The Routledge Critical Adoption Studies Reader

Emily Hipchen received her PhD in literary studies from the University of Georgia. She is a Fulbright scholar, the editor of Adoption & Culture, co-editor of the book series Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture, and an emeritus editor of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. She is also the author of a memoir, Coming Apart Together: Fragments from an Adoption (2005). She’s an editor of Inhabiting La Patria: Identity, Agency, and Antojo in the Works of Julia Alvarez (2013) and The Routledge Auto|Biography Studies Reader (2015), as well as five special issues, "Adoption Life Writing," "Adoption Studies Research," "Critique as a Signature Pedagogy," "What’s Next? The Futures of Auto|Biography Studies," and most recently, "The Dobbs Issue." She directs the Nonfiction Writing Program as a faculty member in the Department of English at Brown University, where she teaches nonfiction writing and editing.

Introduction: Belonging

Part 1:

Foundations, Histories, Frames

Introduction: Beginnings

Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption, by E. Wayne Carp

"Natural Bonds, Legal Boundaries: Modes of Persuasion in Adoption Rhetoric," in Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture, by Judith Modell

"Addressing the Harms of Not Knowing One’s Heredity: Lessons from Genealogical Bewilderment," by Kimberly Leighton

Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, by Dorothy Roberts

Familial Fitness: Disability, Adoption, and Family in Modern America, by Sandra Sufian

Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, by Viviana Zelizer

Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism, by Kim Park Nelson

After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century, by Marilyn Strathern

"Teaching American Literature: The Centrality of Adoption," by Carol Singley

Kin of Another Kind: Transracial Adoption on American Literature, by Cynthia Callahan

Everybody Else: Adoption and the Politics of Domestic Diversity in Postwar America, by Sarah Potter

Part 2

Embodiment and Adoption

Introduction: What We Do With Bodies

Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood: Resisting Monomaternalism in Adoptive, Lesbian, Blended, and Polygamous Families, by Shelley M. Park

A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children, by Margaret D. Jacobs

Family Bonds: Adoption and the Politics of Parenthood, by Elizabeth Bartholet

"Is Kinship Always Heterosexual?", by Judith Butler

Reproducing the State, by Jacqueline Stevens

"The Intimate Politics of Race and Globalization," by Laura Briggs

Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama, by Marianne Novy

Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender, and Kinship, by Sara K. Dorow

Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception, by Sarah Franklin

"The Power to ‘Make Live’: Biopolitics and Reproduction in Blade Runner 2049," by Marina Fedosik

The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy, by David L. Eng

Part 3

Adoption Narratives

Introduction: Telling Stories

"Adoption Stories: Autobiographical Narrative and the Politics of Identity," Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives, by Barbara Melosh

"Adoption Narratives, Trauma, and Origins," by Margaret Homans

Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption, by Catherine Ceniza Choy

A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War, by Kori Graves

To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption, by Arissa Oh

Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging, Mark Jerng

Birthmarks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America, by Sandra Patton

American Baby: A Mother, A Child, and the Secret History of Adoption, by Gabriel Glaser

"Family, Ancestry and Self: What is the Moral Significance of Biological Ties?", by Sally Haslanger

Labor of Love: Gestational Surrogacy and the Work of Making Babies, by Heather Jacobson

"Reckless Abandon: The Politics of Victimization and Agency in Birthmother Narratives," in Adoption and Mothering, by Frances J. Latchford