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.
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