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Kin of Another Kind

The University of Michigan Press

Chapter One

Conversations about adoption in the twentieth century are frequently framed in terms of nature and nurture. Although scientists have generally concluded that all individuals, adopted or not, are shaped by a combination of genetic and environmental influences, adoption is often associated with the nature/nurture binary, and one side is often presumed to prevail over the other. This phenomenon can be seen, for instance, in discussions of adoptees' search for origins, as ancestry is frequently equated with the adoptee's "true" self. While adoption has been intimately linked with this paradigm since Sir Francis Galton coined the phrase nature-nurture in the nineteenth century as he conducted heritability studies on adoptees (Gossett 155; "Adoption Studies" 19), adoption is, in fact, defined by social and historical forces that extend beyond that binary. As Sandra Patton reminds us in regard to contemporary transracial adoption, "Little attention is accorded to the possibility that other social forces, such as public policy and social institutions, fundamentally shape the lives adoptees lead.... The nature-nurture polarity masks the power relations involved in the construction and maintenance of selves in contemporary society" (15). Indeed, the nature/nurture polarity has been overstated when it comes to adoption; it is often the end point to any discussion about the practice's individual or social meaning. But that does not mean that it should be put aside completely from critical explorations of adoption, since the paradigm serves as an important bridge between the larger social forces that Patton identifies and the evolving public perception of adoption in the twentieth century. This chapter explores the ways in which concepts of nature or nurture function discursively in the realm of literal, actual transracial adoption, arising at moments when some segment of the population feels that the meaning of family—and of other individual and collective identities—needs to be secured. This cultural and historical context provides a necessary framework for the essentially literary discussion of subsequent chapters, which will illuminate the ways in which fictional representations of transracial adoption undercut and interrogate that dichotomy and, as a consequence, suggest the constructed nature of all family and all identity.

Adoption, which creates family out of volition rather than biology, constitutes a crisis in the meaning of kinship, especially in a culture that defines family in terms of shared "blood." As I mentioned briefly in the introduction, Ellen Herman's historical study of adoption in the twentieth century explores the various ways that Americans have attempted to make adoption more authentic, positing that the implications of these attempts go beyond any one family: "To the extent that American culture has defined nature as a product of blood-based (now gene-based) identities that are fixed, unchosen, and beyond the scope of social arrangement, adoption illustrates the authenticity crises that plague many forms of voluntary belonging, including democratic citizenship itself" (8). Underlying adoption, in other words, is the anxiety that this particular family arrangement may not be "real" enough when compared to "bloodbased" or "gene-based" kinship. Further, what makes adoption so trenchant at so many different times in the twentieth century is the degree to which this worry resembles the concerns we collectively share about other forms of voluntary belonging. Thus, while nature/nurture often seems to be a defining paradigm of adoption, it may not actually be its defining problem. Instead, what underlies invocations of nature (or nurture) in both fiction and public discourse about transracial adoption is a fundamental anxiety about authenticity. The nature/nurture binary operates as a powerful rhetorical means by which individuals attempt to secure identities that exist outside the norm, to make them seem more "real."

In the fiction and nonfiction discourses discussed in this study, the nature/ nurture paradigm sometimes appears explicitly; at other times, it is expressed in the terms of blood, genes, biology, or essential or inherent traits, all of which exist in opposition to environment, culture, heritage, or learned qualities. By examining how these concepts characterize adoptive as well as racial and national identities, I respond to Patton's call to see adoption as larger than nature or nurture alone, and I show instead how these concepts are employed at flashpoint moments in ways that reveal the power relations working on adoptees. After all, the controversies surrounding adoption are about more than individual families; they are also attempts to redefine social relations and to address inequalities that have manifested in but are not limited to adoption practices. Those social relations intersect with adoption in the fictional texts I address in upcoming chapters, texts that grapple with the anxieties about individual and collective authenticity that adoption often produces. Sometimes they engage explicitly with the practice and perception of adoption as it changed over the course of the century, but even when adoption's significance is more covert, it still operates as an expansive metaphor through which authors attempt to define the parameters of authentic belonging on the level of family, race, and nation.

The power dynamics at work in literal transracial adoption inform the fictional representations discussed in this study. To some, transracial adoption represents progressive racial politics (Melosh, Strangers 159; Bartholet 103) or even evidence that Americans have achieved a "color-blind" society, able to see beyond racial differences (Quiroz 3–4); nevertheless, race and social power more generally both remain salient in all aspects of everyday American life and particularly in adoption practice. As Pamela Anne Quiroz argues persuasively, a "color-blind" approach to adoption over the last few decades has encouraged some to see transracial adoption as the epitome of advancement past racism in the United States, yet racial hierarchies and the preferences of affluent white adopters still influence many adoption practices (4). The movement toward color-blind placements seems to serve the interests of white adopters (who want access to the widest pool of available children) more than the needs of the children themselves. Adopter preferences and the laws of supply and demand become particularly evident in the pricing system for adoption, a subject also explored by Quiroz. Adoptable children are currently placed into three tiers: "white," "honorary white" (which includes mixed-race, Latin American, and Asian children), and "collective black" (Quiroz 5). The fees charged by private agencies vary according to where the children fit, with white and internationally adopted children costing more than a domestically adopted African American child (Quiroz 74–75). Quiroz concludes,

Adoption practices can be understood as part of what Omi and Winant ... called "racial projects," the sociohistorical processes involved in explaining, organizing, and distributing resources according to racial categories.... Examining such practices illuminates the depth of globalization and the role of U.S. citizens as "consumers" in a world marketplace that includes not just retail products and services but also human lives. (6–7)

Beyond race specifically, relative social power also dictates which people are permitted to adopt and which children become available for adoption. As Rickie Solinger has argued, the "choice" that Americans exercise when adopting from abroad is dependent on the relative lack of choice for women in developing nations to care for their children (Beggars 20–35). Furthermore, gays and lesbians looking to adopt domestically or abroad also face discrimination and are either prevented from adopting outright, must do so covertly or with extra effort, or are expected to take "special needs" children with physical or psychological disabilities, a situation journalist and adoptive father Dan Savage irreverently characterizes as the "damaged-goods adoption option" (The Kid 55).

The implications of these inequalities in social power are further complicated by the act of adoption itself, a distinctly atypical form of kinship. To understand how adoption works metaphorically in literature, it also helps to recognize the multiple disruptions of cultural norms that occur when an actual adoption takes place. Because adoption makes family out of individuals not biologically related, it challenges the cultural assumption that kinship is based in "shared blood"; indeed, it undermines the very foundation of legal kinship in the United States. As anthropologist David Schneider asserts, American kinship is normatively biogenetic; although we may consider relatives through law (spouses, stepchildren and stepparents, adopted kin) to be "real" kin, the discourse surrounding kinship privileges biological ties over all else (23). Upheld by the rhetorically weighty metaphor of "blood," these biogenetic norms signify the involuntary, inseverable connection that Americans associate with kinship. In the United States, "blood" suffices as an explanation for why family members look or act alike, how they are linked across generations, and why we still loan money to the cousin who never pays us back. "Blood" equates the abstract qualities of relatedness with a life-giving substance; it naturalizes kinship, locating it in the body and making it inherent. At the same time, it also obscures the fact that the substance of family connections derives less from shared genes and more from established codes of conduct—the fulfillment of our roles as siblings, children, and parents. Adoption embodies the exceptions to the rules of blood kinship. Traditional stranger adoptions, in which birth certificates and adoption decrees are sealed to prevent parties to the adoption from knowing one another's identities, belie the fundamental rule of blood kinship by demanding the irreversible dissolution of the blood tie between birth parents and child and the creation of a new relationship modeled as if it were blood (Modell 2). Adoption establishes parenthood through contract rather than physical conception, making blood paradoxical, a reminder of a tie to the birth family with the potential to undermine the integrity of the adoptive relationship. In the contradictions of adoptive kinship, the presumption of innate blood kinship bumps up against a strictly socially constructed familial relationship.

This paradox also has implications for racial identities. Adoption's disruption of "blood" as the binding substance of kinship results in a corresponding subversion of the social norms that presume race to be shared within families and, implicitly, in bloodlines. Historically, racial difference in America has been understood as inherent, with racial hierarchies sustained by a complex interplay of perceived biological differences, social impositions, and the metaphor of "blood." If, as Henry Louis Gates claims, "race" is a metaphor for difference, then "blood" helps "race" do its rhetorical work. "Blood" creates a conceptual link between family and race that reveals the family's role in creating and sustaining not only racial identities but racial categories as well. The family helps to instill racial identity and then socializes its members into their culturally prescribed roles. Transracial adoption undermines the shared naturalizing discourse of "blood." It forces important questions: What is the source of racial "traits"? How are our beliefs supported by the intertwined relationship between blood kinship and racial "blood"?

Adoption across national boundaries introduces yet another set of related issues: the ambiguous substance of national belonging. As a nation conceived through the collective rejection of bloodlines as a precondition to national membership, the United States has not always lived up to that ideal. Theory and practice remain at odds with the imposition of immigration quotas, broken treaties, and citizenship restrictions. Adoption foregrounds questions about how we "belong" on a national scale, revealing a collective ambivalence about the source of national membership. As Carol Singley observes, "Adoption narratives dramatize the struggle of individuals and families to draw and redraw the lines of bonds and affection; on a larger scale, they portray a nation wrestling in multiple ways with conflicting notions of citizenship in which belonging and entitlement are bestowed either by birthright or ideology" (79). She suggests that fictional adoptions serve as a measure of the evolving criteria for national belonging; in asking what makes a family, they engage with corresponding questions of what constitutes citizenship.

On the level of family, race, and nation, adoption thus demands alternative ways of articulating what it means to be authentic in the absence of biology. As Ellen Herman argues, much of twentieth-century adoption has revolved around ways of responding to its departures from biological kinship norms. Adoption professionals and participants alike have attempted to make it seem more real through purposeful acts of "design." Herman explains, "Enduring beliefs in the power of blood, and widespread doubts about whether families could thrive without it, fueled ardent efforts to subject adoption to regulation, interpretation, standardization, and naturalization. These combined operations accomplished two related goals. They identified adoption as an important social problem and designated kinship by design as its solution" (7). Even as the responses to biogenetic differences in the adoptive family have shifted over the century, the absence of "blood" connection has remained a problem stubbornly attached to adoption for many (Herman 297–98). The problem of the absence of metaphorical blood can be found in writings by and about adoptees and birth parents and in some of the debates that surrounded transracial adoption in the late twentieth century; nevertheless, some scholars have also begun to view adoption's detachment from biology not as a flaw but, rather, as an opportunity to redefine the terms with which we understand identity, to make it more expansive and self-directed.

Literature scholar Margaret Homans has argued persuasively on several occasions that the absence of origins experienced by many adoptees may not be the loss that people often make it out to be. She observes that contemporary adoption culture is fixated around familial and cultural origins that are coded, in various ways, as biogenetic or innate; in turn, the absence of knowledge of those origins—a consequence of the adoption process—constitutes a loss or deprivation ("Origins, Searches" 61). But Homans suggests that we recognize some of the possibilities that unknown origins might afford, including a process of "self-making" ("Origins, Searches" 65) that can detach identities from an essentialized notion of roots. She says, "Adoption ... has the potential not only to destabilize binaries such as nature and culture, blood and water, but also to put into practice 'another configuration of primary attachment' for which there is not yet a language" ("Origins, Searches" 63). Although the exact means by which these identities can be created remain yet undefined, adoption, as Homans suggests, represents an important alternative to essentialism. Other scholars have also viewed adoption in terms of its capacity to advance more social constructionist models for identity. For example, Vincent Cheng asserts that adoptions across racial and cultural lines "make a radical mockery of any notions of an authentic identity" because adoptees have no lived knowledge of their birth parents' culture, despite the efforts of adopters to preserve what they might call "cultural heritage" (70). Cheng argues that adoptive identity, like all identity, is hybrid and contingent, learned through life experience rather than innate. Approaching the issue of constructed identities from a somewhat different direction, Barbara Yngvesson and Maureen M. Mahoney examine how actual adoptees respond to their status by constructing new narratives to address the "gaps" in their life stories. Touching on the ways in which origin narratives are attempts to feel authentic despite the lack of biogenetic connection to their families, the authors point out that adoptees

are caught in the pursuit of "realness".... Their very "in between-ness" and their (ultimately unresolvable) efforts to become either this or that, point to the vulnerability of all identity, its politically and historically contingent "nature." It is from these irresolvable contradictions in the experience of adoptees, contradictions from which no culturally consistent narrative can be told, that the potential is found for challenging "identity" and the fixed belongings this implies. (82–83)

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Kin of Another Kind by CYNTHIA CALLAHAN Copyright © 2011 by the University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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