ASAC Publications

01/28/2022

Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption by John McLeod (review)
By Margaret Homans
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 5, 2017
pp. 130-134
Click to read: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2017.0003
📸: Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

01/26/2022

"This moving and informative renders an account of Maine’s Wabanaki -State Truth and Commission, convened in 2012, whose task was to investigate the treatment of Native American children in the state of Maine from 1978 to 2012, to write a report, and to make recommendations. The work of the Commission is interspersed with poignant accounts of the treatment of the now-adult children forcibly taken from their parents, and of the parents whose children had been devastatingly ripped from them. To contrast with this historical experience, the movie also pictures present-day Native American ceremonies with multigenerational participants—most movingly, toddlers learning dances and rituals from their grandparents. The makes obvious the brutal injustices of child removal, concluding as the Commission itself eventually does, that the white community perpetrated cultural genocide on the Native American community in this practice."
Dawnland by Adam Mazo and Ben Pender-Cudlip ( )
Martha Satz
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press on Project MUSE
Volume 8, Issue 1, 2020
pp. 119-121
Click to read: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2020.0015
📸: Jordan Wozniak on Unsplash

01/23/2022

Interpersonal Communication
By Sara Docan-Morgan
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 4, 2014
pp. 98-102
The sources chosen for the Communication Studies portion of this bibliography represent an exciting, diverse, and emerging body of work. In this list, readers will find work that is quantitative and qualitative, covering both domestic and international. Despite this diversity, all selections reflect an orientation to the discipline of communication, which examines “how people use messages to generate meanings within and across various contexts, cultures, channels, and media” (National). Articles and chapters in this bibliography explore messages regarding , whether these are exchanged face-to-face or through a medium such as the Internet. All selections were authored by at least one researcher whose primary disciplinary identity, or “academic home,” is in Studies.
Click to read: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2014.0012
📸: Quino Al on Unsplash

01/20/2022

“The Canadian government has agreed to pay more than $30 billion to compensate Indigenous children who were taken away from their families and put into the child welfare system.”

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/05/1070471306/canada-reaches-a-historic-deal-to-compensate-indigenous-children

Good companion read with many of the articles published in our first 2018 issue.

The Canadian government has agreed to pay more than $30 billion to compensate Indigenous children who were taken away from their families and put into the child welfare system.

01/17/2022

01/16/2022

"In Search of Other Mother's Gardens: On Creative Kinships"
By Lisa Marie Brimmer
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 7, Issue 2, 2019
pp. 280-289
In Alice Walker's essay In Search of Our Mother's Gardens the womanist writer observes creativity's potential to repair the past. By exploring the pluralized impact of adoption and settler colonial nationalism on Black sociality, this essay exposes the creative kinships of Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Heidi Durrow, and Nella Larsen.
Click to read in full 👇
https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2019.0022
📸: Erda Estremera on Unsplash

01/13/2022

Adoption and Multiculturalism: Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific ed. by Jenny Heijun Wills et al. (review)
Barbara Yngvesson
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021
pp. 351-355
"The essays in this volume unpack the meanings of adoption as through a fine-grained examination of its contradictions in four Northwestern European settings (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Sweden), as well as in Canada and Australia. What does it mean, for example, that a country such as Denmark is simultaneously anti-immigrant and pro-adoption; that in Sweden, a nation that has been celebrated as the world's most antiracist and multiculturalist society, the racialized difference of adoptees "takes precedence despite their being culturally Swedish" (28); or that in Flanders, "a discourse of cultural incompatibility between 'real' Flemish culture and 'Muslim culture' in particular … uses non-European immigration as a substitute for the notion of race within a discourse that justifies xenophobia as human beings' 'natural' fear of differences" (199)?"
Click to continue reading: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0018

01/11/2022

"White U***d Mother: The Adoption Mandate in Postwar Canada by Valerie J. Andrews (review)"
By Liz DeBetta
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021
pp. 347-351
"This review addresses Valerie Andrews's book White U***d Mother: The Adoption Mandate in Postwar Canada. Andrews' account is both historical and scholarly and makes an important contribution to the field of critical adoption studies. This work offers readers insight into the social, legal, and historical precedents set in Canada in the years following World War Two that established modern practices and created a system of violence toward women. The book is an exploration of the way that adoption and should be linked in the about adoption and serves as a call to action for those who research and study adoption as a cultural phenomenon. This review evaluates the author's approach and her contribution to the field of adoption studies."
Click to read in full on Project MUSE
https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0017
📸: Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

01/09/2022

"Since its inception over fifteen years ago, the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC) has been bringing together humanities and social science scholars to create the interdisciplinary field of Critical Adoption Studies. Although she missed the inaugural conference in Tampa in 2005, Elizabeth Raleigh was first introduced to this organization at the Pittsburgh conference in 2007. Since then, she has been a steadfast attendee and participant. In many ways, her own scholarly trajectory grew in tandem with ASAC's. In this conversational , she reflects on the evolution of critical adoption studies and how it shaped her as an academic. Tackling questions such as the most productive lines of inquiry in adoption studies; the disciplinary and topical edges of the field; and the areas that are ripe for future research, in this short piece, Raleigh probes the paradoxes of adoptive and biogenetic connection."
"Reflections of an Adoptee Researcher: Elizabeth Raleigh's Musings on Critical Adoption Studies"
By Elizabeth Raleigh
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021
pp. 341-346
Click to read in full:
https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0016
📸: Ümit Bulut on Unsplash

01/06/2022

"As a Korean adoptee engaged in critical adoption studies , my personal perspectives and academic pursuits are inherently intertwined. Because I come from an interdisciplinary Ethnic Studies background, the scholars and writers who influence and inform my work are diverse in their perspectives, disciplines, and methodologies. In my own research, I draw from the creative voices of transracial adoptee writers, frameworks of gendered colonialism, the interdisciplinary field of Asian American Studies, and the emerging scholarship of Korean adoption studies. My academic engagement with these bodies of research and wisdom has led to not only clarity in my own research, but has contributed to defining my sense of self as a transracial, transnational adoptee."
"Points of Origin: Finding Self in Critical Adoption Studies Research"
By Kira Donnell
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021
pp. 325-340
Click to read: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0015
📸: Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

01/04/2022

"My study of forty-three published by people with the three closest relations to adoption shows some frequent patterns. Birth mothers didn't realize how hard it would be to deal with relinquishment, adoptive parents could have used more information, adoption agencies and professionals are often negligent or deceptive, most adoptees want to know more about their family history. These memoirs mostly support moving toward more openness and a more inclusive understanding of and . If their insights are taken seriously, the proportion of adoptions with greater degrees of openness is likely to increase in the future."
"Memoirs and the Future of Adoption"
By Marianne Novy
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021
pp. 308-324
Click to read on Project MUSE: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0014
📸: Tom Hermans on Unsplash

01/01/2022

Happy New Year to all our readers, contributors, and everyone who makes this journal possible! We can't wait to see what you create in #2022!

12/22/2021

Season's Greetings to you all! We hope your holiday is happy, healthy, and safe! Please note, we will not be posting as often or be as quick to respond to queries during the break. Meanwhile, we're sending you all warm tidings!

12/20/2021

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"Normativity and Belonging: Reflections about Critical Adoption Studies"
By Shelley Park
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021
pp. 300-307
These informal reflections on the past, present, and possible futures of and studies explore connections and tensions among familial norms, disciplinary boundaries, and narratives of belonging.
Read in full: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0028
📸: Noah Buscher on Unsplash

12/16/2021

This is a forum for in Critical Adoption Studies to address larger issues in canon and field formation, or in the field itself, from a conversational standpoint: that is, scholars in CAS are invited to listen to and to talk to each other directly, in ways that foreground discursivity and interaction. This section was developed from a special issue in 2021 that featured interviews in several formats and is an ongoing project of the journal. If you would like to contribute to Conversations, please contact Emily Hipchen or Marina Fedosik for guidelines before beginning your potential contribution.
Click for more information:
shorturl.at/aewAE
📸 Campaign Creators on Unsplash

12/14/2021

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Hijra Representations in Bollywood: Adoption and Legal Discourses
By Rukhsar Hussain
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021
pp. 276-297
Click to read on Project MUSE:
https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0026
This paper examines the theme of and in hijra representations in mainstream Indian . Hijras are members of a nonbinary community in regions of South Asia who are born as males but identify mostly as females or third gender. The community is one of the most visible sexual minorities in the subcontinent and can be easily located on the streets across the country, begging, mostly, at traffic signals. They continue to live on the fringes of the mainstream society because they have no other occupation than prostitution and begging. They have also long suffered from misrepresentation in the mainstream culture which obstructs their social integration.

This paper argues that adoption and motherhood, which are central to identities, and also to the formation of hijra ties, are almost always presented as "unnatural" and criminal in the Indian mainstream commercial films, demonizing the community. In an in-depth analysis of two Indian films, Darmiyaan and Tamanna, I argue that they offer sustained representations of hijra kinship ties, focusing on key themes of adoption and nonbiological parenting, and challenge the conventional idea of "motherhood." Following in the footsteps of scholars such as David Eng, Kim Park Nelson, and Peggy Phelan, this paper critically studies hijra initiation practice with an intersectional lens in order to expose the structural inequalities of race, class, and religion in hijra filmic representations. Thus, this paper starts a conversation in the area of q***r, non-cis, community-based "adoption" from the Indian subcontinent.
📸: Flickr, Creative Commons
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

12/12/2021

"Monstrous Othering": The Gothic Nature of Origin-Tracing in Law and Literature
By Alice Diver
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021
pp. 247-275
Much Gothic touches upon the concepts of familial injustice, disconnect from origin, and ill-treatment of the "monstrously-othered" or abandoned child. Certain works of fiction mirror those judicial discourses that involve contentious issues of unknown ancestry, not least anonymous gamete donation and cross-border surrogacy. Three novels in particular see their characters rendered monstrous by law, society, or unwritten norms of behavior: the clones of Katzuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, the unnamed monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Emily Brontë's Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, share common features and horrific fates of endless exile. They are abused largely because of their genetic losses and unknowable origins, and thereby doomed to undertake fruitless quests and suffer flawed or fatal reunions. Dehumanizing policies of disenfranchisement enable or perpetuate such inequalities, but are justified in , to preserve social order. In courtrooms too, there is a judicial need to balance conflicting human rights and interests: privacy, , family life. A " othering" can thus result, permanently exiling certain individuals from fundamental human rights protections. This is so despite the principles of child welfare paramountcy and best interests, not least where cross-border surrogacy, contact vetoes and sealed birth records are involved.
Click to read on Project MUSE:
https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0025
📸: James on Unsplash

12/10/2021

"Adoptees Online: Community-Building, Collective Affect, and a New Generation of Activists"
By Michele Merritt
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 2, #2021
pp. 219-246
Abstract:
"I examine the rise in adoptee community-building and on the internet, paying close attention to the ways emotions are shared, generated, and sustained in online interactions. Utilizing a framework from the philosophy of cognitive science that argues for a collective or distributed account of affect, I argue that this model suitably explains the ways affective exchanges take place in adoptee communities. Even though these exchanges are largely asynchronous and remote, there is evidence that emotional contagion and entrainment—features that mark collective and distributed theories of affect—can be sustained online. Turning to my own adoption narrative and how my identity as an adoptee has shaped and been shaped by my experiences in "Adoptionland," I provide further evidence for the model I am proposing for understanding adoptee communities online. Finally, I argue that taking the framework I've provided seriously would have important potential benefits for improving mental healthcare and other social support systems for adult adoptees."
Click to read on Project MUSE: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0024
📸: Austin Distel on Unsplash

12/08/2021

Transracial has primarily been examined via the perspective of White adoptive parents and their transracially adopted children. This essay examines adoption from an Asian American adoptive mother's perspective, a unique voice in the adoption triad. Part and part literary analysis, "On Mothering" makes space in recent conversations around transracial adoption to include adoptive parents of color, as well as examines how adoption complicates and illuminates racialized mothering.
On Mothering: Notes From an Asian American Transracial Adoptive Mother
By Jinny Huh
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021
pp. 203-218
Click to read on Project MUSE:
https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0023
📸: guille pozzi

12/05/2021

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"The Kinship Roots (Adoption) Narrative in Documentary and Animated Fantasy: Somewhere Between, Twinsters, and Kung Fu Panda"
By Susanna Birnbaum
This essay contains a detailed of the "Kinship Roots Narrative" (KRN), defined as a canonical returning to kin and/or roots trope used to represent adoptees. Though present throughout historical and , the KRN is analyzed here through the lenses of genealogical bewilderment (the assumption that separation of an adoptee from their biological parents results in irreparable harm to said adoptee) and bionormativity (the cultural schema in which biological families are the gold standard). The analyzed are the documentary Somewhere Between (2011), the documentary Twinsters (2015) and the animated children's series, Kung Fu Panda (2008–2016). An analysis of how these films adhere to the KRN (including how they represent genealogical bewilderment and bionormativity) will show how they promote biological as the only way to read family and race.
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021
pp. 178-202
Click to read: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0022
📸: Arun Geetha Viswanathan

12/02/2021

"Cross-Species Kinship Dilemmas: Adoption and Dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park Franchise"
By Anne Morey, Claudia Nelson
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press on Project MUSE
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021
pp. 154-177
Each of the five films currently comprising Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park series (1993–) presents , with a particular focus on the adoptive father, both as a problem and as the solution to problems within the birth family and the commodity culture within which that family is situated. The series repeatedly traces the process of "substantiation" (we borrow this term from Christine Ward Gailey) by requiring adults to look after children from whom they are at first emotionally as well as genetically distant. Yet the tendency to affirm adoption as a solution to weaknesses in the American family coexists with a readiness to consider thorny issues to which adoption draws attention, including the commodification of children, the exploitation of birth parents, and the ethical dimensions of reproductive biotechnologies. This article examines each installment of the franchise to demonstrate the scope and complexity of the commentary on adoption that the series provides. For while all the films manifest certain structural commonalities, each also focuses on a different adoption-related issue, allowing the viewer to read the collective as a decades-long meditation on the preoccupations of the American adoption community in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Click to read: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0021
📸: Huang Yingone on Unsplash

12/01/2021

🎉🥳👇
Check out our latest issue! Now live on Project MUSE!
The present volume seeks both to acknowledge the present state of the portrayal of adoption in popular culture and to examine those aspects of not usually acknowledged but nevertheless present in popular culture. The first three articles in this collection analyze the images of adoption in wellknown cultural artifacts: the Jurassic Park movies; three popular movies, largely geared to children, that portray the reunion of adoptees and biological parents in American Asian adoptions; and the depiction of motherhood, adoptive and otherwise, in the HBO series based on a contemporary and popular work of fiction, Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere. Alice Diver uses the law and literature to discusses the treatment of children produced by artificial technology, juxtaposing recent legal decisions that leave some children stateless and without rights with literary works that treat children with dubious, "unnatural" origins. Finally, Rukhsar Hussain discusses the derogatory representation in Indian Cinema of the hijra, nonbinary-identifying members of communities in South Asia.
Introduction: The Portrayal of Adoption in Popular Culture
By Martha Satz
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021
pp. 149-153
Click to read: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0020
📸: Matt Popovich on Unsplash

11/28/2021

Interested in subscribing to Adoption & Culture or gifting a subscription to a friend? Follow this link to subscribe today!
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https://pwb01mw.press.jhu.edu/cart/for-sale?oc=3294&client=ohio
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11/24/2021

"An Adopter and the Ends of Adoption"
By James Kyung-Jin Lee
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 6, Issue 2, 2018
pp. 282-291
A scholar in Asian American Studies and a Korean American adopter of a child from South Korea reflects on questions of care, intimacy, and woundedness in light of his engagement with scholarship, art, and activism of adult Korean adoptees' counternarratives.
Click to read in full: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2018.0023
📸: Patrick Perkins on Unsplash

11/22/2021

Pediatricians are now giving adoptive parents good advice based
to a large extent on adoptees’ recounting their experiences. Following the Medical Humanities approach, recent memoirs, novels, poems and films could be useful in helping pediatricians and adoptive parents develop more understanding of adoptees’ experiences such as racism, loss, insecurity, and isolation.
Read in full by clicking: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2018.0014
"Transcultural Adoption Literature for Pediatricians and
Parents"
By Marianne Novy
Adoption & Culture, Volume 6, Issue 1, 2018, pp. 135-161
Published by The Ohio State University Press
📸: CDC on Unsplash

11/18/2021

A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War by Kori A. Graves (review)
By Silke Hackenesch
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 1, 2021
pp. 135-138
Click to read on Project MUSE: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0010
📸: Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

11/17/2021

"Constructing Homonormative Kinship: The Life Worlds and Death Worlds of Gay and Le***an Adoption in Canada"
By Amy Verhaeghe
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 8, Issue 2, 2020
pp. 150-172
"In this essay, I analyze Conceiving Family, a documentary film produced by Amy Bohigian in 2011 about gay and le***an adoptions in Canada. I argue that this illustrates how gay and le***an can be understood to be implicated in hetero- and homonormativity and thus in the naturalization of racial and global inequities, as well as in settler colonialism in Canada. I suggest that the film can be read as a demonstration of how the normative Canadian family is realized in opposition to racialized families, Indigenous families, nonmonogamous family formations, and q***r families."
Click 👇 to read on Project MUSE: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2020.0010
📸: Stanley Dai on Unsplash

11/14/2021

"In Search of Other Mother's Gardens: On Creative Kinships"
By Lisa Marie Brimmer
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 7, Issue 2, 2019
pp. 280-289
In Alice Walker's essay In Search of Our Mother's Gardens the womanist writer observes creativity's potential to repair the past. By exploring the pluralized impact of transracial adoption and settler colonial nationalism on Black sociality, this essay exposes the creative kinships of Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Heidi Durrow, and Nella Larsen.
Read on Project MUSE: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2019.0022
📸: Michael Olsen on Unsplash

11/11/2021

"Single Parent Adoption in Contemporary India: Addressing Questions Around Sexuality"
By Chandan Bose
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press on Project MUSE
Volume 8, Issue 2, 2020
pp. 173-193
This article examines the emerging trend of single-parent adoption in contemporary India. It describes how single men and women, through their desire for parenting-through-adoption, engage with different ways of authoring their sexualities and sexual agencies. Adoption law in India determines who is fit to be adopted, who is fit to adopt, and the right conditions for adoptions. This article simultaneously looks at how questions of sexuality are framed at the intersections of law, cultural constructions of and sexual health, and narratives of single-adoptive parents.
Click to read 👉 https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2020.0001
📸: pavan gupta on Unsplash

11/10/2021

"Introduction: Visualizing Kinship: Politics, Challenges, Opportunities"
By Lucy D. Curzon
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press on Project MUSE
Volume 8, Issue 1, #2020
pp. 1-5
Click to read: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2020.0013
📸: Austin Kehmeier on Unsplash