The Violence of Love : Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Myers, Kit W.

Series:

American Crossroads Series

American Crossroads Series ; v.74

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (286 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, 2025.

Summary:

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents--a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Kit W. Myers comparatively examines the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. He shows how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures--in contrast to others that are not--and argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempt to transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet they are also linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence. The Violence of Love confronts this discomforting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. A Genealogy of Transracial and Transnational Adoption

2. The New Normal: Positively Defining (Adoptive) Motherhood and Family

3. Color-Evasive Love and Freedom from Violence in (Neo)Liberal Adoption Laws

4. Love, Life, and Death: Opposite Futures and Protecting the Wrong Subjects

5. Eliminating the Native and the Privileging of White Rights in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl

Conclusion: Love, Alternative Kinships, and Imagining Otherwise

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780520402492

0520402499

OCLC:

1468980801