18
TransRacial Adoption in Practice	p. 31
Making Kinship in the Wake of History: Older Child Adoption	p. 56
The Global Search for "Blue-Ribbon Babies": International Adoption	p. 79
Inclusive, Exclusive, and Contractual Families: What Adoption Can Tell Us about Kinship Today	p. 117
Notes	p. 153
References	p. 157
Index	p. 181
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