Download or read book Unequal Motherhoods and the Adoption of Asian Children written by Jungyun Gill and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-12-13 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores a deeply personal aspect of globalization: the adoption of Asian children by white Americans. It is based on dozens of interviews with adoptive mothers and adoption social workers, nearly two hundred letters and essays written by Korean birth mothers who put their children up for adoption, and field work at an adoption agency in South Korea. It also includes analyses and explanations of U.S. and South Korean governments’ social characteristics and policies regarding adoptions and how relations between nations have affected international adoption. The book focuses on whether the commonly held notion that adoptions are to serve children’s welfare and their best interests has tended to render gendered aspects of international adoptions invisible. Factors such as gender inequality, social control of women’s reproductive power, patriarchic family structure, and social beliefs concerning womanhood and motherhood that affect international adoptions are revealed in this book. The multiple ways in which adoptive, birth, and foster mothers experience gender oppression from their different social positions of class, race, and nationality are explored and the interdependencies and inequalities of the motherhoods of these three groups of women are brought to light.

Download or read book Global Families Inequality and Transnational Adoption written by Riitta Högbacka and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-18 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at the simultaneous processes of making and un-making of families that are part of the adoption practice. Whereas most studies on transnational adoption concentrate on the adoptive family, the author identifies not only the happy occasion when a family gains a child, but also the sorrow and loss of the child to its family of origin. Situating transnational adoption in the context of the Global North-South divide, Hogbacka investigates the devastating effects of unequal life chances and asymmetrical power relations on the adoption process and on the mothers whose children are adopted. Based on unique primary material gathered in in-depth interviews with South African families of origin and Finnish adoptive families, the book investigates the decision-making processes of both sets of parents and the encounters between them. The first mothers' narratives are juxtaposed with those of the adopters and of the adoption social workers who act on the principles of the wider adoption system. Concluding with a critique of the Global Northism that exemplifies current practices, Hogbacka sketches the contours of a more just approach to transnational adoption that would shatter rather than perpetuate inequality. The book can also be read as an expose of the consequences of current inequalities for poor families. Global Families, Inequality and Transnational Adoption will be of interest to students and scholars of adoption studies, family and kinship, sociology, anthropology, social work and development.

Download or read book International Adoption written by Laura Briggs and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past two decades, transnational adoption has exploded in scope and significance, growing up along increasingly globalized economic relations and the development and improvement of reproductive technologies. A complex and understudied system, transnational adoption opens a window onto the relations between nations, the inequalities of the rich and the poor, and the history of race and racialization, Transnational adoption has been marked by the geographies of unequal power, as children move from poorer countries and families to wealthier ones, yet little work has been done to synthesize its complex and sometimes contradictory effects. Rather than focusing only on the United States, as much previous work on the topic does, International Adoption considers the perspectives of a number of sending countries as well as other receiving countries, particularly in Europe. The book also reminds us that the U.S. also sends children into international adoptions—particularly children of color. The book thus complicates the standard scholarly treatment of the subject, which tends to focus on the tensions between those who argue that transnational adoption is an outgrowth of American wealth, power, and military might (as well as a rejection of adoption from domestic foster care) and those who maintain that it is about a desire to help children in need.

Download or read book Culture Keeping written by Heather Jacobson and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1990s, close to 250,000 children born abroad have been adopted into the United States. Nearly half of these children have come from China or Russia. Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference offers the first comparative analysis of these two popular adoption programs. Heather Jacobson examines these adoptions by focusing on a relatively new social phenomenon, the practice by international adoptive parents, mothers in particular, of incorporating aspects of their children's cultures of origin into their families' lives. "Culture keeping" is now standard in the adoption world, though few adoptive parents, the majority of whom are white and native-born, have experience with the ethnic practices of their children's homelands prior to adopting. Jacobson follows white adoptive mothers as they navigate culture keeping: from their motivations, to the pressures and constraints they face, to the content of their actual practices concerning names, food, toys, travel, cultural events, and communities of belonging. Through her interviews, she explores how women think about their children, their families, and themselves as mothers as they labor to construct or resist ethnic identities for their children, who may be perceived as birth children (because they are white) or who may be perceived as adopted (because of racial difference). The choices these women make about culture, Jacobson argues, offer a window into dominant ideas of race and the "American Family," and into how social differences are conceived and negotiated in the United States.

Download or read book Transnational Adoption written by Sara K. Dorow and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each year, thousands of Chinese children, primarily abandoned infant girls, are adopted by Americans. Yet we know very little about the local and transnational processes that characterize this new migration. Transnational Adoption is a unique ethnographic study of China/U.S. adoption, the largest contemporary intercountry adoption program. Sara K. Dorow begins by situating the popularity of the China/U.S. adoption process within a broader history of immigration and adoption. She then follows the path of the adoption process: the institutions and bureaucracies in both China and the United States that prepare children and parents for each other; the stories and practices that legitimate them coming together as transnational families; the strains placed upon our common notions of what motherhood means; and ways in which parents then construct the cultural and racial identities of adopted children. Based on rich ethnographic evidence, including interviews with and observation of people on both sides of the Pacific—from orphanages, government officials, and adoption agencies to advocacy groups and adoptive families themselves—this is a fascinating look at the latest chapter in Chinese-American migration.

Download or read book Adopting Maternity written by Nora Moosnick and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2004-03-30 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the issues related to race, class, and gender involved in adoption based on in-depth interviews with 22 adoptive mothers. This text compares and contrasts the experiences of white women who adopted Asian, black, or biracial children. The bulk of the book is dedicated to presenting the women's words as they talk about their perceptions of fertility treatments, birth mothers, other mothers, adoption processes, and outsiders' reactions, among other matters. Feminist discourse is used to examine the applicability of these theories to women's self-characterizations. Beginning with an overview of the theoretical basis of the book, discussions of becoming an adoptive mother and the realities of being an adoptive mother follow. Each chapter presents feelings and experiences of adoptive mothers, in addition to analysis that brings these feelings into broader societal context. This honest portrayal will offer adoptive families, adoption professionals, and social workers important insights into mothers' adoptive experiences. Scholars of women's studies, social work, and sociology will find this volume useful as well.

Download or read book Global Families written by Catherine Ceniza Choy and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last fifty years, transnational adoption—specifically, the adoption of Asian children—has exploded in popularity as an alternative path to family making. Despite the cultural acceptance of this practice, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the factors that allowed Asian international adoption to flourish. In Global Families, Catherine Ceniza Choy unearths the little-known historical origins of Asian international adoption in the United States. Beginning with the post-World War II presence of the U.S. military in Asia, she reveals how mixed-race children born of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese women and U.S. servicemen comprised one of the earliest groups of adoptive children. Based on extensive archival research, Global Families moves beyond one-dimensional portrayals of Asian international adoption as either a progressive form of U.S. multiculturalism or as an exploitative form of cultural and economic imperialism. Rather, Choy acknowledges the complexity of the phenomenon, illuminating both its radical possibilities of a world united across national, cultural, and racial divides through family formation and its strong potential for reinforcing the very racial and cultural hierarchies it sought to challenge.

Download or read book Social Problems and Social Movements written by James DeFronzo and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-03-20 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social Problems aims to not only introduce students to the key social problems discussed in most courses, but also to show them that change is possible by introducing them to key social movements working to solve some of these social problems.

Download or read book Strangers and Kin written by Barbara MELOSH and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Strangers and Kin is the history of adoption. An adoptive mother herself, Barbara Melosh tells the story of how married couples without children sought to care for and nurture other people's children as their own. Taking this history into the early twenty-first century, Melosh offers unflinching insight to the contemporary debates that swirl around adoption: the challenges to adoption secrecy; the ethics and geopolitics of international adoption; and the conflicts over transracial adoption.

Download or read book Inside Transracial Adoption written by Gail Steinberg and published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. This book was released on 2012-02-15 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inside Transracial Adoption provides creative, confident and pro-active guidance on how to build close, loving, and very real families consisting of individuals who are proud and culturally competent members of differing races. Drawing on research and personal experience, Steinberg and Hall offer detailed, step-by-step, get-real guidance for families about tough issues they have to face relating to race and adoption in domestic or international transracial adoptions: What's "normal?" Where do we live and go to school? Does class have an influence? How do children develop racial identity? What kind of impact does being raised by white parents have on a black child? Combining humor with empathy and hard truths, this book is an established classic guide to living Inside Transracial Adoption. It is essential reading for parents and the people who support them: whether considering transracial adoption for the first time or experienced veterans.

Download or read book The Journal of Korean Studies Volume 21 Number 1 Spring 2016 written by Donald Baker and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The University of Washington-Korea Studies Program, in collaboration with Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, is proud to publish the Journal of Korean Studies.

Download or read book China s Hidden Children written by Kay Ann Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-03-21 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the thirty-five years since China instituted its One-Child Policy, 120,000 children—mostly girls—have left China through international adoption, including 85,000 to the United States. It’s generally assumed that this diaspora is the result of China’s approach to population control, but there is also the underlying belief that the majority of adoptees are daughters because the One-Child Policy often collides with the traditional preference for a son. While there is some truth to this, it does not tell the full story—a story with deep personal resonance to Kay Ann Johnson, a China scholar and mother to an adopted Chinese daughter. Johnson spent years talking with the Chinese parents driven to relinquish their daughters during the brutal birth-planning campaigns of the 1990s and early 2000s, and, with China’s Hidden Children, she paints a startlingly different picture. The decision to give up a daughter, she shows, is not a facile one, but one almost always fraught with grief and dictated by fear. Were it not for the constant threat of punishment for breaching the country’s stringent birth-planning policies, most Chinese parents would have raised their daughters despite the cultural preference for sons. With clear understanding and compassion for the families, Johnson describes their desperate efforts to conceal the birth of second or third daughters from the authorities. As the Chinese government cracked down on those caught concealing an out-of-plan child, strategies for surrendering children changed—from arranging adoptions or sending them to live with rural family to secret placement at carefully chosen doorsteps and, finally, abandonment in public places. In the twenty-first century, China’s so-called abandoned children have increasingly become “stolen” children, as declining fertility rates have left the dwindling number of children available for adoption more vulnerable to child trafficking. In addition, government seizures of locally—but illegally—adopted children and children hidden within their birth families mean that even legal adopters have unknowingly adopted children taken from parents and sent to orphanages. The image of the “unwanted daughter” remains commonplace in Western conceptions of China. With China’s Hidden Children, Johnson reveals the complex web of love, secrecy, and pain woven in the coerced decision to give one’s child up for adoption and the profound negative impact China’s birth-planning campaigns have on Chinese families.

Download or read book Adoption Race and Identity written by William Laufer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-04 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adoption, Race, and Identity is a long-range study of the impact of interracial adoption on those adopted and their families. Initiated in 1972, it was continued in 1979, 1984, and 1991. Cumulatively, these four phases trace the subjects from early childhood into young adulthood. This is the only extended study of this controversial subject.Simon and Altstein provide a broad perspective of the impact of transracial adoption and include profiles of the families involved in the study. They explore and compare the experiences of both the parents and the children. They identify families whose adoption experiences were problematic and those whose experiences were positive. Finally, the study looks at the insights the experience of transracial adoption brought to the adoptive parents and what advice they would pass on to future parents adopting children from different racial backgrounds. They include the reflections of those adopted included in the 1972 first phase, who are now adults themselves.This second edition includes a new concluding chapter that updates the fourth and last phase of the study. The authors were able to locate 88 of the 96 families who participated in the 1984 study. Bringing together all four phases of this twenty-year study into one volume gives the reader a richer and deeper understanding of what the experience of transracial adoption has meant for the parents, the adoptees, and children born into the families studied. This landmark work, will be of compelling interest to social workers, policy makers, and professionals and families involved on all sides of interracial adoption.

Download or read book Like Our Very Own written by Julie Berebitsky and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A fascinating chapter in American social and cultural history, Like Our Very Own offers compelling evidence of the role that adoption has played in our evolving efforts to define the meaning and nature of both motherhood and family."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Mothers and Their Adopted Children written by Dorothy W. Smith and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Results of a study based in part on sixty tape-recorded interviews and fifty-seven questionaires from mothers.

Download or read book A Passage to the Heart written by Amy Klatzkin and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Globalization of Motherhood written by Wendy Chavkin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brings together research from the Global North and the Global South to illuminate how contemporary motherhood is changed by the processes of globalization.