The Routledge Critical Adoption Studies Reader presents a central source of scholarly approaches arranged around fundamental questions about how adoption, as a complex practice of family-making, is represented in art, philosophy, the law, history, literature, political science, and other humanities. Divided into three major parts, this volume traces the history of adoption and its analogues, identifies major movements in the practice, and illuminates comprehensive disciplinary frameworks that underpin the field’s approaches. This key scholarly and pedagogical tool includes excerpts from scholars such as Judith Butler, Dorothy Roberts, Margaret Homans, Margaret D. Jacobs, Arissa Oh, Marianne Novy, and Kori Graves. It explores a variety of representations of adoption and embraces interdisciplinary discussions of reproduction as it intersects race, ethnicity, power relations, the concept of nation, history, the idea of childhood, and many other contemporary concerns. The Routledge Critical Adoption Studies Reader provides a single-volume resource for instructors or students who want a convenient collection of foundational materials for teaching or reference, and for researchers newly discovering the field. This volume’s humanities perspective makes it the first of its kind to collect secondary materials in Critical Adoption Studies for researchers, who, in taking up cultural representations of adoption, examine cultural contexts not for their impact on the practice over time but for their richness of engagement with the human experience of belonging, kinship, and identity.

Table of Contents:
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