Adoption, Identity, and Kinship

This is an archive of the original Bastard Quarterly newsletter, edited by Damsel Plum and Charles Filius. It was published in print and on the web between 1997 and 2002.

BOOK REVIEW

Adoption, Identity, and Kinship
by Katarina Wegar
Yale University Press, 1997

Review by Ron Morgan (rhyzome@best.com)

(This article first appeared in the Winter 1998 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)

"Activists who strive for social change face a fundamental strategic and moral dilemma. On the one hand, arguments that resonate with existing values and beliefs generally are more convincing and therefore more effective than those that challenge accepted wisdom. On the other hand, by using the traditional arguments, social activists risk reinforcing old stereotypes and labels of inferiority and difference. This dilemma has shaped the ongoing debate over the right of adoptees to have access to identifying information about their biological parents -- the so-called search or sealed records controversy. The failure to examine critically society's view of adoptees as similar yet different from children who live with their biological parents has led the search movement to perpetuate confining images of adoption, kinship and identity. In this respect the arguments of such activists follow the tradition of adoption research that has dominated public discourse on the topic. Neither side understands the experience of adoption within a social context, and as a consequence both tend to pathologize adoptive kinship."

- Chapter 1, page 1 Adoption, Identity, and Kinship

Adoption, Identity, and Kinship is a slim volume, only one hundred thirty-eight pages (with an additional nineteen pages of reference bibliography), but it is heavy lifting nonetheless. Densely yet clearly written, it contains much to delight and enrage pre-Bastard Nation adoption reformers and Closed Records advocates alike.

Her central arguments are that American society elevates blood kinship so highly that the Closed Records system, which assumes that adoptees who wish to know their genetic heritage are somehow maladjusted, and that adoptive families are no different than "normal" ones, is absurd and unrealistic. The search movement, which she conflates with the Open Records movement, make the opposite assumption that blood relationship is so important to individual development that adoptees who express no desire to search are exhibiting the pathological symptom of denial, and that adoptive families are pale substitutes for the mandate of blood kinship.

Wegar, assistant professor of sociology at Old Dominion University, succinctly describes the history of adoption in the United States, the shifting attitudes and social forces that sealed records, and the subsequent struggle between those who wished to open them and those who wished them sealed forever. She analyzes most of the seminal studies on adoption: the Freudians and their discontents, Kirk's Shared Fate (1964), reams of government task force reports and summaries, the NCFA's 1989 Adoption Factbook, Brodzinsky, Sachdev, and Pannor all parade through, bow and curtsey.

The book moves at almost dizzying speed through the seventies and eighties, when personal search narratives, from both adoptee and birthparent perspectives, became popularized. Discussed in tandem with this are the buttressing works of psychological theory, such as Betty Jean Lifton's Journey of the Adopted Self and Nancy Verrier's The Primal Wound.

Professor Wegar is an adoptee from Finland, where adoption records were opened before her birth. The scholarship in Adoption, Kinship, and Identity is excellent, and although she admits a bias for Open Records, this doesn't interfere with her critique of the Open Records advocates. If anything she is a tad peevish with them.

In the next section, Professor Wegar investigates the Open Records debate as viewed by the general public through the mediating instruments of popular fiction and TV talk shows. As she points out, the incidence of such media focus is far out of proportion to the actual number of adoptees, particularly adoptees and birthparents in search, the dominant theme of these books, shows and stories. She is particularly adept at highlighting how the Open Records debate serves as a funhouse mirror in which the non-adopted/adoptive may see their own definitions of identity and kinship reflected and reinforced; hence the search narrative's popularity as a thematic device.

In the last section, titled "Conclusion", Wegar throws up her hands, despairing at a solution to the intractable problem she has put before us. "Is there a way to argue for adoption reform without simultaneously perpetuating harmful and confining images of those most intimately affected by adoption? My study would indicate that the possibility of escaping the trappings of rhetoric are slim"

My response to that pessimistic conclusion, accurate though it may have been for the time in which it was written, is that you are holding the new argument in your hand. Bastard Nation's position that access to government records of identity is a civil right, assumes this right regardless of individual search choices. We are not interested in proving or disproving the Primal Wound or other psychological arguments for searching, because they are not germane to the issue of civil rights, which assumes equality rather than difference.

Adoption, Kinship, and Identity, while an invigorating piece of sociology, does not provide any practical political solutions. Professor Wegar's adherence to the standards of scholarship prevent her from forceful advocacy, although she seems at times to be biting her tongue to keep herself from blurting out, "Just open the damned records!" The next edition, which by all rights should include Bastard Nation, the various case law generated by the Tennessee bill, and Open Records victories in Washington and Oregon, should dispel some of Professor Wegar's disillusionment with the Movement.

(This article first appeared in the Winter 1998 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)