Blue-Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love: Race, Class, and Gender in U.S. Adoption Practice

Christine Ward Gailey

Published by University of Texas Press 2010

Blue-Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love

Race, Class, and Gender in U.S. Adoption Practice

Christine Ward Gailey

In the series Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Series

https://doi.org/10.7560/721272

Overview
Contents

About this book

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 / Editor information

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.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
1. Profiling Adoption in the United States Today Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. “Kids Need Families to Turn Out Right” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	18
3. Transracial Adoption in Practice Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	31
4. Making Kinship in the Wake of History Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	56
5. The Global Search for “Blue-Ribb on Babies” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	79
6. Inclusive, Exclusive, and Contractual Families Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	153
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181

Language: English
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 199

eBook

Published: February 1, 2010
ISBN: 9780292795143