Placing the Adoptive Self

Abstract:     
[A]doption law and practices are guided by enormous cultural changes in the composition and the meaning of family. As families become increasingly blended outside the context of adoption - with combinations of blood relatives, step-relatives, de facto relatives, and ex-relatives sitting down together for Thanksgiving dinner as a matter of course - birth families and adoptive families knowing one another may not seem so very strange or threatening at all. There will simply be an expectation across communities that ordinary families will be mixed and multiple. With that in mind, we should hesitate before establishing embeddedness as the source of mother's authority over her child's placement. It is a concept that only sounds cozy in great part because it simplifies the relational complexities of the world in which we live.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 20

Keywords: adoption, placement, mixed family, embeddedness, mothers

Accepted Paper Series