*Article* **From Both Sides of the Atlantic: Black German Adoptee Searches in William Gage's Geborener Deutscher (Born German)**

#### **Rosemarie Peña**

Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers The State University of New Jersey-Camden, Camden, NJ 08102, USA; rosemarie.pena@rutgers.edu

Received: 3 August 2018; Accepted: 24 September 2018; Published: 1 October 2018

**Abstract:** William Gage's Geborener Deutscher, a print newsletter distributed by traditional mail from the late 1980s until 2003, and the eponymous Internet forum Gage established in 2000 on Yahoo Groups, provide search resources and community support specifically for German born adoptees. The archived newsletters and conversations offer early insight into the search and reunion activities of many who were transnationally adopted to the United States as infants and small children in the wake of the Second World War. Among Gage's mailing list and Yahoo Group subscribers are members of the post-war cohort of Black German Americans living in Germany and in the US. Gage's archive provides a unique opportunity to begin to explore Black German adoptee search, reunion, and community development over nearly a two-decade span.

**Keywords:** adoption; transnational adoption; reunion; reunification; African American; Germany; Black German; Afro-German; Afrogerman; Afrodeutsch

With respect to my authorial standpoint and socially constructed categories of difference that relate to this essay, it is important to disclose that I identify as a Black German American transnational adoptee and am the only known adoption scholar belonging to the historical Black German-U.S. adoptee cohort. My research and analyses benefit from my own adoption, search, and reunification experiences, and are informed by both my personal and my professional relationships with hundreds of members of the diasporic community of Black Germans. Importantly, as vice president and president of the Black German Cultural Society (BGCS) (2000–2011), and as founder and president of the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA) (2011-present), I have been privy to many adoptee testimonies, assisted adoptees in their birth-family searches, and represented the interests of Black German adoptees, internationally. My previously published essays represent the existing literature exploring actual Black German-US adoptees' childhoods and reunion experiences (Peña 2015, 2016). No ethnography, and only a few adoptee memoirs have been published to date. As a community leader, I designed and moderated all organizational websites, Internet forums, and social media networks for the BGCS from 2000–2011 and for the BGHRA thereafter until the present. Having archived all communications and images shared since 2000, I enjoy privileged and unequaled access to a vast amount of primary source material related to Black German adoptees reunifying transnationally. My analyses are therefore derived from many years of participant observation as administrator and member in the private online communities and e-lists hosted by the only two Black German organizations established in the U.S. Since 2000, I have also observed Black German adoptee interactions in other online communities such as those hosted by Black German organizations in Germany, and other adoption and family search related organizations. Since the mid-2000s, Black German organizations have joined other adoption related groups in establishing both public and exclusive virtual communities on the Facebook social network platform. An astute

observer is more easily able to discern those who identify as Black Germans and who belonging to multiple groups. Networking between and among groups often occurs. For example, it is likely that a Black German adoptee who emerges in one affiliate group will often be recruited by or referred to another as the circumstances dictate.

Adoptees searching for their origin stories and birth-family members typically connect with others who share in their context specific circumstances in online social networks and community-based forums. There is no way to determine how many Black Germans subscribed to Gage's printed newsletter in the earlier years or are among the 477 current members of his online Yahoo group. Not all list members reveal their personal information, and unlike social media today, no image is attached to an individual's profile. According to researchers Catherine Ridings, et al., (Ridings et al. 2006) who study online behavior for business marketing purposes, people often join online groups and remain "lurkers," they simply find the information they are seeking by reading the archives and other subscribers' postings. "Since lurkers do not post, it is impossible to gather information about them in the persistent conversation. It is important to know about lurkers, however, since they are bona fide members of the virtual community and consumers of its knowledge. Thus, they may be affected by the virtual community content even if they do not contribute to the ongoing conversations" (330). Some Black German adoptees only discover they belong to the historic adoptive cohort when they begin to search for their bilateral family roots in Germany and the U.S., and from what they learn from others they encounter in online forums and social networks. Although most Black Germans who have shared their stories with me and online are aware of their adopted status since childhood, some reveal they are late discovery—meaning they learn about their adoptions as adults. Many never saw their birth certificates or adoption papers until their adoptive parents died. Others still have no access to their identity documents and are fearful that their citizenship status in the U.S. is precarious given contemporary immigration politics; although, only one Black German adoptee is known to have ever been deported. Adoptees with access to their identity documents while their adoptive parents are alive often hesitate to discuss their intention to search for their families of origin with their adoptive parents. Many adoptees wait until their adoptive parents are deceased to initiate their searches out of fear of offending them or appearing ungrateful. Black Germans are no different from adoptees belonging to transnational adoptive cohorts born in the 1950s and 1960s in this regard. What makes this group unique are the historico-political circumstances of their transnational adoptions—solely on the basis of race, and also that the cohort of dual-heritage, biracial, German born adoptees are the only know group of children to be adopted from overseas by African Americans.

Race is a complex and nuanced topic in the Black German context. The transnational adoptions of biracial children into African American families must also be considered transracial since the research reveals that many Black Germans believe they experience(d) race and racism, particularly during their 1960s' childhoods, differently from their African American peers (Peña 2017). The proliferation of diaspora, migration, and critical mixed-race studies reveals that the experiences of persons considered to be Black and biracial are not monolithic and are context specific in terms of history, culture, and individual preference. Adoptees raised in military families, for example, were sheltered from overt discrimination in childhood and were among the first to attend integrated schools (Peña 2017). It would be disingenuous to suggest that while the children were absorbed into the African American community, per se, that they didn't stand out as visibly different from their adopted parents.

The adoptees were both biracial and of dual heritage and were born during a time when relationships between blacks and whites was expressly forbidden in many of the United States, prior to the Supreme Court decision on *Loving vs. Virginia* (1967) declaring bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional. "In the late 1940s and 1950s an interracial couple with or without a mixed-race child faced countless obstacles, many of which seemed insurmountable. In thirty out of forty-eight states of the Union during this period, interracial marriage was legally prohibited by anti-miscegenation laws" (Lemke 345). Maria Höhn's, "GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany" (Höhn 2002) and her later work with Martin Klimke, "A Breath of Freedom: the Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany" (Höhn and Klimke 2010) illuminate not only the transnational socio-political and cultural contexts in which the interracial relationships developed, but also give invaluable insight into the lives and experiences of the men and women who became the birth parents of the Black German children. In the case of the African American GI's, some of the men that Höhn and Klimke discuss also became adoptive fathers, effectively raising the children that their compatriots left behind.

Between 1945 and 1956, an estimated 150,000 children were born in West Germany to occupying troops and German women. More than 9000 were the children of African American and Moroccan soldiers (Lemke Muniz de Faria 2003). Statistics are unreliable, and although most of the children remained in Germany with their mothers, historians approximate that in the two decades following the War as many as seven thousand Black German children were adopted to the U.S. Many of the children's generational peers were also adopted domestically and, transnationally, to Denmark. Others of their peers grew up in German children's homes and/or in White German foster families (Lemke Muniz de Faria 2012). All formal adoptions were closed, as it was the contemporary custom in transnational adoption. Upon relinquishment of their rights and responsibilities to their children, German mothers waived the right to ever pursue contact with their children in the future. Many of the mothers, who are silent in the literature, placed their children in adoptive homes under pressure from family, social workers, and community members.

There is a dearth of literature about Black German adoption and only a handful of memoirs exist. The present author is the only Black German adoptee scholar, and the only researcher to have published about the U.S. adoptees' childhood experiences growing up in the U.S. Effectually, the transnational adoptions of the Black German children to the U.S. entered academic discourse primarily through the three historical texts written by Yara-Lemke Muñiz de Faria beginning in 2005 although, Heide Fehrenbach is the first American scholar to publish a monograph on the history of Black German adoption in English. Fehrenbach's (Fehrenbach 2007) text is therefore, the most comprehensive English historical account of the postwar adoptions of Black German children. Lemke Muñiz de Faria's book (Lemke Muniz de Faria 2002), *Zwischen Fürsorge und Ausgrenzung: afrodeutsche "Besatzungskinder" im Nachkriegsdeutschland* (Between Welfare and Exclusion: Afro-German "Occupation Children" in Post-War Germany (2005)), has not yet been translated into English. An earlier article by Lemke Muñiz de Faria, *Germany's 'Brown Babies' Must Be Helped! Will You? U.S. Adoption Plans for Afro-German Children, 1950–1955 (2003)*, previewed her German publication. Plummer (Plummer 2003) and Rudolph (Rudolph 2003) have to a lesser extent written about the postwar adoptions of Black German children. Collectively, these historical accounts illuminate the socio-political ethos that precipitated the children's births in Germany and elaborate on the contemporary transnational debates over what to do with them. Lemke Muniz de Faria writes:

The debate over the fate of Afro-German children as it was articulated in Germany and the U.S. between 1945 and 1960 reveals the particular importance attached to these children solely on the basis of their skin color. These children were confronted less with national or moral feelings of resentment as children of an occupying power, or illegitimate children, than with racial prejudices. Their skin color, features, and hair structure led Germans and Americans to declare these children different or foreign and consequently that they belonged not in Germany but in the U.S.—in the African-American community. Ultimately, racial characteristics served in their native country as a factor of exclusion, while in their fathers' country as an attribute of belonging' (Lemke Muniz de Faria 2003, p. 358).

Beginning in 1952, Mabel Grammer, an African American woman and foreign correspondent for the Baltimore-based newspaper, *The Afro-American*, facilitated somewhere between fifty to five hundred "by proxy" adoptions of Black German children to the U.S. Estimates are inconsistent in the literature. These children were first introduced to their adoptive parents after they arrived in their new country. Grammer and her husband, an African American administrative officer who was stationed in Germany between 1950–1954, adopted several of the children after visiting St. Josef Children's home in Mannheim, Germany. Grammer is still honored by the St. Josef staff and members of the Mannheim community who aspire to name a street in her honor. Mabel Grammer launched a press campaign in the *Afro-American* informing African Americans in the U.S. about the children she encountered in Mannheim and encouraged married couples to adopt. Her initiative became known as the "Brown Baby Plan," and the children she placed were referred dubbed the "Grammer Babies." Thanks to Grammer, the children's controversial plight was publicized extensively in Germany and in a number of African American newspapers and magazines (Lemke Muniz de Faria 2009).

Grammer's appeals in the *Afro-American* and articles in *Ebony* and *Jet* magazines encouraged African American married couples who could provide evidence of their education and economic stability, and who would allow their stories to be printed in the newspaper, to apply to adopt. Scandinavian Airlines voluntarily transported the children from Germany to their waiting adopters in the U.S. Many more children were adopted by African American military couples serving in Germany at the time (Lemke Muniz de Faria 2009). Statistics are difficult to come by in the Black German context since after the defeat of Nazism, neither the German census nor birth records identify individuals by race. By the 1980s, many belonging to the postwar generation, who were now approaching middle-age, began searching for their origin stories and family roots on both sides of the Atlantic and began sharing their stories and discovering each other through *Geborener Deutscher*.

As a direct result in the rapid advancement of internet communications technologies over the last two decades, group-specific adoption related organizations and internet social networks like Gage's *Geborener Deutscher* have proliferated exponentially. Concomitantly, the availability of DNA testing, international family search consultancies, genealogy and public records research databases have made searching across national borders much less expensive and complicated propositions today than it was for the Black Germans in the 1980s. Before WIFI, smartphones, and social networks, Red Cross workers often referred searching German-born adoptees who wrote or called their missing persons department to Leonie Boehmer. Boehmer is a German-born birth mother and search consultant located in New Mexico, U.S., who specializes in German adoption searches. Gage, a German-born adoptee, came to Boehmer for help locating his birth mother. In cooperation with Boehmer, Gage subsequently authored and distributed a free adoptee newsletter entitled *Geborener Deutscher* (German by birth) (Gage 1988b, p. 5).

The first issue of *Geborener Deutscher* was published in 1988, shortly after Gage's search for his mother ended with the revelation that she had already passed away. Gage described his newsletter as "a new adoptee/birth parent periodical ... designed to meet the needs, answer the questions, and otherwise provide a forum for discussion of topics of concern to German born adoptees and birth parents, particularly those residing in the United States of America." The newsletter advertised that future issues would contain search workshops, profiles of adoption reformers, first person "search journals" and progress updates. Boehmer was the first adoption activist profiled, and Gage shared his own adoption story in the premiere issue. The workshop offered instructions on how to write a letter to the Standesämter (state registries) and *Jugendämter* child welfare offices in the German state in which the adoptee was born and/or adopted. In addition to providing information on how to go about searching, requesting documents and applying for recognition of German nationality or dual German/U.S. citizenship, Gage also printed adoptee reunion testimonies.

Jenny Jansen, a domestic adoptee living in Munich, was the first Black transnational reunion story featured in the second issue of *Geborener Deutscher* in 1988. Gage describes Jenny as "a mixed-race German-born adoptee who searched for and found both of her birth parents in the U.S. and who has had her story publicized quite extensively in Germany." After sharing on Jenny's adoption details, Gage closes his essay thus:

But for all the peace that reunion with her past has brought her, questions remain for Jenny. Being half black and half white, half American and half German, she wonders where, exactly, she belongs. Jenny discovered a group of other black Germans in München—Initiative Schwarze Deutsche (ISD) (initiative of Black people in Germany)—many of whom are also adoptees. She wonders if she could live in America, in San Francisco, where she had felt comfortable with her father's family. She feels herself, however, to be more European—more "white"—with little more in common with American blacks than her outward resemblance to them (Gage 1988a, p. 2).

*Geborener Deutscher* was in print for three years before Black German adoptees headlined the Autumn 1991 issue. Boehmer's (Boehmer 1991) featured front page essay warned, "Biracial Adoptees Can Expect a 'Mixed' Reaction." In the center of the article in large bold print, Boehmer writes, "To this day, I, as a German-born birth mother, am ashamed to say that the attitude of Germans towards people with other-than-white skin has not changed." Boehmer further suggests that fathers are more likely to be open to reuniting with their adopted biracial children. Boehmer points out that Black Germans up until that point represented less than 10% of an unquantified number of her clients. Adoptee testimonies shared in other spaces over many years reveal a myriad of reunion experiences that challenge Boehmer's predictions though no relevant research yet exists. The first Black German transnational adoptee story in fact, seems to refute Boehmer's claim.

In the 29 February 1992 issue of Gage's newsletter, Black Germans once again made the cover page of *Geborener Deutscher*, but this time without a direct mention of race in the headline. This featured adoptee profile came in the form of a letter written to Gage from a Black German reader, Henriette Cain. Cain's letter entitled *Rockford, Il, Adoptee Finds Mother and Three Half Brothers in Virginia*, offers a closer look at the frustration involved in adoptees' early efforts to find their families before broadband internet technology was available for home users. Genealogy researchers and the adoption community have historically been early social network adopters and connected to the internet via dial-up services like Prodigy and AOL that called into Bulletin Board Services (BBS), a rather primitive real-time digital communications technology that was installed on servers hosted in private homes. Gage hosted one such service called KinQuest where searching adoptees could dial in from their home computers and engage in running conversation with other callers interested in adoption searches that were generally then archived and made accessible to future users. Cain reveals that after a challenging search, she found a consultant through KinQuest that eventually led to her finding her mother. Cain explains that her mother was tentative on the first call and claimed not to be the person Cain was looking for. The search consultant encouraged Cain to call back again and the second time the woman who answered her call admitted that she was indeed her mother. Cain's mother then disclosed that she had kept the adoptions of Cain and another biracial daughter a secret from her husband of 34 years and their four sons. Eventually, Cain and her husband visit her mother and her family in Virginia and all goes well with their reunion.

When we got ready to depart, my mother and I both cried, brother's girlfriends cried, and there were tears in the brother's eyes too. It seemed as though I have always known them, in a sense, but then again, it does seem strange to now have three half-brothers and to know my birth mother and her husband. We were overwhelmed by everyone's kindness and generosity. Mom didn't know for sure how her sons would handle it, especially since I have a Black father. She said she and her husband had always taught the boys to treat everyone as a person, that skin color doesn't matter (Cain 1992).

Cain mentions at the close of her letter that she normally finds it difficult to ask for help but appreciates the guidance she received from Gage's publication. "I want to thank you for publishing *Geborener Deutscher*. It helped me in my search. Had it not been for the ideas and tips, I would probably not have gotten this far as I did by myself. I'm just sort who likes to do things herself and always hate having to ask for help." Cain's comment is noteworthy because she will later become well known

transnationally for her work helping other Black German adoptees searching for their family members. The next Black German story featured in Gage's newsletter also had a happy ending in the U.S., this time in the same state. Again, Black Germans were the cover story.

*Back to the Future* was the title of the article in the Spring 1994 issue that Gage acknowledges was a reprint of the reunion story written by journalist Joann Smith that was featured in the *Atmos Reporter*, the adoptee's employer's newsletter from August 1993.

After briefly describing a happy childhood and positive relationships with her adoptive parents, Ingrid Smith from Dallas, Texas, describes how she came upon Leonie Boehmer to ask for help with her search. "I finally couldn't stand it any longer said Smith. When I called the adoption hotline listed in the Yellow Pages, the representative referred me to a nonprofit organization in Irving called Search Line of Texas." Smith said Search Line referred her to a Ms. Boehmer in New Mexico, who specializes in German adoptions. "It took me two weeks to finally get up the courage to call Ms. Boehmer and she asked me to send her my birth certificate—the one thing I had from my past." Within a few short weeks Ingrid was on a plane headed to El Paso to meet her mother and younger sister. Smith is at first disappointed when she doesn't find a physical resemblance in her mother but is pleased that they share values and a number of interests.

After looking at family pictures, Smith and her mother decided that she looks like her maternal grandmother. Smith and her mother even share the same first name. 'My adoptive parents were going to call me Michele,' said Smith. 'But my birth mother asked them to leave me Ingrid, after her.' Smith said her adoptive parents agreed to the birthmother's request, but she never knew they actually named their daughter in good until they met. 'She named my half-sister Michelle, thinking she was giving her the same name I was using,' said Smith (Smith 1994).

As it is the case with so many reunion testimonials, Smith's story ends with the initial encounter, but the reader is led to assume the bond between mother and daughter was significant at the moment of the writing. Smith adds, "It seems as if we were never separated for 27 years" (Smith 1994). It is interesting that Smith, like Cain, gives no information about their backstories, about how their parents met and how they came into the world or why their mothers placed them in foreign adoptive homes and later emigrated to the U.S. themselves. It is especially interesting that there is no mention of race whatsoever in Ingrid Smith's story, even in the part where she focuses on her familial resemblance—or lack thereof. Readers only recognize that Smith is biracial by the included reunion photograph of the two Ingrids standing next to one another. What is illuminated in Smith's story is the importance of belonging in adoption. Belonging as a theme in adoption storytelling is amplified again in the next Black German adoptee profile appearing in the Autumn 1994 issue of *Geborener Deutscher*.

Gary Freeman's *Who I Was Is Gone* is the first time a Black German man's adoption story is featured in Gage's newsletter (Freeman 1994). Self-written, Freeman's four paragraph essay describing the devastating moment he first learned he was adopted is both powerful and provocative. Freeman leads with the exclamation that he finds his name, Gary, to be strange and asks his reader, "Wouldn't you agree? Maybe it is and then again maybe it's not. I'll let you make the call." In the next two paragraphs, Freeman describes a happy childhood with an African American soldier father he admired and respected and a beautiful African American mother who loved him dearly and whom he adored. "She always told me that I was special, and that she couldn't have chosen a better little prince. I was their son, their only son. I would carry their name and one day pass it on. This was who I was. It was good. I belonged." Freeman goes onto describe how his complete sense of Self and belonging were shattered when his mother revealed he was not their biological child. Freeman does not reveal his exact age on the particular evening when, after hearing his parents argue in another room, his mom came into his bedroom to comfort and reassure him. Apparently, what started out as a relatively frequent family scenario, this time, as Freeman explains at the end of his essay, it was a night that would change him forever.

'Mama has something to tell you tonight, Gary. You're not our son, you're adopted. Mama loves you though. It will be all right.' Who I was, is gone. Who are the strangers I live with anyway? My father was an African-American soldier, but *he* wasn't there to teach me things a father should. There were no long hours listening to *his* stories. I don't know him to love him, but I do. My mother was a beautiful German woman. She wasn't here to cuddle or nurture me. I don't know if *she* ever thought of me as her pride and joy, or *her* little prince. I don't know her. But I love her very much. I am their son. You see who I was is gone. This is who I am. My name is Gary. Not such a strange name after all, is it?

After Freeman's article only one other Black German adoption story was profiled over the fifteen years that Gage published fifty-seven issues of *Geborener Deutscher*. The fifth and final adoptee featured reveals how profoundly the need for belonging in the Black German context extends beyond biological kin. Black German adoptees are members of a diverse, multicultural, and multigenerational Black German diasporic community.

Shirley Price (Price 2000) began her story entitled *A Little Brown Baby: An Afro-German Adoptee's Story*. Price's essay was again on the front page of the Spring 2000 issue. Price's narrative offers valuable insight into the establishment of a sense of community between Black people in Germany and Black Germans living in the U.S. It was a chance meeting with a Black German woman from Germany at the Million Woman March in 1997 in Philadelphia that inspired Price's internet search for Black people in Germany even before she began searching for her birthmother. After considerable effort to locate the woman she met at the event in Philadelphia, Price discovered the website of an organization of Black women activists in Germany known as ADEFRA (an acronym for Afrodeutche Frauen or Afro-German women in English). "Certainly, like our white counterparts' assimilation into the American culture, we too have been assimilated into the (Black) American culture, and are, therefore, not too easily identifiable. Finding a website for and about people like myself, was a revelation, and an emotional revelation." What Price suggests here is that simply being Black in America did not guarantee her a sense of community with African Americans. On the ADEFRA website, Price learned about a Chicago host committee for the African-American and Afro-German Cross-Cultural Community Initiative. After contacting one of the Chicago organizers, Price was invited to accompany the group on a trip to Berlin for Black History Month. The thought of going back to Germany filled Price simultaneously with excitement and anxiety.

Initially I was very excited about the trip to Germany. I was constantly on the Internet trying to get additional information about Afro-Germans. But as the weeks went by I started to feel very panicky about the trip. Would I be accepted? Would I be mocked for not being able to speak German? Even though my family and I had talked about going to visit my birthplace one day; Germany had always been a nice fantasy place in my mind. The reality of actually going back filled me with anxiety.

After discussing with her husband and children, Price revealed her plans to her adoptive parents. While her father was supportive, her mother was less than encouraging. "My father was very excited for me and wanted me to go. My mother, on the other hand, came across as very blasé, wondering why I wanted to go since I didn't speak German and wouldn't know where to go once I got there. Needless to say, I decided then, I would not discuss the trip with her again." Price ultimately sent her son Tyson to Berlin in her stead and wrote at length in her essay about his experience and the information he brought back with him about Afro-Germans and the community in Berlin. Price was delighted to receive a note from the woman that she met at the March in Philadelphia, and they were able to reconnect.

Not long after her son returned from Germany, Price was moved to begin her own birth-family search. She found her way to Gage's new *Geborener Deutscher* online network and contacted Leonie Boehmer. When Boehmer translated her adoption papers, Price describes a sense of relief when she learned her mother was a nursery school teacher rather than a nanny as she had interpreted the German language documents to say.

On 19 February 1999, I received a reply from Leonie telling me she received my documents. She stated in her letter, that my mother was a nursery school teacher. That was a surprise. From reading the documents myself, I sadly thought her occupation was a nanny, not that a nanny is not an honorable profession, because it is. But the thought of my birth mother taking care of someone else's children after giving her own up for adoption ... well I'll just say the thought of it made me feel sad.

Price ends her essay by acknowledging the community's anticipated advice while she is restlessly waiting to hear news from Boehmer on the whereabouts of her mother.

I know you all are saying that I should be mindful that there are no guarantees. Not all searches are successful. Not all searches end with a 'happy beginning,' and I appreciate your concern. But I have a better sense of myself now. I am a woman who shows courage. And while I pray for the best, I am prepared for the worst. With the love and support of my family, and all of you, it is a chance I'm willing to take for the little brown baby in me.

Beneath Price's article, Gage adds important references to Black German organizations in Germany and recommends to readers the canonical anthology *Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out*, edited by May Ayim Opitz, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz (1991). The five Black German adoption stories profiled in *Geborener Deutscher* reveal the bilateral nature of the search and reunion activities of the postwar generation of dual-heritage Black German Americans. Gage's newsletters also document the naissance of a virtual Black German community. While there is no adoptee-exclusive Black German organization in the U.S., there are two non-membership non-profit organizations that promote transnational community development on and offline. Cain and Price until today serve together on the Board of Directors of the Black German Cultural Society (BGCS). In 2011 the Black German Heritage & Research Association (BGHRA) hosted the first international Black German convention at the German Historical Institute in Washington-DC. three more have been held since and the videotaped panels and events are available on the BGHRA website.

*Geborener Deutscher's* now rather rudimentary Yahoo Group still exists online today after all these years. While Gage stopped mailing the printed newsletter in 2003, they remain accessible in the archives. Over the years new Black German adoptees have come to the list seeking advice and assistance with their searches. Information about Black German history, organizations, and events are also sometimes shared, but often without acknowledgement or follow-up discussion with other members. With the revolutionary changes in internet communications technology and the proliferation of virtual spaces available to Black Germans and searching adoptees to gather online, there have also been tremendous shifts in how, where, and when adoptees share their personal stories, and from whom they request assistance.

For example, Jenny Jansen, the first Black German adoptee featured in Gage's newsletter exemplifies the fluidity of reunion experiences over time, and how the more recent digital archives of discovery engage with the old to memorialize family encounters over time. More than a decade after Jansen was profiled in *Geborener Deutscher*, she discovered via DNA that Willie Booth, the man she found initially and was pictured with in the article, was not her father. In 2016, Price, the fifth and final adoptee featured in the newsletter, shared a link to her BGCS Facebook group where she posted Jenny's video appeal for assistance with a renewed search with a comment, "Jenny is looking for her biological father: please give her help by sharing this video from her." Jenny had posted her video appeal on YouTube and shared links publicly on her Facebook page, asking others to spread the word by sharing the link on their own Facebook pages and timelines. Jenny updated the video description on YouTube a year later in 2017 and posted celebratory photographs on Facebook when she finally reunited with half-siblings and extended family members, subsequent to her father's death. She never got to meet him after all.

Adoption scholar Sylvia Posocco refers to the process by which the excavation and unveiling of adoption history takes place as enfleshment (Posocco 2015). "'Enfleshment' in this sense," Posocco argues, "is simultaneously regulatory and plural. Far from stable or univocal, it is processual and instantiated through varied technologies and forms of relationality at the points where discourse, embodiment, and personhood congeal into socially situated objects, subjectivities, and social relations" (569). Since nearly three decades now, as revealed in Gage's *Geborener Deutscher*, Black German adoptees are and have been participating in their own enfleshment by virtue of the digital footprint each adoptee creates when they initiate their searches or share their adoption stories online. Various forms of, "my name is, I was born in 1950 or 60-something in Germany to a German woman and an African American GI. I was adopted to the U.S. by African Americans and am just now deciding to look for my mother" appear in numerous online search forums and community networks.

It is rare that searches and reunions are publicized as intensely and as broadly as Jansen's and even rarer that we are able to follow an adoptees reunion journey over a period of years. No study exists that follows up with Black German adoptees post-reunion. As multiple generations of globally situated Black Germans relaying disparate adopted childhoods are earnestly piecing together their fragmented, intimate family histories in virtual spaces, they are also actively constructing a sense of community among themselves. At such a time of personal and political activity, and with much of it taking place on the internet, it is important to examine how and where Black Germans are writing themselves into public memory and the ways in which the unveiling of their personal life stories in internet social networks is in itself, an unwitting history-making endeavor. Thus, an examination of the Black German adoption narratives in William Gage's Geborener Deutscher is timely and relevant.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


http://www.aacvr-germany.org/index.php?option=com\_content&view=article&id=136&Itemid=11 (accessed on 13 July 2018).


Rudolph, Nancy. 2003. Black German Children: A Photography Portfolio. *Callaloo* 26: 383–400. [CrossRef]

Smith, JoAnn. 1994. Back to The Future. In *Geborener Deutscher: A Newsletter for German Born Adoptees and Their Birth/Adoptive Families*. Berlin: Spring, vol. VII-1, pp. 1–4.

© 2018 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## *Article* **Legitimacy and the Transfer of Children: Adoption, Belonging, and Online Genealogy**

#### **Sandra Patton-Imani**

Department for the Study of Culture and Society, Drake University, Des Moines, IA 50311, USA; sandra.patton-imani@drake.edu

Received: 8 August 2018; Accepted: 10 September 2018; Published: 20 September 2018

**Abstract:** A great deal of both scholarly and public attention has been paid to questions of *nature versus nurture* in understanding identity and family construction in adoptees, yet much less attention has been given to the ways that power shapes the social reproduction of families through adoption. In this feminist interdisciplinary self-reflexive ethnographic research, I enter the world of online genealogy sites to critically explore the social practice of constructing a family tree as an adoptee. I explore genealogy as a culturally and historically specific representation of patriarchal heteronormative whiteness. I argue that adoptees' liminal locations between socially understood categories of nature and nurture embedded in online family heritage websites make evident the ways that genealogical templates and stories reproduce mainstream family ideology through the erasure of "illegitimacy". I consider what I found in my adoptive family history, critically exploring my "legitimate" relationship to my family in relation to the "illegitimate" (and unrecognized) relationship between my family and an enslaved child transferred as property between family members in 1813. This research makes visible power inequalities governing family reproduction at macro levels by exploring the contradictions and slippages regarding family "legitimacy" in micro level online genealogical constructions of adoptees' family trees.

**Keywords:** adoption; belonging; roots; genealogy; power; nature; nurture; reproductive justice; legitimacy; illegitimacy

#### **1. Introduction**

Shafts of afternoon light illuminated variegated shades of lavender and purple against shadows of the carpet's original dark blue on my bedroom floor. I sat there experiencing my first existential crisis. I was twelve. I was supposed to be doing my homework—making a family tree. The mix of shadow and sun evidenced time's passage in the fading colors of the quiet afternoon. I could not fill in the genealogical template I had been given. I felt trapped by the logic of *nature versus nurture* embedded in the question of heritage. I was experiencing what social workers often call "genealogical bewilderment" in discussions of adoption, identity, and family history.<sup>1</sup> I *knew* the assignment was about biological family connections. It was 1977 and talk about '*Roots'* was everywhere.<sup>2</sup> My sisters and parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents were easy. As an adoptee I was well practiced at redefining social definitions of "natural" and "normal". I loved my parents, so that made them my family. However the ancestors that came before them were completely unknown. By what logic could I claim them as mine, or I, as theirs? I knew almost nothing of my biological family; they were only a seething absence. I did not really belong, it seemed, to either family history.

<sup>1</sup> The term was introduced by psychologist and psychotherapist H.J. Sants in his 1964 article (Sants 1964). Betty Jean Lifton (Lifton 1988) embraced and popularized this concept in her influential 1988 book *Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience.*

<sup>2</sup> Alex Haley's book *Roots* (Haley 1976) and the television miniseries released in 1977 sparked a renewed interest in genealogy in the U.S.

Questions of identity, roots, and belonging are central themes in both popular and academic discourse on adoption. Adoptees' identities and family heritage are typically framed through the language of *nature versus nurture*, or *culture versus biology* in discussions of adoption at individual, familial, community, national, and transnational levels of meaning production. Adoptees are often represented as "genealogically bewildered"—without "real" family and heritage until our birth parents are found. Many people argue that searching for birth parents is the only way to learn one's "true" self. Others argue that focusing on biology or DNA as the determinant of heritage ignores the lived experiences of family and child rearing. Anthropologist Barbara Yngvesson suggests there is an inherent tension built into the structure of adoptive families that "simultaneously constitutes and disrupts a genealogical imaginary for what a 'real' family consists in" (Yngvesson 2010, p. 15). These questions are profoundly shaped by race, gender, sexuality, and class in both transracial and same-race adoptions.<sup>3</sup> Indeed, questions of adoptees' "real" identities seem to embody these deep social tensions about the "truth" of family, heritage, and belonging. A great deal of scholarly and public attention has been paid to questions of *nature versus nurture* in understanding identity and family construction in adoptees, yet much less attention has been given to the ways that *power* shapes the social reproduction of families through adoption.

In this interdisciplinary self-reflexive ethnographic research I enter the world of online genealogy sites to critically explore the social practice of constructing a family tree as an adoptee. Exploring one's family tree online is a narration, a guided performance of family ideology scripted through the operating systems of online genealogy sites. Adoption is a historically and culturally specific social system and practice of child transfer, and the social definitions of family engaged and reproduced speak to larger assumptions about kinship and belonging in society. The social location of adoptees requires us to negotiate these meanings in particular ways and that process is useful for thinking about the ways that power relations are reproduced in everyday cultural practices. In this essay I seek to explore these questions: What does the experience of an adoptee creating a family tree tell us about the systemic construction of family and belonging in the U.S.? How is the engagement with online genealogy programs part of the way that structural power relations quietly shape social understandings of personhood, family, and social belonging—for everyone, not just adoptees?

Feminist scholarship on families makes evident that kinship is not "natural," but rather, is a socially constructed category that is organized differently in various eras and locations (Thorne and Yalom 1982). This framework challenges views of patriarchal white heteronormative definitions of family as natural and normal, making clear that *power has always* shaped the ways that families are organized and understood. We often think of genealogy as a neutral recorder of "natural" family ties. Genealogy is a politically and historically specific social practice that has shifted over time and space in relation to the specificities of kinship, belonging, and nation in different societies and different eras (Weil 2013). When we recognize that *families are always shaped by social power*, we can begin to see that genealogy too is a culturally specific practice that works in tandem with power to reproduce social definitions of natural and normal families. In the United States genealogy has historically been about the reproduction of patriarchal heteronormative whiteness through the social construction of particular family forms, and this is reflected in templates for genealogical legitimacy structuring the story and the performance of the family tree.

I argue that adoptees' liminal locations between socially understood categories of nature and nurture embedded in online family heritage websites make evident the ways that genealogical templates and stories reproduce mainstream family ideology and function to maintain systemic inequality. Genealogy programs may seem like impartial tools for documenting family relationships, but engaging with these systems requires engagement with hegemonic views of "normal" and "natural" families. These online systems

<sup>3</sup> For in depth discussions of transracial and transnational adoption see Cox (1999, 2011); Dorow (2006); Eng (2010); Evans (2000); Haslanger and Witt (2005); Ito and Cervin (1999); Kim (2005, 2010); Nelson (2009); Oh (2012); Patton (2000); Patton-Imani (2012, 2014); Richards (2012); Trenka et al. (2006); Volkman (2005); Yngvesson (2005, 2010).

are organized through the same sets of power relations regulating race, gender, class, sexuality, and reproduction that families are. Indeed, in my view the contemporary social practice of documenting and creating family trees functions to reproduce (white middle class heteronormative) *macro* definitions of legitimate kinship and belonging at the *micro* level of lived experience.

I draw on ethnographic methods of participant-observation to critically explore the process of creating a family tree as a person with more than one set of parents—birth and adoptive. Drawing on participant-observation in the online world of genealogy, I explore the ways the structure of online programs for creating family trees reproduces and enforces societal definitions of legitimate family. I draw on intersectional feminist research on family and reproductive justice to analyze the complex relationships between reproductive politics and the maintenance of social inequalities.4 In the final section I consider what I found in my adoptive family history, critically exploring my (legally) "legitimate" relationship to my family in relation to the "illegitimate" (and unrecognized) relationship between my family and an enslaved child transferred as property between family members in 1813.

This article is comprised of two halves. In the first few sections, I analyze the *process of exploring and creating* my online family tree. In the final section, I scrutinize the redacted history I found there. The first half puts my own life in social and cultural context, considering the ways that adoption was practiced in the U.S. in the post-World War II era as a means of regulating unwed pregnancy and reproducing idealized versions of white middle class heteronormative family. In my exploration of *what I found* in my family tree, I consider the life of an enslaved child named Julia who was transferred as property by her owner, a man that was likely her biological father. I explore the ways that reproductive policies and practices served to support mainstream definitions of family legitimacy in each era. Each of our life stories is shaped through historically and socially specific definitions of family legitimacy that bolster images of white middle class families as sexually and racially "pure" by erasing "illegitimacy".

Critically exploring the differences and parallels of Julia's and my relationships to this family in social and historical context demonstrates the limitations of the *nature versus nurture* framework. While these tensions typically organize discussions of adoption and genealogy, my analysis shows that these explanatory narratives are not sufficient for understanding the ways that social ideals of gender, race, class, and sexuality are regulated in particular historical moments through laws and policies regulating family and reproduction. *Power must be recognized as part of these genealogies*. I engage these life stories to consider the ways that race, gender, sexuality, and class operate to regulate and maintain mainstream definitions of legitimate patriarchal families in different historical moments. My legal transfer *into* this family is the other side of the coin from Julia's erasure *from* it. It is not just *nature* or *nurture* that regulates our relationships to this family, but also, *illegitimacy* and *power*.

#### **2. Insider-Outsiders Everywhere**

I entered the world of online genealogy websites as a "participant," but soon became an "observer" as well. I didn't intend to begin a new research project. In fact, I was deeply immersed in writing my second book (Patton-Imani 2019). As I was beginning my sabbatical I needed a brain break and genealogy was the alternate world I entered. The tensions I first experienced as a kid trying to construct a family tree had continued to haunt me. The desire to find a place of belonging in my family fueled a continued interest in genealogy, so I began exploring and researching, and in the process, found myself crafting an online public narrative of family. It was clear from the beginning that I was an interloper. "DNA certified" was the highest accreditation available for familial relationships in this cyber-world. White middle class heteronormativity is the unspoken template for family, and the naturalization of this family structure makes the power inequalities driving it invisible.

<sup>4</sup> See in particular the work of Dorothy Roberts 1997 (Roberts 1997), Rickie Solinger (Solinger 2001), Laura Briggs (Briggs 2003, 2012, 2017), and Melissa Murray 2012 (Murray 2012).

There are two particular ways that adoption shaped my own consciousness that are relevant here, and I found that many of the adoptees I have interviewed over the years have shared these perspectives.5 The first is what I refer to as an insider-outsider way of viewing social belonging. The second is a visceral understanding of what the social construction of family means. As I discussed in my first book, *BirthMarks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America*, one of the commonalities I found among the transracial adoptees I interviewed was the sense of being a perpetual interloper, of not fully belonging anywhere. This often led to the development of social practices very similar to what anthropologists call participant-observation. The origin narratives of adoptees support the understanding that we always come from somewhere and someone else. In fact, it is not just that I would have been a different person had I stayed with my birth family. A slight shuffle in the applications for adoption received in the time and place I was born might have put me into any number of different families. I always had the awareness that I could have been almost anyone. My identity feels contingent upon a broad array of social factors and a little bit of chance. In my view, this sense of simultaneously belonging both nowhere and everywhere creates the potential for a critical angle of vision on the social construction of family.

My focus on my own experience is grounded in self-reflexive ethnography. Feminist anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod discusses the importance of positionality in conducting research in one's "own" society. She suggests that anthropologists (like herself) who are feminists and/or people of multiple races and ethnicities—whom she refers to as "halfies"—are positioned in ways that are useful for critically considering how power shapes notions of self and "other" in ethnographic research.

The problem of studying one's own society is alleged to be the problem of gaining enough distance. Since for halfies, the Other is in certain ways the self, there is said to be the danger shared with indigenous anthropologists of identification and the easy slide into subjectivity. These worries suggest that the anthropologist is still defined as a being who must stand apart from the Other, even when he or she seeks explicitly to bridge the gap. (Abu-Lughod 1991, p. 468)

She suggests that people positioned as "outsiders" or "others" have a particular angle of vision on the ways that cultural belonging is constructed in various societies, and emphasizes the complex ways such positionality shapes the construction of academic knowledge. Her discussion focuses on ethnographers whose identities locate them as insider-outsiders in fieldwork and in the discipline of anthropology. I build on this discussion of positionality to suggest that the ways that adoptees navigate online genealogy programs are useful for thinking critically about the ways that social power relations shape the construction of families.

Anthropologists have always relied on observation and self-reflection to understand how human beings in different social and cultural contexts construct meaningful lives. Abu-Lughod emphasizes the importance of James Clifford's (Clifford 1986) famous dictum that anthropological analyses are always "partial truths," and builds on this by arguing for the "recognition that they are also positioned truths" (Abu-Lughod 1991, p. 469). In other words, people who do not easily fit into social categories of identity—like people who are biracial or immigrants or adoptees—have a particular angle of vision on the constructedness of the social system at hand. This is consistent with the feminist standpoint theory that suggests that those most subjugated by a system of power are able to see the workings of power more clearly than those who benefit from such unequal relations. Donna Haraway's notion of "situated knowledges" is a useful way of thinking about how the social positionality of adoptees in relation to definitions of family legitimacy allows us to see the relations of power at work in the literal social construction of families through adoption (Haraway 1988). Adoptees navigate family in ways that differ from non-adopted people, and this shapes the assumptions about the world we internalize.

<sup>5</sup> I have been conducting ethnographic life history interviews with adoptees, birth mothers, and adoptive parents on and off, as part of several different research projects, since the early 1990s.

Abu-Lughod argues for the importance of writing "ethnographies of the particular" to challenge generalizations about monolithic groups, behaviors, and cultures that often emerge from seemingly "objective" anthropological analyses.

By focusing closely on particular individuals and their changing relationships, one would necessarily subvert the most problematic connotations of culture, homogeneity, coherence, and timelessness (Abu-Lughod 1991, p. 476).

"Ethnographies of the particular" focus on how people create meaning in specific social and cultural contexts, with an emphasis on interactions between individuals and other people, communities, systems of cultural meaning, media narratives, social institutions, and laws and public policies. Those of us who stand outside the boundaries of "natural" and "normal" views of family negotiate meanings differently than those whose families adhere to hegemonic definitions of family legitimacy.

I draw on my own story not because I think my experience is "representative," but rather, because as an adoptee I make sense of my life from a particular social location and familial configuration. The specificities of my life do not represent all adoptees by any means. Yet the configuration of my family life is not random; its formation was guided by a set of rules and regulations created and maintained by governmental agencies according to social definitions of good parenting and the "best interests of children".<sup>6</sup> The lives of adoptees differ dramatically based on an infinite number of specificities. Yet we learn to navigate meaningful lives in interaction with pervasive public narratives about adoption, family, identity, race, gender, and class. We are positioned in similar ways in relation to social definitions of identity, family, and belonging.

The origin stories I grew up hearing did not involve due dates, labor pains, and hospitals. Rather, they were about home studies and social workers, bureaucratic interviews and paperwork, and the sealing of original birth records. I always envisioned the secrets of my origins locked in a file cabinet somewhere in the California state capital. It is easy to see the presence of the state and the child welfare system in adoption narratives. This contrasts dramatically with tales of "natural" origins and blood heritage that characterizes genealogy websites. As Jerng states, "To be adopted in the modern formulation is specifically to be at the crossroads of multiple histories, the possession of which is never certain" (Jerng 2010, p. x). Indeed, the navigation of these multiple histories is central to the experience for adoptees of creating an online family tree.

I registered with an online genealogy website that was free. I had no interest in paying to explore or document my family history. Popular sites like Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com offer an entry-level membership for free, but in order to access the research tools they provide, one must subscribe to the service. I began with a site similar to these and found it limiting, to say the least. I stumbled upon wikitree.com in my research and was pleased to discover that their "mission is to grow an accurate single family tree that connects us all and is freely available to us all".7 I created an account, including a login and password. And so, I began the documentation and exploration of my family histories.

#### *2.1. The Process: "Our Tree Should Be Genetic"*

I enter my name and birthdate—simple enough. Parents come next. I enter my adoptive parents' names, and search for a way to enter my birth parents too. I try entering my half-birth siblings and connecting to my birth parents through that door. It doesn't work. I have to choose either my adoptive or birth family. I explore the policies of the website, and find them unhelpful. "WikiTree only allows a person to have one mother and one father. This provides the basic structure for family trees." The only practical suggestion they offer for mediating this tension is to create two profiles for myself, connecting one to my adoptive family, and one to my birth family. I am not allowed to be one person with two sets of parents. There is a set of ontological assumptions guiding these principles that ties my identity to my parents and

<sup>6</sup> See (Cole and Donley 1990).

<sup>7</sup> https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:About\_WikiTree.

those who came before them. In this formulation, I belong to either my birth or adoptive families, but there is no framework for conceptualizing the complex ways that both have shaped me.

My identity cannot be contained within this genealogy program unless I create a separate identity—the person I might have been if I had not been adopted. Yngvesson characterizes this pervasive either/or approach to discussions of adoptees' identities as the "narrative of exclusive belongings" (Yngvesson 2002, p. 8). In her analysis of transnational adoptee "roots trips", she argues that the necessary first step toward challenging this narrow framework is to explore the lived experiences of adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents from their own perspectives. Yngvesson (Yngvesson 2005) emphasizes the importance of exploring the ways that the life stories of adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents differ from each other, yet are related to and interact with each other's stories in complex ways. She argues as well for the importance of recognizing the ways that laws and public policies in the U.S. and abroad shape the lives of these three groups very differently.

Narrow constructions of *nature versus nurture* do not accurately represent the lived experience of family for people whose families are shaped by adoption. And thus, my discomfort with wikitree's suggestion that I create an alternate profile to represent my biological identity. What would I call this other self? My birth mother had chosen a name for me, but her mother told her not to name me because it would make it harder to let go. So "Baby Rundell" was listed on my original birth certificate. Rundell was my birth mother's legal last name, yet she had always used her step-father's last name. She did not know her father or his family well. There are no relational ties to either of these family names for me. If my birth parents had stayed together and kept me I would likely have been called Nicole Goldberg. She—an unrealized self—would have likely been raised Jewish, or at least with the knowledge that that was part of her ethnic heritage. The Latinx foster family I lived with for my first three and a half months called me Jolon. I only know that they discovered my milk allergy, and they loved me and were sad when I left. I was issued a new birth certificate listing my adoptive parents as if they had been there since my birth. None of these stories fully makes sense without the others. And none of them makes sense outside the sociopolitical context in which I was born. Each of these relationships was mediated by social institutions, laws, and public policies designed to regulate the social construction of legitimate family.

I did not set up an account representing the person I might have been had I not been adopted. As it turns out, this possibility of creating a second wikitree identity is not encouraged. The site provides detailed instructions about the importance of merging the two profiles an adoptee may create at a later date "when the issue is less sensitive". The concern is with "accurate" information for future generations, and the only reason the possibility of creating two profiles is raised is because there seems to be no simpler way within this system of conceptualizing people having more than one set of parents. The biological framework is embedded in the structure of the program. "It's important that the use of duplicates be rare and unusual. It violates basic principles of WikiTree." They provide a link to their honor code that emphasizes accuracy as paramount for the creation of a "single family tree".8 Accuracy is defined through adherence to a definition of biological ties as real or authentic. By the regulations set forth on the website, the lives of adoptees represent a "violat(ion) of basic principles".

And thus, I am reminded, as I often am, that as an adoptee, I do not fully and completely "belong" anywhere. Wikitree's instructions continue:

This means that with adoptions, step-children, etc., a choice needs to be made. For private profiles with direct connections to living people, the family can choose which parents to include. For example, if you were adopted you can choose to enter your adoptive or biological parents as your mother and father. If your great grandfather was adopted, you should use his biological parents, if or when they are known.

<sup>8</sup> https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Special:Honor\_Code.

What assumptions about kinship and identity guide this distinction? The way this is framed suggests that adoptees are not "real" members of our families. As they say, in the case of living adoptees, "the family can choose which parents to include." Yet this is less straightforward than it seems. Choices only make sense in the context of the range of options available. The wikitree guidelines state:

For public profiles without connections to living people, genetic connections should prevail. This is a choice that our community has made: our tree should be genetic.

This "choice" offered to adoptees is illusory in multiple ways. Belonging—"real" inclusion—in the global family tree is dependent on biological connections, as per the community's decision.

People like me that were adopted in closed adoptions, have no legal access to information about biological heritage. The recovery of information about birth family history, along with searches for birth parents, has been framed as the generic answer to adoptees' questions about who we are and where (and how) we belong. The choice is not really a choice in another sense as well. We may choose to represent ourselves as part of our adoptive families on wikitree, but the instructions are clear:

Note that if the adoptive parents are used, they should be marked as Non-Biological. This will prevent incorrect DNA test connections.

The instructions are clear: no passing allowed. We are not fully part of either family, and thus, our sense of belonging is always contingent and negotiated. Yngvesson states:

The constant slippage ... between real and fictive belongings positions the adoptee and the adoptive family and, in very different ways, the birth mother in a virtual space where they are simultaneously real and not real. The adoptive family is the only de facto family of the child; yet it never becomes an unmarked (nonadoptive) family. (Yngvesson 2010, p. 13)

Adoptees' primary connections to both our family histories—our birth and adoptive parents—are effectively labeled illegitimate, and thus, we are told to mark ourselves according to these definitions of familial inclusion. If this were a dystopian novel or movie, this would be the plot device used to out the main character as not genetically desirable, as an inferior human illegitimately inhabiting elite citizenship status.<sup>9</sup> (Gattacca 1997). Adoptees are caught between two incomplete "choices". We do not fully belong anywhere.

It is important to be clear that DNA tells a story. Ads for Ancestry.com and other genetic testing companies are blatant about this, but they discuss genetics as if it were self-evident what narratives individual genetic encryptions actually tell. Let us be clear. Genetics is a code that is anything but self-evident. We may know what a double helix looks like. We might recognize magnified images of those symbols that make up our bodies at the chromosomal level. However, what each sequence of bars means must be interpreted by experts. Someone must narrate the story. Genetics and its meanings are the micro-level story that is supposed to tell us everything we need to know about macro-level meanings of identity, family, and society. These assumptions about biogenetic belonging are embedded in social and cultural understandings of family trees, and these assumptions are intrinsic to online genealogy programs.

The emphasis on DNA in the online genealogy websites both draws on and fosters a pervasive sociopolitical narrative that biology determines "natural," and thus, "real" family ties. Social narratives about family trees, heritability, likeness, and difference reinforce notions of family as biological, natural, and thus, unchanging. The extension of this story, of course, enshrines heterosexual reproduction as natural. Reproductive justice scholar Laura Mamo explains:

Nature, or the 'facts of life,' is today biologized and geneticized. The conception narrative, which describes the origin of life, is webbed together with two other narratives: the kinship narrative, which explains the ties that make a family, and the genetic narrative, which explains individuals and their connections to the past and future. (Mamo 2007, p. 192)

<sup>9</sup> See for example, Gattaca (1997).

Belonging is socially narrated through familial relationships, both lived and imagined. Naturalized fictions of family and history are reproduced through the "common sense" tension between nature and nurture.

Family tree programs are not neutral, nor do they accurately represent the lived experiences of family relationships and meanings. Genealogy programs are a mainstream representation of *socially legitimate family forms*. Fictions of race, gender, class, sexuality, and kinship are embedded in the operating systems of free and commercial websites dedicated to family history research. *Genealogy is literally encoded in a computer application program that provides a template for what counts as family.* Participating requires negotiation with mainstream definitions of family legitimacy encoded in the application as biological and thus, "natural". This engagement with family history web programs *reproduces* macro-social definitions of family legitimacy at the individual and familial levels.

My experience as an adoptee in this online space demonstrates that definitions of family structuring the social practice of genealogy are more about recognizing *socially legitimate* family relationships than accurately portraying biological connections. Mamo explains:

Nothing within biology demands the nuclear family. It is a cultural and social system enforced by regulations and reinforced by legal discourse, medical practices, and cultural norms. Yet in the United States it is the nuclear family, bound by blood and legal arrangements of marriage and adoption, that represents social order, idealized kinship, and legitimate relations. (Mamo 2007, p. 5)

Family genealogy records the official story—legitimate marriages and births. In the western patriarchal model lineage is traced through legal matrimony. Children's status as legitimate citizens is dependent on their mother's marriage to a man. Critical race scholar Zanita E. Fenton explains the connections between social definitions of "legitimacy" and power relations.

Historically, illegitimacy status has assisted in gender subordination and control over female sexuality and reproduction; it has made social class standing all but pre-determined at birth; it has contributed to the maintenance of racial stratification. Indeed, illegitimate is an appropriate description for the effects of this legally and socially imposed status upon children. (Fenton 2014, p. 9)

Historically, legitimate lines of inheritance determine property transfer, class status, and social recognition, creating legal links between families and society (Coontz 2005). But what of the people who fall between these social definitions of "illegitimate" and "real" families?

#### *2.2. Belonging to the Tree: "Adoption Angels"*

One of the stated goals of wikitree.com is to create one family tree. "A collaborative family tree, or single family tree, is one that we all share. It's not your tree or my tree. It is our tree—a tree for the entire human family10. This sounds beautifully inclusive, and in a sense, is a deeply appealing prospect for an adoptee. But finding my place in my own family trees—the set of links necessary to connect to wikitree's view of the "entire human family"—proves problematic. How am I to connect with a shared family tree if my primary connections to it are contested in the very structure designed to document such links?

As it happens, wikitree has an answer for that! They have organized a group of genealogists known as "Adoption Angels" who volunteer to help adoptees find their biological family histories. The focus on a genetic family tree on wikitree defines biology as the path to connection with this "collaborative family tree". The "Angels" are here to help us lost souls find our "real" families and thus, the story goes, ourselves. Indeed, the project website provides links to resources for adoptees to search for birth parents outside of wikitree, as well as a set of basic guidelines pertaining to searching11.

<sup>10</sup> https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Collaborative\_Family\_Tree.

<sup>11</sup> https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Adoption\_Angels\_Basic\_Search\_Help.

This discourse is consistent with media discussions of adoption searches—both articulate sociopolitical assumptions about genetics and identity. Reunions between adoptees and birth parents have become particularly popular media narratives in the past few decades. On television adoptees' struggles with a sense of mystery or confusion about identity, family, and history typically lead to searches for a "real self" that people assume will be revealed in reunions with birth families. Anthropologist Judith Modell comments:

Dramatized on television and reported in newspapers, reunions between long-lost kin resonate to Western literary and religious traditions. The sight of a child embracing a parent she has never known stirs the imagination, and also compels a reconsideration of love, parenthood, and relationship. (Modell 1994, p. 144)

The search is often represented as the fulcrum in life histories of adoptees–in both fictive and actual lives. Anyone familiar with daytime television talk shows or made-for-television movies could recite the typical search narrative. It is often scripted as an adoptee's quest for roots—a search for the "true" self through access to forbidden knowledge, to a previously unknown origin narrative, to a family tree, to a genetic and/or medical history, and often foremost, to the birth parents (more often, birth mother). Indeed, in much of the search literature and television discourse, searching is discussed in ways that suggest it functions as a sort of rite of passage for adoptees, a rebirth through the rewriting of the origin narrative. It is a discourse fueled by the tremendous loss that most adoptees feel in some way, but it is infused with the power of biological and genetic ways of explaining the "nature" of identity (Patton 2000).

Sociologist (and adoptee) Katarina Wegar's study of the adoption search movement in the contemporary United States found that popular search rhetoric, academic studies drawn on by search activists, and media representations of reunions among birth families focused strongly on biological sources of identity formation. In fact, she found that in psychological research on the issue, adoptees were often represented as "genealogically bewildered" and driven by "nature" to search for their biological origins. Psychology functions here as a normalizing discourse, asserting that adoptees who profess not to feel the need to search are repressing their true selves; searching is represented as an expression of a universal human need to connect and belong (Wegar 1997, p. 136).

Media stories about adoption are often framed as allegories about what shapes human identity—nature or nurture, biology or culture. Indeed, adoptees' selves are often represented in public discourse as an embodiment of the *nature versus nurture* tensions at the core of western assumptions regarding identity. This discourse is framed by ideas about family and identity that our ancestors, our cultures, our "bloodlines," determine who we are. While search and reunion narratives typically lean toward the nature side of the nature-nurture divide, there are also public discourses available that stress the importance of culture and environment. There is a broad range of opinions available on the relative importance of biology and culture in the development of adoptees' identities, however, little attention is accorded to the possibility that other social forces, such as public policy and social institutions, fundamentally shape the lives adoptees lead.

#### **3. Reducing Complexity, Denying Power**

How do these narratives get woven so deeply into our understandings of self, family, and belonging? Computer applications embedded in genealogy websites may seem to be neutral generators of family trees. However, the categories for entry are regulated by the sociopolitical assumptions about family and legitimacy embedded in social and historical constructions of genealogy. Mainstream expectations for gender, sexuality, race, and class are subtly incorporated as default categories, and biological notions of family are taken for granted as "real". We can take this analysis deeper by considering the ways that the very structure of the computer programs used on these sites reflects larger societal assumptions about legitimacy and knowledge-production.

I want to be clear that I am not critiquing the ways that genealogy websites operate. Some websites are more inclusive in regards to family form, while others are more rigid in gender representation than wikitree. My purpose is not to suggest changes for these programs, though I am sure that would be welcomed by many people. Rather, my aim is to explore the ways these sites organize meaning and knowledge production through a set of social and structural assumptions about what constitutes legitimate family and identity. I critique contemporary politics of reproduction and family through this exploration of genealogy websites. I view these sites not only as tools for documenting family history, but also as generators of legitimate family narratives as defined in the contemporary United States. The process of interacting with this structure reproduces hegemonic definitions of patriarchal family norms.

The logistical boundaries of computer applications available for exploring and documenting family history are regulated by the computer operating systems in which they function. New media scholar Tara McPherson's analysis of computer operating systems makes evident how the seemingly culture-free realm of codes and computations is shaped and constructed in historically and socially specific ways.

... the development of computer operating systems at midcentury installed an extreme logic of modularity that 'black-boxed' knowledge in a manner quite similar to emerging logics of racial visibility and racism (McPherson). An operating system like unix (an os that drives most of our computation, directly or indirectly) works by removing context and decreasing complexity. (McPherson 2014, p. 181)

Complexity is reduced by only allowing people to represent one set of parents. This simplicity enables the system to function, but it also limits that ways that people can represent the lived experiences of family. Adoptees are located in too complex a set of relationships—including those with the state—to represent through this system. It is through gender specificity that the inclusion of heteronormative sex-gender identities regulates parentage. People with two moms or two dads face a similar set of obstacles in attempting to represent the lived experience of family.12

The illusion of neutrality obscures attention to gender, class, and race. The ideology of "colorblindness" is literally encoded in the logics of knowledge production guiding our everyday understandings of family history in the post World War II era. The "logic" of colorblindness as a socio-legal system is that race is "merely" a biological category with no inherent meaning, and thus, any attention to racial difference is spurious. This is accomplished by separating race from power. The absence of attention to context or complexity in the operating system unix is mirrored in the ideologies of colorblindness undergirding the U.S. legal and ideological system in the post-World War II era. Dorothy Roberts explains how the logic of legal colorblindness depends upon the absence of attention to social context and power relations. While her work focuses on African Americans, her analysis of the ways that people of color are defined through rigid, ahistorical, and homogenous definitions of race are useful for thinking critically about the social locations of all peoples defined as "non-white".

This color-blind approach to equality disregards preexisting discriminatory structures that disproportionately harm blacks even in the absence of official discriminatory motive and that may require race conscious remedies. Color blindness permits racial subordination to continue by leaving intact institutions created by centuries of official and private oppression. Viewing all government recognition of race as equally pernicious manifests an incredible blindness to current arrangements of power. (Roberts 1997, p. 366)

Roberts' incisive analysis makes clear that prohibiting all forms of racial recognition functions to reproduce and naturalize oppression by creating an illusion of neutrality and equality. Once this artifice is established, structural and institutional racism and sexism are provided a cover for maintaining and reproducing inequality.

The erasures and exclusions of this system of knowledge production—in online genealogy programs and in law and policy—are mirrored in family legitimacy as a social operating system.

<sup>12</sup> I discuss this in depth in *Sophie Has Five Mothers*.

The "blindness" or evasiveness of this ideology is its purposeful denial of power as a force shaping families differently based on their social location in relation to white heterosexual middle class family ideals. Yngvesson makes clear the connection between closed adoption laws and constructions of biological parents as the "natural real".

Without the assumption that before the adoption there is a natural real, there would be no need for adoption law to cancel the prior relation of birth parent to child, for adoptees to search for a birth parent, or for the adopted child and the adoptive family to remain forever "as if." (Yngvesson 2010, p. 15)

Maintaining the illusion of the "as if" family requires the erasure of the "natural" or "real" family the child was born into. Birth parents must be made invisible in order for the new family to narrate a sense of family legitimacy. In regards to the formation of adoptive families, the erasures are central to the reproduction of heteronormative middle class whiteness.13

My birth represented a catastrophe in the lives of my unwed teenage parents, and this is mirrored in the stigma associated with unwed pregnancy in the 1960s U.S. among white middle class teens. Getting caught having sex outside of marriage for a middle class white girl was disgraceful.14 And so my existence was erased and denied in those two families, while celebrated in my adoptive family. Adoption is part of a set of reproductive laws, policies, and practices that functioned to make extra-marital pregnancy invisible among white middle class people in the post World War II U.S. Reproductive justice scholarship is particularly useful for exploring the ways that power relations shape the social reproduction of families and the social meanings ascribed to them. A central tenet of this feminist scholarship is that laws and policies regulating reproduction and family-making have historically functioned as a means of responding to perceptions of social "crises" that must be remediated (Solinger 2005). Both out-of-wedlock pregnancy and infertility among white middle class heterosexual couples were constructed as social problems that must be made invisible by the closed adoption system in the U.S. following World War II15.

The regulation of illegitimacy has been consistently framed as a "social problem" in the United States that has been defined differently in various historical eras. Historian Rickie Solinger explains:

Reproductive politics-as-a-way-to-solve-problems reflects a belief that the social, economical, political, and moral problems that beset our country can be solved best if laws and policies and public opinions press women to reproduce or not in ways that are consistent with a particular version of the country's real needs. (Solinger 2005, p. 9)

Women of different races, classes, (dis)abilities, and sexual orientations are located differently in relation to social definitions of legitimate family and provided different levels of access to social resources necessary to achieve these socioeconomic ideals (Dill 1988). Race, gender, sexuality, class, and (dis)ability circumscribe familial legitimacy in complex and contradictory ways for mothers in different social locations. In other words, women in different social locations have access to a different range of choices (Roberts 1997). The social practice of adoption in the postwar era in the U.S. functioned to make the "deviance" of unwed pregnancy and infertility invisible. The familial complexity resulting from these social regulations does not translate into the algorithm coded into the online genealogy programs. There are no familial templates on wikitree.com that could accommodate my entire genealogy.

<sup>13</sup> For research on sealed records see (Carp 1998) (Modell 2002).

<sup>14</sup> See (Solinger 1992) for an in-depth discussion of the different meanings attributed to white and Black girls' unwed pregnancies prior to Roe v. Wade. The different meanings and values attributed to the mothers and their "illegitimate" babies shaped how unwed mothers were treated, and provided each population a different range of options for unwanted pregnancy.

<sup>15</sup> In contrast, African American teens that became pregnant were discouraged from relinquishing their children for adoption because there was no "market" for their babies.

Online genealogy programs simplify this complexity in kinship relations. These erasures are facilitated by a naturalization of kinship through the options available for documenting family relationships. This program is not just a representation of social structure, but is an operational structure that reproduces these macro-level definitions of legitimacy at the micro-level of individual family trees. What are the social functions of these versions of family history? At the most fundamental level, these stories about legitimacy function as a way of justifying the exclusion of people outside mainstream definitions of legitimate family. This approach is useful for understanding the ways that white supremacy, heteronormativity, economic inequality, and gender oppression are reproduced and reinscribed in social understandings of family, equality, and nation.

Online family tree programs operationalize patriarchal family ideology, forcing exclusions by only offering narrow options for inclusion. Not only are the categories for entry rigid, but the default settings—the social and cultural assumptions guiding this construction of family—are colorblind, heterosexual, and cis-gender. Each familial entry requires that "gender" be specified, by checking the male or female box; as I have discussed, entries only allow space for one father and one mother. By collapsing gender and sex, the program naturalizes patriarchal gender expectations for men and women, foreclosing inclusion of kin whose identities cannot be contained within these polarized categories. The rigid options function as a gatekeeping mechanism enforcing ideological constructions of heteronormative gender identities into everyday understandings of family as "common sense".16

Yet there is another important aspect of this online system for categorizing family. These programs operationalize a set of social definitions of family and identity that is so pervasive as to be largely invisible. As each person—*adopted or not*—interacts with these programs, their family stories are channeled through the digital template created for documenting kinship. Yet, as my experience of creating a family tree shows, the structure of this program requires a particular kind of engagement. I cannot enter more than one set of parents. I cannot have siblings from different sets of parents. I am asked to label my adoptive relationships as "non-biological" (though I do not comply). Engaging with these programs continually reconstructs and maintains U.S. patriarchal definitions of family in individual genealogical records. The messages are clear for adoptees that we do not fully belong anywhere.

Yet adoptees are not the only outsiders. This system defining family legitimacy has also been used throughout U.S. history to regulate families of color, families living in poverty, and all other kinship relations "deviating" from the patriarchal nuclear family ideal.17 Cultural Studies scholar Julia Watson emphasizes the disjuncture between western genealogical traditions and the family structures of Indigenous, enslaved, and colonized people in the United States.

If we turn to accounts of how to map genealogy for historical 'others', it becomes clear that its practices have been formed around the normative WASP subjects who first invaded and ordered America. (Watson 1996, p. 308)

Genealogical templates for "legitimate" Eurocentric family trees cannot accommodate the multiplicity of kinship forms that have characterized families of color in the U.S.<sup>18</sup> There is a reason for this: genealogy functions as a tool of assimilation and settler colonialism in its adherence to "traditional" definitions of family. In his history of the cultural and historical shifts in practices of genealogy, Weil explains:

From the 1860s to the mid-twentieth century, racial purity, nativism, and nationalism successfully dominated the quest for pedigree and gave genealogy more contemporary

<sup>18</sup> Dill (1988).

<sup>16</sup> Ancestry.com has developed ways of representing more than one set of parents in their algorithm. One set is still designated as the default parents that appear in the family tree, but the other set can be accessed by clicking. https://support.ancestry. com/s/question/0D51500001wVrfFCAS/two-sets-of-parents. As I said earlier, genealogy website differ in the specificities of how information is accessed and represented. Yet, all of the websites still reflect and articulate ideological definitions of legitimate family.

<sup>17</sup> Dill (1988); Glenn (1994); Gutierrez (2009); Davis (1981); O'Sullivan (2016).

ideological relevance than ever before. The language of race, heredity, and later eugenics invaded the genealogical spheres, helping many white Americans describe themselves self-consciously as Anglo-Saxons and claim racial and social superiority over others. (Weil 2013, p. 6)

Genealogy as social practice shifts over time and across place, imbuing intimate relationships with societal definitions of legitimate family. In the U.S., the practice is deeply embroiled in the politics of race and reproduction. Legitimacy is a socially defined category that has been used historically to regulate kinship, belonging, and inheritance (Murray 2012). What relations of power facilitate my inclusion while denying the inclusion of others? As I have discussed, biology and culture are not the only forces shaping familial belonging. Laws and social policies regulating reproduction, property, and legitimacy have functioned differently at various historical moments.

#### **4. What I Found: Legitimacy and Redacted History**

Wikitree, like other genealogy websites, operationalizes hegemonic definitions of legitimate family that support and maintain ideal kinship forms. The family tree I found there was the legitimate documentation of a complex set of relationships representing the growth and development of a web of kinship ties over time. In this section, I consider the ways that the limited system I have been discussing reproduces a redacted version of family history.

My understanding of what kinship relationships mean was shaped through interaction with public narratives about roots, adoption, and family trees that I encountered in media and social interactions. Like many adoptees, I internalized a narrative that suggested that I was not a "real" member of my adoptive family. Yet, when I was twelve or so, my grandmother told me that I was more like her than any of her grandchildren. I was confused, given the societal pressure to envision biology as the touchstone for authentic family ties. I said, "How can that be? I was adopted." She didn't miss a beat. She said, "Oh, I always forget that." She provided me an alternative story about how I belong in my family. I was grafted into a family tree and nourished by its roots. I actively sought out those roots by asking my parents and grandparents about family history.

My grandmother was proud of her Union-soldier grandfather, and his older brother who had been a well-decorated Rear Admiral during the Civil War; there was even a battleship named for this Union officer, the U.S.S. Fairfax19. This was as far back in her family history as I ever heard, but she laughed as she assured me that I would be eligible to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, should I think such things mattered. Her healthy disregard of class pretensions shaped our family deeply. As an adoptee, the DAR wouldn't have me anyway; their membership status is dependent on a proven biological connection to an American "patriot". Their website states: "All lineage for the DAR must be bloodline descent."<sup>20</sup> Adoptees are invited to apply based on biological connections to their birth families. Of course, many adoptees do not even know who their birth parents are, due to sealed adoption records so, as I have discussed, this "choice" is often not really an option.

Years ago, when I asked her about our family history, my grandmother told me "Aunt Bird and Aunt Bell always said we were related to Lord Fairfax. But he didn't have any children". She laughed about the pretensions of caring about such things. It was apparently a bit of a family joke in my grandmother's era that we were descendants of Lord Thomas Fairfax, the only British peer residing in Colonial America, and proprietor of the vast Northern Neck Territory in what became the state of Virginia. The premise of the humor was both that ours was not a wealthy family, and that we were Northerners whose family had been in Pennsylvania for generations, and thus, certainly had never enslaved anyone. That we are a "white" family was an assumption so fundamental that to have considered otherwise was unheard of.

<sup>19</sup> https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Fairfax-288.

<sup>20</sup> https://www.dar.org/im-adopted-can-i-still-become-member.

I assumed my family had always been Northerners, until I learned my great-great grandfather and his brother were the only members of their prominent Southern slave-holding family to enlist in the Union military during the Civil War. When they left the South for good, they left those family stories behind. This discovery links me to a meticulously documented lineage available on wikitree (and many other websites), where I find histories, including kings and queens and lords and ladies and founding fathers. Once I found the details of my great great grandfather's birth, it was clear that the aunts were correct. Edwin Cary Fairfax21 was the son of a wealthy Virginia planter who enslaved human beings and used them for their labor. When the Civil War began, Edwin followed his older brother's footsteps North and enlisted in the Union Army. He proudly served under Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. He named his oldest daughter, my great grandmother, Nellie Grant Fairfax,<sup>22</sup> after the daughter of General Grant. He made a modest life as a carpenter for himself and his family in Pennsylvania, and erased all connections to the history of slavery as best he could. Along with knowledge of these prominent historical figures comes a disturbing history of enslavement and oppression, that some of my ancestors were apparently eager to rebel against. What is my connection to this history? As an adoptee, I already have a troubled relationship to the very notion of genealogy—not belonging fully to either my adoptive or birth family histories. My identification leans toward the insider-outsider kin, like Edwin and his brother. Thus, I went looking for more life stories. If my own inclusion in this family tree is grounded in definitions of "legitimacy", then I have to consider whose stories may have been excluded from the family genealogy in order to maintain this illusion of social legitimacy.

The process of racializing-as-white my family genealogy depends first, on the omission of slavery in our oral family history, and second, on the legal and social fictions of genealogical legitimacy that erase enslaved ancestors from the genealogical record. Laws regulating marriage, adoption, inheritance, anti-miscegenation, labor, and property-transfer support social views of legitimate family relationships as natural, traditional, and unchanging. This construction of whiteness—intimately tied throughout U.S. history to legitimacy—obscures awareness that social categories of identity and family are shaped by power relations that shift over time, to accommodate the needs of the state. Constructions of the ideal white patriarchal family are the hinge upon which the outsiderness of "others" is defined, and thus, this public narrative of whiteness-as-purity must be critically explored.

How does one find people and stories that have been erased from history? I started looking for other ways people's lives may have been documented. It was clear that I had to move beyond the mainstream narrative represented in wikitree. I scanned documents from The Freedmen's Bureau archives, searching for family names. The property transfer records in 1813 in Alexandria, Virginia (Alexandria, Virginia Property Records 1813) provided clues to several family members' lives. On 24 December 1813, Wilson Miles Cary,23 a newly discovered grandfather seven generations back, "conveyed by deed of trust" three enslaved girls: "Sally and Charlotte two negro girls ... and Julia a mulatto girl" to his son-in-law, for "the use and benefit of his daughter."<sup>24</sup> Were these girls Christmas gifts for his daughter? The precision in legally recording the racial identity of these three girls reflects the significance these categorizations of race had in regards to personhood and citizenship in the antebellum era. Was "Julia a mulatto girl," his daughter too? Did he send her away to remove the reminder, for his wife, that he increased their wealth by raping and impregnating enslaved women?25

Virginia law dictated that the race of the child followed the race of the mother. The children enslavers fathered with the women they raped were legally "mulatto" and enslaved like their mothers. Dorothy Roberts explains:

<sup>21</sup> https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Fairfax-283.

<sup>22</sup> https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Fairfax-282.

<sup>23</sup> https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Cary-835.

<sup>24</sup> (Alexandria, Virginia Property Records 1813). http://www.freedmenscemetery.org/resources/documents/importation.shtml.

<sup>25</sup> See Davis (1981); Dill (1988); Collins (1991); Roberts (1997).

Racism created for white slaveowners the possibility of unrestrained reproductive control. The social order established by powerful white men was founded on two inseparable ingredients: the dehumanization of Africans on the basis of race, and the control of women's sexuality and reproduction. The American legal system is rooted in this monstrous combination of racial and gender domination. One of America's first laws concerned the status of children born to slave mothers and fathered by white men: a 1662 Virginia statute made these children slaves. (Roberts 1997, p. 23)

Julia's mother is completely erased in this property transaction. Under what circumstances did a white man rape this unnamed enslaved Black woman? How did he justify his brutal behavior? He likely engaged what sociologist Patricia Hill Collins calls "controlling images" like the "Jezebel" to convince himself she wanted it (Collins 1991). Narratives of Black women's deviant sexuality have functioned as justification for rape in public discussions of race, gender, class, sexuality, and family throughout the history of the U.S.26 She is an illegitimate mother, and thus, she is erased from the historical record.

It is important to make visible the ways that sociopolitical narratives support the scaffolding of social law regulating reproduction and family, and critically explore the ways that these complex definitions of family operate through legal fictions of exclusion that are reproduced in subtle and overt ways in everyday life. In her award-winning book, *The Hemingses of Monticello*, historian Annette Gordon-Reed discusses family legitimacy under slavery.

Slavery simply provided families in the South with many more ways to be bizarre than in regions where it never took hold or was abandoned early on. Fathers owning sons, brothers giving away brothers as wedding gifts, sisters selling their aunts, husbands having children with their wives and then their wives' enslaved half sisters, enslaved black children and their free little white cousins, living and playing together on the same plantation—things that by every measure violate basic notions of what modern-day people think family is supposed to be about. (Gordon-Reed 2008, p. 559)

Fictions and erasures of kin function in relation to laws defining family members beyond the pale as illegitimate. Constructions of whiteness were, and are, central to social definitions of legitimate family and citizenship in the U.S., both then and now. Recognition of Julia as family challenges the sociopolitical narratives designed to make slavery appear normal and natural. Within the terms of this kinship system she cannot be acknowledged without undermining the premises undergirding the entire social structure of that time and place. And her story continues to be erased by the configuration of online genealogy programs, contributing to a whitewashed view of history.

In each era, laws, policies, and cultural understandings of legitimate family regulate belonging. "Illegitimate" children—those born outside the socially sanctioned category of legal marriage—are erased from the family tree. In 1813 in Alexandria, Virginia racial identity defined the boundaries of personhood, family, and legitimacy. Julia never became part of the official family tree because her existence would challenge ideologies of whiteness as purity, and expose the common social practice—particularly after the 1770 law banning the importation of slaves into Virginia—of white men increasing their wealth by raping women they enslaved. This reproductive practice was made invisible through erasure and denial. The transfer of Julia as property from her biological father to her biological sister was facilitated by laws defining her outside of familial relations and outside of personhood because she was "illegitimate"—born outside the sanctioned kinship system. This property transfer and its absence in the genealogical record supported white supremacy by maintaining political narratives about pure white families. It continues to narrate a redacted form of history that denies the existence of power and oppression within families and between families and the state.

<sup>26</sup> See Davis, Dill, Collins, Roberts.

Julia's identity and lived experience of family were shaped by societal definitions of race, sexuality, gender, legitimacy, and personhood in the U.S. in the historical moment in which she was born. Census records in the early 1800s recorded only the gender and age of enslaved people. The only trace of her existence is the documentation of a legal transaction. This property transfer is the only record of her life that I have found. Why does this story speak to me so profoundly? She is likely to have been a biological member of my adoptive family, though she was defined out of the family by social definitions of illegitimacy tied to race, gender, and capitalism. She was born outside of sanctioned relationships—under duress and oppression—and so her identity as a family member was denied at every level of meaning production.

What is my relationship to Julia? By the legal terms of family in the United States, we are not related because she has been excluded. According to genetic definitions of family, we are not family because I do not genetically belong to our family. Yet, when I consider the affiliation I feel with her based on our shared status as illegitimate, I must claim her as kin. What can we learn by looking at our different relationships to this family and its history? We were each born outside of sanctioned marriage and thus were defined as illegitimate. A legal transaction marked each of our exclusions from biological family. She was the child transferred out of the family in the antebellum era in order to ensure the illusion of wealthy white Southern families as pure and untainted by miscegenation or illegitimacy. The legal papers documenting her transfer from one family to another were recorded in the property records office, not the family Bible27. I was the child assimilated into the family through adoption in the post-World War II era, signifying a sort of redemption from the stigma of infertility for my adoptive parents and of illegitimacy for my birth parents. The legal documents detailing my actual birth are sealed by the state and unavailable except by court order. Neither of us is accurately documented in the family tree. Sociopolitical stories and legal fictions erase all traces of the legitimate transactions that defined our lives.

I wonder who Julia considered family after she was taken from her mother. Who told her stories that made her feel that she belonged somewhere? What genealogy did she claim for herself? How did she understand the meanings of race, gender, and property that regulated her life? How did she make sense of the relationships between herself and the biological relatives that enslaved and exploited her? The genealogical assumptions operating in that era would never have allowed for the inclusion of Julia in the family tree. Her absence is an effect of power. My erasure in my birth family histories is also an effect of power, as is my inclusion in the family history Julia and I share.

#### **5. Conclusions: Claiming Roots and Belonging**

Given the emphasis on genetic determinism in the contemporary U.S., people tend to assume that "real" genealogy is about biology and blood. For me, it is more about enculturation and stories. It is not in spite of adoption that I am interested. It is because of adoption. The insider-outsider social location of adoptees, in relation to both our birth and adoptive families, makes a connection to genealogy that is much more important to me. As Sarup explains, "the person with roots takes them for granted, while the person with no roots whatsoever is vividly aware of them, like some phantom ache in an amputated limb" (Sarup 1996, p. 4). Yet, the notion of "roots" (and what constitutes them) is profoundly shaped by social context. Power shapes constructions and understandings of kinship as surely as nature and nurture do—perhaps more, because its presence is so frequently invisible.

The tensions between exploring my birth or adoptive family history cannot be resolved. If I have to choose, I go with the people I love. The family that raised me feels real, whereas my birth parents feel like strangers. The sisters and parents I grew up with shaped my sense of self and the world in clearly identifiable ways. The stories my family told me, the ways my parents socialized my sisters

<sup>27</sup> See Weil for a discussion of the common practice in the 19th century U.S. of documenting family births, deaths, and lineages in the family Bible.

and I, was rooted in their own family histories. The lived experience of kinship is conveyed in stories and memories that establish connections between people to whom we are "related".

For me, the lived experience of kinship far outweighs the genetic scripts of possibility encoded in each cell of my body28. The meaning and articulation of the genetic codes my birth family passed on to me took shape and grew as part of the family that loved me and socialized me. The biggest influence of my birth parents was their absence and a lack of information about my biological family history. The relationships I have with my birth parents feel like shells of loss and unmet expectation. Social categories of parent and child did not play out according to the scripts any of us were raised with. Their children do not feel like siblings. Their identities and families do not constitute the "truth" of myself, yet my adoptive parents do not hold the sole key to my sense of self either. These are not either/or questions. I have been influenced by both families, in different ways. Nature and nurture matter, but they are not the entire story.

I read the social practice of genealogy as an operationalizing narrative enforcing normative constructions of legitimate families and identities. It shapes individual documentation of family to fit the structure of its template. These genealogical templates correspond to social and legal definitions of legitimate kinship. The structure of the family tree online programs literally enforces a normative public family story. The gaps between the genealogical template and the lived experience of family are useful for thinking about the ways that "difference" from this norm is regulated and erased, further entrenching this view of family as "natural" and "normal".

My research makes visible power inequalities governing family reproduction at macro levels by exploring the contradictions and slippages regarding family "legitimacy" in micro level online genealogical constructions of adoptees' family trees. Patriarchal family structures are naturalized and normalized in family tree programs, and the erasure of people outside the boundaries of "legitimacy" is necessary for the reproduction of socially ideal families. The nature versus nurture framework for identity limits our understandings and obscures attention to power inequalities driving the social practice of adoption.

**Funding:** This research was funded by a Drake University Center for the Humanities Research Grant, a Drake University College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Development Grant, and a Drake University Provost's Research Grant.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


<sup>28</sup> This is not necessarily a common view among adoptees. In fact, many of the adoptees I have interviewed over the years have not felt a sense of belonging in their adoptive families, and thus have invested more meaning in biological views of identity and family than in cultural and relational views. Much of the public and academic discourse about adoption stays within this framework. Some people embrace biological explanations. Others believe culture and environment shape identity and family. This "commonsense" framework for understanding identity and family is rarely questioned.


Haley, Alex. 1976. *Roots*. Garden City: Doubleday.


Roberts, Dorothy. 1997. *Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty*. New York: Pantheon Books.


© 2018 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## *Article* **"I'm More Than Just Adopted": Stories of Genealogy in Intercountry Adoptive Families**

#### **Sarah Richards**

School of Education and Psychology, University of Suffolk, Ipswich IP4 1QJ, UK; s.richards@uos.ac.uk

Received: 4 July 2018; Accepted: 25 July 2018; Published: 6 August 2018

**Abstract:** In contrast to the historical 'blank slate' approach to adoption, current policy places significant emphasis on providing children with knowledge; family history; biological connections; stories, a genealogy upon which to establish an authentic identity. The imperative for this complex, and often incomplete, genealogy is also explicit within the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption established in 1993 to ensure that intercountry adopted children will be provided with a genealogical 'heritage'. Yet, despite the recurring dominance of this approach, 'heritage' remains an ambiguous dictum which holds the expectation that adopted children should have access to any available birth/first family information and acquire cultural competence about an often distant and removed birth country. Providing such heritage becomes the responsibility of intercountry adoptive parents. It is therefore unsurprising that this role has become part of how intercountry adoptive parents perform and display their parenting and family practices before and after adoption (Richards 2014a; 2018). Such family work is explicit in the stories that parents and children coconstruct about birth family, abandonment, China, and the rights of adopted children to belong first and foremost to a birth country. Using qualitative data provided by a social worker, eleven girls aged between five and twelve, and their parents, this article explores the role and changing significance of narratives as familial strategies for delivering such heritage obligations. Outlined in this discussion is the compulsion to provide a genealogical heritage by adoptive parents which can ultimately be resisted by their daughters as they seek alternative and changing narratives through which to construct their belongings and identities.

**Keywords:** Belonging; Intercountry adoption; China; Narratives; Genealogy

#### **1. Introduction**

Despite the contentious and controversial practices which take place under the name of intercountry adoption, it continues to be a welfare option available for a few children internationally. As a practice, intercountry adoption extends our understanding of adoption and is defined as being the legal process by which a child habitually resident in one country or state (origin/sending) is moved to another country or state (receiving) as a result of permanent adoption by a person or persons habitually resident in the receiving state (ArcAdoption 2013; Department for Education 2011). An added and frequently provocative aspect to intercountry adoption is a transracial element. This term is clarified as being an adoption 'of a child of one race by parents of another' (Triseliotis et al. 1997, p. 160, see also Barn 2013; Barn and Kirton 2012).

Intercountry adoption (ICA) is commonly (but not exclusively) regulated through the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption established in 1993. It usually (but, again not exclusively) involves the transfer of children from Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, to North America and Western Europe (Leifsen 2008). In 2011 Rotabi and Bunkers (Rotabi and Bunkers 2011) claimed that approximately one million children have been adopted internationally since the Second World War. Recent statistics however, show a significant decline in

ICA since 2004 with numbers dropping by half (Selman 2017). In England the number of intercountry adoptions has always been, and remains, very low with just 58 application received by the Department for Education in 2017 and 60 adoptions. Less than 5 of these adoptions were from China. Despite this small number, China has previously been one of the most popular sending countries for the UK and the focus of a number of previous studies such as the British Chinese Adoption Study (Feast et al. 2013; Rushton et al. 2012).

Significant research exists concerning the potential impact of taking a child from one country and incorporating them into another through adoption (Juffer 2006; Smolin 2004). Less is known about the ways that intercountry adoptive families actually manage the undoubted challenges that this represents (Jacobson 2008; Juffer and Tieman 2012). Allen (2007, p. 125) argues that a 'lack of knowledge and insight into racial and cultural issues' portrayed by intercountry adopters is a valid cause of concern. Yet, Selwyn and Wijedasa (2008) argue that in England little research has taken place with adoptive families to identify how ethnicity, culture and belonging are facilitated. Given the critical discourse and polarised debates which surround this practice (see for example Bartholet and Smolin 2012), it is perhaps unsurprising that the voices of those most affected by intercountry adoption are seldom heard (Gibbons and Rotabi 2012). My research explores how the complexities of belonging are managed, displayed, and performed by adoptive families (Richards 2014a; 2018). This qualitative research focused on the stories of nine families and ten girls aged between five and twelve years and one social worker who specialised in ICA and was involved in the application process of some of the families who took part in this PhD study. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with parents and a creative journal activity with the girls where they were able to tell stories, draw pictures, add photos and other small artefacts to illustrate their narratives. These methods sit within a child focused methodological approach and were supported overall by a feminist ethic of care (Cockburn 2005). The families live in England and have adopted children from China. It was not my intention to focus only on girls in the study but the families who came forward to participate all had daughters. Explanations about the prevalence of girls available for adoption from China are complex and under researched, though it is often assumed to be a response to the implementation of China's one child policy (now abolished). It is the stories of these very young adoptees that I sought to highlight in response to their lack of voice elsewhere in the field.

There are a number of relevant studies about intercountry adoption which include discussions on identity. Volkman (2005, p. 32) research with transracial adoptees in Sweden illustrates the 'complex transformations in identity' within the adoption process. Dorow (2006, p. 4) conducted research with adoptive parents and argues that identity narratives for children are both complex and 'relational'. Howell's (Howell 2006) research, set in Norway, includes the voices of adult intercountry adoptees who claim an over emphasis is placed socially on their adoptive status. Feast et al.'s (2013) study provided accounts from adult Chinese adoptees living in the UK where, like previous research, fluidity in identity is suggested (see also Malhotra 2013). Furthermore, Howell (2006) argues that differing aspects of identity can be emphasised in certain social contexts. Echoing Howell's findings, Moinian (2009) study on identity, though not about adoption, also illustrates that certain identity traits can be more salient in specific contexts.

Such research reminds us that our identity narratives are not fixed, can be contested, relate to the past, and also, to a potential 'myth of origin'. These narratives help explain the present and hold a plan for the future too (Yuval-Davis 2011, p. 14). Nevertheless, it is commonly a fixed, essentialised, and naturalised understanding of identity and belonging that is prevalent in adoption literature and practice (Richards 2012; 2014a). These natural belongings are regarded as primordial ties and position ethnic and biological ties as pre-social and pre-cultural (Shils 1957). Such fixed biological, familial connections facilitate a sense of continuity, where identity is assembled through narratives of generational succession (Warner 1991). These blood-based connections are associated with belonging to a nation state, a birth place, and they create prescribed bonds between biological and familial belonging which have come to be essentialised as integral to identity (Bartholet 1999). These

'primordial components' (Yuval-Davis 2011, p. 409) of identity dominate adoption discussion, policy, and practice (Richards 2012). 'The naturalised biological family, with its privileged status (both socially and politically) as a location for authentic belonging is a powerful discourse which creates a particular truth about how we should belong, and to whom' (Richards 2018, p. 55). Geertz (1963, p. 108) describes these 'congruities of blood' as 'overpowering' and coercive where obligation in one form or another to these ties is a universal experience.

Without 'blooded belongings', adopted children and adults are socially constructed as lacking complete identity narratives and thus risk the development of an authentic identity (Richards 2012). Such 'genealogical bewilderment' (Sants cited in Volkman 2005, p. 26) must be compensated for (Richards 2018). In intercountry adoption this compensation begins with genealogical stories; narratives of belonging both to birth families and adoptive families, to birth country and adopted country. These narratives must also attempt to move beyond ethnic and racial boundaries. Such genealogical narratives are threaded together from known and assumed personal history. For girls adopted from China concepts such as abandonment and orphanage care become focal points of their early narratives. These components structure the genealogies constructed for, with, and about adoptees and 'script' their belonging stories (Richards 2018, p. 56).

Adoption policy in England makes the necessity of heritage explicit. Under the dictum of best interests, English law allow those who are adopted to research their background and birth families and gain access to records of their adoption (Mignot 2017). Life books are an accepted and expected activity which utilises the knowledge held about birth families and adoptive families (Watson et al. 2015). Social work practice therefore reproduces this primordial heritage imperative through providing genealogical life stories and access to a birth culture, in the name of children's best interests (Richards 2014b). In consequence, adoptive families, seeking to support their children's identity development and belonging, develop stories, strategies, and family practices to facilitate their children's complex genealogical belonging through birth, blood, country, and adoption.

This article sets out the significance of heritage as an adoptive birthright before outlining its emphasis in relevant legislation. The centrality of this focus is then explored by using data from parents and their children which highlights the ways in which genealogical knowledge is facilitated in these intercountry adoptive families.

#### **2. The Imperative of Genealogy as a Birthright in Adoption**

The shift from a previously dominant blank slate approach in adoption, to a stance where familial knowledge, adoption circumstances, and cultural heritage are expected to be available for adopted children, occurred in part as a result of changing ideas about childhood and the best interests of children. The principle of the best interests is now central in all legislation surrounding children and underpins adoption discourse (Aldridge 1994). Increasing emphasis on rights discourses also continue to inform welfare provision for children and adoption policy in England. However, Roby (2007) succinctly contextualises the associated ambiguity of a rights based discourse in intercountry adoption by differentiating three stages in the adoption process which rely upon rights to justify policy and practice. Before adoption: rights to a family, birth culture, and access to adequate health care, along with the right to survive, are emphasised. During adoption: the child has a right to be adopted, to be provided for by a family which has been suitably prepared and assessed, and to be able to consent. Post adoption: access to a birth culture and adoption records, social acceptance, and full family membership within adopted country are required. This last set of rights makes explicit the role of genealogy as being both a right and in the best interests of the child (Richards 2014b) and speaks to the complexity of the belonging narratives.

The genealogical aspect of identity formation is particularly challenging in intercountry adoption as often little, if any, knowledge is available about the biological family. In China, it is generally assumed that a number of infants become available to adopt as a result of abandonment. For children adopted transracially and intercountry, this severance of genealogical ties has commonly induced silence, making discussion about birth family and origins very difficult to broach (Volkman 2005). A blank slate therefore contradicts both the best interests of the child dictum, kinship ideology, and rights discourses as enshrined in The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) (UNCRC). It is these rights that are used to shape The Hague Convention (1993) through which adoptions between China and England are organised, articulated most succinctly in the Subsidiarity Principle. In accord with this principle, UNCRC place intercountry adoption as a suitable option only when all domestic options including fostering and suitable institutional care have been exhausted.

Children's right to access their heritage holds a recurring emphasis in adoption policy and practice. I argue that heritage in this context refers to a continued acknowledgment of primordial, essentialised identities attributed and fixed through birth and a biological family. In this prevailing discourse children's successful identity formation thus becomes inextricably linked to an ethnic, cultural birthplace in adoption policy and practice, which seeks to protect this identity.

#### **3. The Presence of Heritage in Policy**

Hollingsworth (1998) has previously highlighted five broad professional principles in adoption policy and practice. These include the significance of ethnic heritage; the primacy of the biological parents and relatives in raising children; that children should not lose their biological families through economic hardship alone; and that effort and preference for same race adoption should be pursued, with alternative arrangements (such as transracial and intercountry adoption) only acceptable if a child is otherwise deprived of a permanent family and home. 'These fundamental principles have become key narratives (Bruner 2004) of adoption and have informed national and international policy development' (Richards 2018, p. 56). The role of adoption policy has been to enable children to be re-incorporated into a family structure and to provide the most appropriate care for the wellbeing of children (Keating 2009). Such reconstitution embeds children into the institution of family but, as the principles above indicate, through inferior or subordinate attachments which lack genealogical roots. These are the belongings of paper rather than blood, of choice rather than fate. As a result, adoptive families, described by Gailey (2000, p. 296; see also Schneider 1968) are suggested to hold a 'diluted' 'sense of belonging'. From a primordial perspective nature or blood will always be privileged over nurture (Hawkins 2016).

The Hague Convention (1993) evokes these key belonging narratives. Through the Subsidiarity Principle, it identifies the importance of birth family preservation, and the importance of programmes working towards the reunification of children with birth families in sending countries. The Convention also stipulates that in the majority of cases children's best interests are best served by keeping them within this birth family unit. In this, the legislation reflects the prevailing privileging of the biological family as being the natural and most appropriate place for children to be:

... the philosophy of the body must be that its work is child-focused and the body [accredited agency] respects the priority given in the State of origin to family preservation and reunification of children and their birth families. (Hague Conference on Private Law 2012, Chapter 6, Sec. 6.1, p. 47)

The rarefied status of the biological family is explicit. Identity essentialised through birth and origin is protected and prioritised. Intercountry adoption is implicated not only in risking the authentic identity of individual children, but also risking the preservation of 'families of origin, language, culture, and religion' (Ja Sook Bergquist 2012, p. 46).

The task of the professional as identified in the legislation includes formal assessment of applicants ensuring that adopters are sufficiently prepared (Hoffman 2013), suitably matched and can offer ongoing support to children severed from family and heritage. Such preparation includes an emphasis on the possible impact of the loss of family, culture, and country for a child and how to facilitate reconnecting these ties. This is where the 'obligation' of primordial connections (Geertz 1963, p. 108) is transferred to adoptive parents. Jacobson (2008, p. 2) argues that an emphasis on 'culture keeping' features extensively in adoption legislation and professional advice which instructs parents to educate adopted children about their birth country and culture in order to assist the development of a 'solid ethnic identity'. Such expectation and emphasis is explicit in the early stages of the application process as highlighted by the social worker in my data below:

Anne. Beginning the process with a couple who do not know the country or perhaps have not even visited the country, is more difficult. I have always tried hard to encourage people to go and visit, I use the example of going to China where it is a difficult thing; it's in your face, busy, the smells, the dirt, and the friendliness of people, the huge things there. If you have not been there it would be foolhardy to go out to collect a child and see all these aspects of the country and culture for the first time at that point.

I do lengthy interviews and as many as are needed. I try not to stay with people too long but I am certainly willing to because I talk, I ask questions to draw people out, because unless you actually get under the skin of people you cannot really know them. I have to get some feeling about how this person is going to cope with the practicalities and emotions of bringing up a child who comes from a different culture and maybe has a different skin colour, or a totally different ethnicity. Obviously there are some straightforward questions that one has to ask but I think that you have got to know more and delve deeper than that and find out how people tick. I think I am pretty intrusive, not in delving into people's personal thoughts necessarily but I need to feel that I have got to know these people.

Throughout the intensive application process, adopting parents are made aware of the complex weaving of biological and adoptive belongings that they must construct for their children's wellbeing. One adoptive father (below) speaks about trying to establish this belonging. Harry begins by describing letter writing to a daughter not yet adopted. These letters are used to establish a connecting link with daughters but also to facilitate a sense of family 'history' as he describes it.

Sarah. Angela has described how you both wrote pre-adoption letters to your daughters prior to their adoption, can you tell me about your motivation for doing this?

Harry. We had written letters to them because it was part of us doing something in the wait. Also, writing a diary we just called her 'my Darling'; but there was a level of engagement and attachment from that which was reinforcing and it focused on her.

Sarah. Had you been told that letter writing was something that was good to do, or did you just feel motivated to do this?

Harry. I don't remember being told to do this; it came out of who we are as people and out of our lived experiences. We are not trying to compensate for their massive personal loss, to lose absolutely everything, but how we might give them something to, not replace what they had lost but a sense of belonging to a family I suppose. We had wanted to be parents for so long that once you had the child you were on a high really, that's what I felt, a high that lasted quite some time, I felt quite invincible. Once you had your child you feel that you've climbed Everest and were coming down to a welcome committee. People who had shared the journey with us, friends who were on the adoption video and shared the story with us are important to have.

Sarah. Do you often watch the video?

Harry. Yeah, well the girls really like to watch it, we put on the video, which highlights the journey while we were there. They love watching it themselves and seeing really significant events.

I guess we are sowing the seeds for the future really, doing this now so that we can give them a history, helping them now but also giving them something in the years to come. I have a box that belonged to my grandfather and it is important to me, I want them to feel the same connection to him as I feel, that he is their great grandfather and that they feel connected to him through the box and me.

Overall (1997) demonstrates the privileging of the biological, genetic connection through identification of similarities with one's children that enables a sense of continuity and history to be felt; an identity to be constructed through a 'narrative of generational succession' (Warner 1991). Individual identity is constructed as being embedded within familial identity (Lawler 2008) and here the relationship between a 'natural' biological identity and a 'cultural or social' belonging of adoption are both articulated by Harry. He actively constructs a social belonging for his daughters whilst simultaneously declaring aspirations that his own biological belongings will also be significant to them. His obligation to primordial ties and adoptive ones are explicit.

The importance of preserving information relating to children's origins, background, and family history is highlighted throughout the Hague Convention, though in practice this information can be quite limited and leave many gaps in the knowledge that children, and the adults they become, might seek. Adult adoptees speak of the importance of having this knowledge described as being, 'big information' but also, 'little and seemingly insignificant' details about their past (Richards 2014b, p. 9). The Convention states (2013) that this historical knowledge about origins, identity, and culture help to establish or maintain connections to a birth country and culture. Adoptive parents are both tasked, and personally motivated to support their children's wellbeing in attempting to provide such connections. With very young children this belonging is developed and initially performed through storytelling.

#### **4. The Performance and Display of Heritage in Families**

Adoption stories are powerful narratives which not only connect the adoptive parent to the child and child to place and race, but play a role in maintaining the moral and social order (Yngvesson and Mahoney 2000). In biological families, narratives play a key role in perpetuating family lineage and reinforcing the role of blood and biology in the normative family structure. In adoptive families, they emphasise the social importance of the biological family by situating the child in this family before any adoption narrative can be told.

#### *4.1. Birth and Biological Stories*

Birth stories seek to anchor children to a biological family, birth country, and culture; a starting point from which identity and alternative belongings can emerge. These stories also serve to retain the primacy and privilege of the biological, blood belongings so dominant in familial ideology. Lawler (2008) reminds us that blood ties are not ties in themselves but socially constructed and therefore symbolic of connection. Yet, as Shils (1957) contends, a primordial discourse is given a status of natural and therefore more powerful than social. Such symbols of connection are created in these adoptive families through relations which begin in an orphanage (known or assumed), birth province, birth country, and adoption date. The social context makes such stories compulsive telling and the wellbeing of adoptees is assumed to be based upon such origin stories. These are the stories articulated in the adoption process, that 'good' adoptive parents must perform in their children's 'best interest' (Richards 2018). They form part of the culture making activities that these families engage with, and through which these families recognise and understand their belongings.

Part of the adopted parent role is to establish a biological familial link, to facilitate a kinship with a biological mother and family, whose absence in the girls' lives is described by Dorow (2006, p. 164) as 'loud'. The biological family is commonly symbolised by an idealised maternal figure. In this kinship work (Traver 2009), the adoptive mother becomes the means by which the biological mother as a symbolic figure is maintained. In the picture below, the affective labour of the adoptive mother has provided a daughter with a birth mother narrative that she can use to build an imagined biological

family and so assist her to become familiar with this biological link and her relationship to it. The birth mother has the largest of the heads and is the starting point from which the rest of the narrative flows: See Figure 1.

**Figure 1.** Amy's imagined birth family.

The story told with this picture explains Amy's absence from this imagined birth family and provides a key role for the birth mother. Amy's adoptive mother wrote the story on the picture at Amy's request:

Amy (aged 7yrs) My birth parents were together for a short time before they splitted up because they had a big argument once and he decided to go. In the morning she said "good morning husband" but there was no reply. She felt really upset and felt "what has happened? I really loved him but I think I hurt his feelings." They were arguing because he didn't want to have a baby with her and she really wanted a baby so they splitted up. That could be true, couldn't it? [she asks her adoptive mother]

The story above provides a birth family and sets the scene for an abandonment narrative which attempts to explain the separation of child from biological family. Kinship making requires another key activity commonly ascribed to the mothering role in adoption discourse, attempting to fill the gaps that the absence of a biological family can incur. Dorow indicates the significance afforded this role:

The affective labor of creating an originary identity for the child tells us how blood and culture speak to each other, through gendered kinship, racialised fantasies, and national imaginaries. (Dorow 2006, p. 165)

Rosenblum et al. (2006) identify this role as both complex and unique to adoptive families. However, within adoptive families this task is construed as normative and facilitated through the telling of stories. Genealogical gaps are said to undermine the adoptees' authentic identity and adoptive parents are tasked with teaching their children to manage this loss and offer what they can to fill the gaps (Lacher et al. 2005). Below an adoptive mother highlights the recurring relevance of her daughter's connections with her birth family that her affective labour helps to support;

Angela. We created a page in her life book that became a conversation about genetics and how she would always be connected to her birth family through her genes.

Angela's daughter Lisa (aged 8 yrs) confirms this influence of her genes in her picture of her birth family where the figures wore glasses. As she drew she explained that this is where her own short sightedness comes from. See Figure 2.

**Figure 2.** Lisa's birth family drawing.

#### *4.2. Abandonment Stories*

It is commonly assumed that many of the girls adopted from China have been abandoned before coming under the care of local orphanages. Such details are frequently given to adopting parents at the time of the adoption. How, and when, to share this information with daughters is something each family has to individually decide. Below, Angela speaks of her anxiety about telling her daughter Lisa that she was found at the orphanage gate in a cardboard box:

Angela. I just didn't know how I was going to be able to tell her. Then one day when she was about three she said 'let's play Mummies and Babies'. I said 'okay' and she said 'I'll be the baby and you can be my Chinese Mummy'. I was a bit nervous about this but we began this play acting and before I knew it I was acting out her abandonment. I was holding her in my arms on the floor, hugging her and saying 'I love you so much but I cannot look after you, what can I do? I have to put you somewhere safe so others can take care of you'. Tears were streaming down my face as I acted out putting her in a box, saying 'this will keep the wind and the rain off you, it will keep you safe'. The amazing thing was that as I was playing this part, the box really did become a source of refuge for her rather than something to be thrown away as I had always thought. I was sobbing buckets by now. Lisa put her hand against my cheek and said 'Don't worry Mummy, my English Mummy is coming soon and she will look after me'.

Others choose to follow guidance about how to explore this topic with their children as Ruth highlights:

Ruth. We have some terminology that we decided as a family: Birth mother and birth father, the conventional British, suggested adopted term. We never use the term abandoned; we always use the term found. We tell her no lies but simply the truth as we know it in language that she understands. We lean on the positives rather than the negatives so we say, -'you were in a safe place to be found and put there by your birth mother'. The facts only; and if we don't know the answer than we say we don't know. That is what I have been advised by others and this is what we are going to do.

Though approached in alternative and individualised ways each family has an abandonment story which is told in order for the adoption story which follows to make sense as part of these children's heritage narratives. See Figure 3.


**Figure 3.** Louise (9yrs) depicts the significance of family stories for her.

#### *4.3. Adoption Stories*

How children came to be in their adopted families is vital belonging story which often begins with a first meeting. This first meeting in China is also when the baby is first placed in the care of the adopters. It is understandably traumatic. Sally tells her story below:

Sally. We arrived and were told we were going to meet her the following day and then there was a knock at the hotel door and the guide was there and he said, 'baby coming in half an hour', so it was a bit of a shock and we were jet lagged and hungry. And half an hour later she was at the door screaming. They handed her to me and she went very quiet and was looking around to see where the orphanage director and carer was but she was not crying. But after they had gone she just latched onto my husband and decided to only go to him. The rest of the week that we were in China she would not come to me.

'First meeting' stories are told to the girls to help them begin to comprehend where and to whom they belong as a result of adoption. The girls themselves speak of the same events and similar key figures, but with alternative explanations. Whilst mothers such as Sally speak of strangeness, and rationalise rejection (a common experience), the girls position themselves as babies to explain their initial rejection of their adoptive parents. Wim (Sally's daughter) tells her version of the same story:

Wim (9yrs). When I was in China, I was a baby so I don't really know what happened. I didn't like Mummy so Daddy had to carry me when we were in China. But when we got back home, Mummy gave me a chocolate biscuit and I liked her then [she laughs] Mummy thinks it was because Daddy had darker eyes and Mummy has light blue eyes and I might have been used to Daddy's colour eyes.

Lisa (7yrs) also recounts a story of initial rejection and again food is used to make a first connection. Lisa's younger sister Jane (5yrs) interjects to explain her elder sister's behaviour:

Lisa. I cried. I remember when I kept stealing the biscuits. Well Mummy and Daddy gave me a biscuit and I ate it and then they gave [orphanage director] a biscuit and I took it because she was right next to me. They were pink ones.

Jane. You didn't understand. You were just a baby

Lisa. My Mummy calls me Peaches because when she got me I had a hole in my bottom [split in trousers traditionally used in China] and when she held me for the first time she said it was as smooth as a peach

Being 'a baby' explains the inexplicable, the rejection of the parents they now love and trust. Both girls laugh about this response to their parents and use humour in telling how the eldest also got her family nickname. Lisa claims these accounts as her memories. This perhaps is not surprising as she has been told these stories over the six years since her adoption, and has seen the video of it taking place frequently. She has participated in the telling of the story with her family members (as does her younger sibling despite being absent, and not even born when the event took place).

It is common for parents to use archived material such as video clips. Archive materials were variously used in the interviews to show me something, or provide information.

Rosie (7yrs). We watch the video about our adoptions. We took our video recorder and my Mummy and Daddy filmed it. I was sad when Mummy and Daddy adopted me

China as an imagined home space and England as home seem to be fluid in these narratives. Wim speaks of getting 'back home' after her adoption. Rosie reveals in the extract above, the collective ownership of the video recorder by the term 'we took'. The phrase also demonstrates a plurality 'we' and that she too travelled from England to China. Rosie situates herself as belonging with her family even as she talks about her adoption from her birth country and her emotions at the time. The girls know these stories because they have been told them repeatedly and as they tell them the stories shift and are restoryed (Cresswell 2008).

One father speaks of the imperative to begin telling these stories:

Frank. One of the things we got from all the application process in both domestic and intercountry adoption is that you talk about adoption before they can talk about it, you talk about it to them, and it has never been a topic that we don't talk about.

Frank's wife then adds a story which corroborates Frank's claim by telling me about the first time her daughter said 'adoption':

Thelma. She was about two years old sitting in her high chair and she said 'dopted' for the first time with a big smile on her face and this went on to become 'dopted, China'

Birth, abandonment, and adoptive narratives are used by adoptive parents to connect their children to birth families and countries as well as adopted ones. Gathering 'big information' and, 'little and seemingly insignificant' details about their past (Richards 2014b, p. 9) is part of how primordial and adoptive belonging is performed and genealogies created in these families.

#### *4.4. Building a Genealogy*

Creating a coherent and informed life narrative is a necessity if one is to be a good adoptive parent (Richards 2018). Archives, in particular, can articulate people and places from the past, they also identify our connection to these people and places, and so help us to understand who and how, we belong in the present (Meinhof and Galasinski 2005). When outlined in these terms it is unsurprising about the extent to which the families in my study engaged with archiving. The transcript below describes Tina's extensive archiving work and also her display of this ascribed role:

Tina. We are still in close contact with the manager of the hotel where we stayed [in China] for the adoption. He had breakfast with us each morning; he'd sit and tell us about his family, his children, and his wife. We still send and get emails from him. We have made it very clear that they are part of this history and that we want him to stay close to us.

Sarah. Why is this so important to you?

Tina. Because I want to maintain as much of [daughter's name,] history with us in a tangible way. I have kept the laundry receipt from the hotel; I don't know what it says as it is in Mandarin but if I can keep these things and keep these relationships then maybe instead of just me telling the story to her, maybe there can be somebody else who will say 'what my perspective was'. It's all in boxes, the jewellery that was given to her, and every card that was sent to her, even Christmas gift tags. I am in the recording business! We are going to have to buy a bigger house. I haven't parted with anything that crossed our path from the time we walked out of this house to go and get her to today. I am not quite sure yet how to compile it because if I sit down and put together a narrative it would be just that, it will be me speaking through my lens and I don't want that. I want her to see the evidence.

Tina as the archivist identifies key roles for casual strangers who happened to be at the scene of this adoption. She describes her retention of minute details and artefacts as part of the adoption story of her daughter. Such details articulate the story of the formation of her family. Anagnost (2000, p. 409) argues that the 'sentimentalization of certain objects', such as the laundry tickets and gift cards mentioned above are, constructed in anticipation of a subject who will need a record of a past and a point of origin, readily retrievable in a form 'already made up' for him or her.

The parents, particularly the mothers in my research, demonstrate explicit knowledge of this archiving role. However, anxiety about whether it is sufficient is also evident in their discussions as Janet describes:

Janet. I hope we do enough, we keep articles and keep life books and story books and read lots of books. We go to CACH [Children Adopted from China organisation] and Chinese summer school each year and we really try to keep on top of it; but it is never too late to learn. We go out on the significant dates and watch movies about adoption and read books about it and China. So we watch stuff like that and we encourage them to go to where the stuff is all kept, and read them or watch the videos whenever they want. We do not put it in their rooms because we think it is all too precious. So I try to keep it all where I can keep an eye on them because so much of it is very sentimental and irreplaceable. We also look at their Chinese adoption files with the stuff in sometimes.

Riggs (2012) argues that too little is done by adopters to comprehend the loss of a child's biological family and birth culture. Trying to balance the loss represented by this absent family for their child is one of a number of challenges for adopters in a social context which already reifies this absent yet mythical biological family. Some mothers speak either remorsefully of not yet completing the archiving (if this is actually something that is ever completed) or lapsing in some way. There is an evident feeling of compulsion or 'obligation' (Shils 1957, p. 108) on the part of adoptive parents to construct a cultural identity and archiving accords with this. Anagnost (2000) claims that this activity stems from an anxiety on the part of these parents to facilitate a secure ethnicity that they cannot provide through biology. However, I argue that it speaks of a starting point, an origin, a place where the known story can begin. It can and does (perhaps inevitably) develop into a cultural identity story in these families but it is also simply telling the story of the birth of any family. It becomes keyed (Goffman 1974) into the wider frame of adoption discourse through its formalisation into what good adoptive parents should do, even in the face of criticism for its inadequacies. Yet, the origins of this activity lie in the normative display of what families 'do'. The imminent arrival of a baby in a family can generate the archiving of artefacts that are emblematic of this event: the ultrasound image, the photos on the bookshelf, the video recording of the birth, and the retention of congratulatory cards. As Frank (2010) argues:

Stories accompany us through life from birth to death. They do not merely entertain, inform or distress us, they show us what counts as right or wrong and teach us who we are.

All families archive and tell stories using artefacts which relate to family identities. Such stories are multiple, plural in the telling and contingent, but there are always family stories as part of the way that families are constructed and displayed: the narratives of and for family life in all its diversity.

#### **5. Narratives of Belonging**

#### *5.1. The Girl's Stories*

As Frank (2010, p. 5) argues, stories remind us that we have to live with complicated truths. When asked to draw birth families, many of the girls placed themselves in these pictures. Identities which these pictures illustrate are shaped by stories told to the girls and reshaped by them as they tell them to others. It can make for a complex and conflictual space in which to determine who one is and to whom and where one belongs. See Figure 4.

**Figure 4.** Louise (9 yrs).

Yngvesson and Mahoney (2000, p. 80) argue that 'proper stories need proper beginnings; [children] must be placed (in a mother's womb/on a native soil)'. This beginning is notable in many of the younger children's stories. As seen earlier, the younger girls create detailed family accounts which weave together imagined family and adoptive family belongings. Their responses also include key narrative structures, such as the orphanage, and key figures such as the police. Davies and Harre (1990) argue that individuals hold multiple social identities which are variously prominent. However, whilst some aspects of these identities can be negotiated, other attributes are imposed by dominant groups (Geertz 1963). Whilst the younger girls in my study accept and reconstruct origin narratives, some of the older participants are more resistant to creative narration and reduce the story they have been told by parents to a temporal progression to adoption and their life now.

Most participants remain willing to repeat it but not always willing to embellish or create imaginative detail:

Louise (aged 9). I was found on a doorstep and somebody took me to the local police station. The police sent me to the children's home. The children's home arranged fostering for me and so I was fostered for about a year. A month before I was adopted, I was taken back to the children's home. I was then adopted and taken back to England

Yngvesson and Mahoney (2000, p. 78) describe adoption stories as 'broken' with attempts to fill the gaps being a way to 'generate order from disorder'. Failure to do so they claim, induces anxiety when a 'fixed point of origin cannot be supplied'. Some participants left the pages blank in my research

where the origin stories/drawings might be told and these silences are powerful narratives in their own right (Richards 2012; Richards et al. 2015; Richards and Clark). Some girls provided questions such as the one below:

May. (8yrs) where was I found? Who was I found by? Where was I taken? And who took care of me in the orphanage?

Louise (9yrs) I would like to know what happened to my birth Mum and birth Dad and why they could not keep me. See Figure 5.

**Figure 5.** Memories of visits to China.

These quotations eloquently depict the inadequacy of the earlier 'created' origin stories for some of the girls. Asking poignant questions is evident in the data along with the occasional challenge to the way the origin narratives have been told (see Richards 2012). The fluidity of these narratives is realised as the girls themselves tell their stories. The activities such as those described here, inevitably place significant emphasis on an ascribed heritage and genealogical narratives. Yet my research with these young girls suggests that, as they grow older they seek alternative narratives through which to situate their identity. Such findings are supported by previous research. Howell (2006) provides accounts of adoptees challenging essential identity traits. Gray (2009) study with young adult Asian adoptees in Australia also indicates that adoptees seek a broader identity narrative than 'transracial adoptee'.

#### *5.2. Alternative Belonging Narratives*

Some girls in my study indicate that essentialised stories of identity which always emphasise or reinvest in an origin narrative are no longer sufficient to identify who they are. Some of the stories indicate a desire by the tellers to move beyond these ascriptions (Richards 2012). A desire to be seen as a more rounded individual than the ascribed 'Chinese Adoptee' is evident for example, in Mel's (10yrs) statement made in response to me explaining the research to her again as part of her ongoing consent;

I am more than just adopted; I don't feel like I am different to everyone else just because I was adopted.

Interesting to note here is the past tense which Mel uses to describe her adoption. This is in contrast with the present tense used in much social work adoption literature. Adoptees seem to be burdened not only with ascribed identities which mark them as different from normative family kinship but also the enduring presence of adopted status. As Frank (2010) argues, stories can become more fate than choice. Mel eloquently placed the act of adoption in her past and puts her current self in the present 'I am more'. Such adoption stories can reveal the dis-ease of being forced to a hard game of identity difference in the context of powerful narratives that compel us to situate ourselves in one place or another '(Yngvesson and Mahoney 2000, p. 78).

Other activities such as football, swimming, and interacting with boys, if only to annoy them, are also evident in the quotations below and used to inform me of their identities:

Jess. (9yrs) I like to hang out with my friends and go shopping. I like to go swimming club and football club. I like to do sporty things. I like to put on mini shows. I like going to my gang show rehearsals.

Louise (9 yrs) My special friend is Sasha because she is my best friend and very nice. We like hanging out and chasing and annoying the boys.

Friendships become important belonging narratives too:

Mel. (10 yrs) I love school! I like my friends and my teachers and I don't really like half terms because you don't see you friends every minute of the day like you would on a regular school day.

Jenny. (12yrs) School is fun because all of us, my friends, all go round in a big group talking, playing, and laughing.

Jess. (9 yrs) School is okay because you get lots of work but it is fun too because you have most of your friends there.

#### **6. Have We Got the Genealogical Emphasis Right?**

Genealogical narratives in intercountry adoption are complex, commonly ascribed, and seem to present an element of compulsion or obligation (Shils 1957) to construct on the part of these parents. As they grow older, the girls in this study look for opportunities to resist these origin narratives and seek instead to create other stories about the ways in which they belong. Allowing these children to decide how and when genealogical narratives are important seems to contradict both policy imperatives, family practices, and primordial assumptions. But I argue that an over emphasis on genealogical narrative risks ongoing belongings and identity formation. The necessity to comply with current policy informed by rights discourses and the children's best interest ensures that the emphasis on such origin narratives dominates the lives of these young adoptees. To secure their children's identity formation and wellbeing parents will tell and retell these stories to situate and anchor their children's belonging. Indeed, tension occurs in families as children begin to refuse or resist these stories as I have highlighted elsewhere (See Richards 2012; 2018). Gilbert (2005, p. 65) reminds us that:

Identity cannot be described, explained, or categorised ... what should be understood is that identity may be strategic, uneven, unstable, fragmented, heterogeneous, always in a process of change, never static, always in a state of 'becoming'. Indeed any attempt to resolve the question of identity is a fallacy.

The following account is provided by Sue, a mother who professes a desire for genealogical identity in adoption to be more pragmatic and for adoptees to have the capacity be more agentic in identity formation:

Sue. The adoptions today are on the back of those earlier transracial adoptions when the children were told nothing, which was so, so bad, so they [social work profession] rewrote

the book and ensured that children are now told everything. But where does that leave them about where they actually belong? Maybe it is time to rewrite the book again. My father was Australian, my mother American; I regard myself as Spanish because that is where I grew up and the language I spoke. We should be the generation of adopters that say, "well actually we are going to allow our children to ebb and flow, between one and the other so that it is okay if they don't talk about their birth mother every day, that they know what they need to know when they want to know it".

The normative categories of belonging through biology, ethnicity, and country are dominant categories of the cultural space occupied by these girls, and their status, when defined through such traditional categories becomes ambiguous and difficult to classify. The uneasy fit of the girls' belongings is evident at times in their stories. Undoubtedly their adoption marks these girls as different, and on occasion, as they grow up, this difference can conflict with their desire to be the same as their peers (Friedlander 2003). Parents can feel compelled to reduce this othered nature of adoptive belongings for their daughters through stories which connect children to normative, essentialised belongings of birth, biology, and country. But I argue that these genealogical stories eventually become the narratives which exemplify difference rather than reduce it and some of the girls have become less willing to perform these identity narratives. The expectation to tell such stories and situate adoptees in the 'social order' is explicit in adoption literature (Yngvesson and Mahoney 2000). The liminality of adoption is one that wider society imposes on these adoptees and then a role that it expects them to perform. Be adopted if you wish to belong, this then is the social and political belonging of adoption that is imposed on adoptees and their families. However, these girls are not only produced by social context, they are also productive and need not be constrained by the limitations of these narratives or the absence of normative belonging that they reveal. These stories can be perceived as a starting point to move beyond, not a constant presence as adoption is commonly perceived. 'I was adopted' should perhaps be the linguistic term that we allow these girls and others to claim. Belonging can also be viewed as a threshold state where new identities and culture is formed and new social structures emerge, a boundary from which something can begin rather than end (Bhabha 1994).

Our belonging narratives need not be fixed nor should they constrain our identities, rather we should perceive them as ever-evolving carrying not only the legacies of our birth, biology, and culture but also our choices and experiences which shape who we are, who we wish to be and where we belong. As Wim (9yrs) eloquently, powerfully, yet softly stated:

'I'm more than just adopted'

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


Bruner, Jerome. 2004. Life as Narrative. *Social Research* 71: 691–710.

Cockburn, Tom. 2005. Children and a Feminist ethic of care. *Childhood* 12: 71–89. [CrossRef]


Rushton, Alan, Margaret Grant, John Simmonds, and Julia Feast. 2012. Assessing Community Connectedness and Self-regard in a Mid-life Follow-up of British Chinese Adoptions. *Adoption & Fostering* 36: 62–72.

Schneider, David M. 1968. *American Kinship A Cultural Account*. London: University of Chicago Press.

Selman, Peter. 2017. Why Is Intercountry Adoption Declining? Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/ social-care-network/2017/may/25/why-is-intercountry-adoption-declining (accessed on 24 July 2018).

Selwyn, Julie, and Dinithi Wijedasa. 2008. The Language of Matching, Why am I waiting? Paper presented at LVSRC London British Association Adoption & Fostering Conference, London, UK, 7 July 2008.

Shils, Edward. 1957. Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil ties. *British Journal of Sociology* 8: 130–45. [CrossRef] Smolin, David M. 2004. Intercountry Adoption as Child Trafficking. *Valparaiso University Law Review* 39: 281–325. Traver, Amy E. 2009. Towards a theory of fictive kin work: China adoptive parents efforts to connect their children

	- the Child. Available online: http://www.unicef.org.uk/UNICEFs-Work/Our-mission/UN-Convention/ (accessed on 13 June 2018).

*Genealogy* **2018**, *2*, 25

Watson, Debbie, Sandra Latter, and Bellow Rebecca. 2015. Adopters' views on their children's life story books. *Adoption & Fostering* 39: 119–34.

Yngvesson, Barbara, and Maureen A. Mahoney. 2000. As One Should, Ought and Wants to Be' Belonging and Authenticity in Identity Narratives. *Theory, Culture & Society* 17: 77–110.

Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2011. *The Politics of Belonging Intersectional Contestations*. London: Sage.

© 2018 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## *Article* **Damaged Attachments & Family Dislocations: The Operations of Class in Adoptive Family Life**

#### **Sally Sales**

Dept Health & Social Sciences, University of West of England, Bristol BS16 1QY, UK; sally.sales@uwe.ac.uk

Received: 1 August 2018; Accepted: 9 December 2018; Published: 13 December 2018

**Abstract:** This paper is an initial exploration of an under researched area in the field of contemporary adoption—the impact of class on adoptive family life. The first part of the paper argues that whilst class is structurally present in adoption work, the effects of class difference have been a neglected dimension of practice. This neglect of class in adoption reflects its elision in the wider social field. It isn't that class stratification has materially or economically disappeared but that the inequalities it installs are concealed through a new privileging of individualism. This individualizing of social problems places new regimes of responsibility upon both individuals and parents. This section concludes with an exploration of the intensive field of contemporary parenting, where social background is considered unimportant. It is argued that attachment theory has become a dominant paradigm for parenting in both adoption and the wider social field because its classed notions of parenting are concealed. The second part of the paper draws upon a small scale qualitative study with one local authority adoption team where adoptive parents and birth parents were interviewed about class and parenting. Working classness assumed a structuring importance in terms of the interview material, as most participants were from this class background. Two areas are particularly foregrounded: the degree to which adopted children's class differences are interpreted as attachment difficulties and the degree to which middle-classness operates as a silent measure for successful parenting in substitute care.

**Keywords:** class; adoption; parenting; attachment; working-class

As a way of introducing this paper, I have four quotations from my research project on class and adoption.

The first is from two adoptive parents:

When we started the process I thought we had to be middleclass, living in a mansion house with a garden, had that in my head, one thing that slowed us down with adopting. They won't want two manual workers and ones who are still building their house

The second is from an adoption manager:

Adopters social backgrounds are irrelevant—it is whether they can parent according to PACE (playfulness, acceptance, curiosity, empathy) and how they score in attachment interview

The third is from an Adoption social worker:

It is funny you discussing class. I have had struggling adopters tell me that once their children go to school, they are drawn to play with children from the same background as their birth family. What is so surprising is that these children were removed very early from their first families

And the final quotation is from a birth mother:

I am not middleclass, I am working class; I am hoping my kids will have a bit more than working class, an education

These four quotations give four very different but related accounts of the complicated and contradictory place that class occupies in contemporary adoption. In the first quotation a working class couple are surprised that they would be acceptable adoptive parents. In the second quotation an adoption manager confirms that social background is irrelevant provided adopters have the right kind of attachments in their parenting. In the third quotation a social worker acknowledges the enduring mark of working classness in adopted children and in the final quotation a working class birth mother hopes her children's origins will be improved by adoption. All the quotations reveal a view of working classness as second class, an inferior social position but one that leaves an enduring mark that not even adoption can eradicate. Yet alongside this acknowledgment of working classness there is also its elision. Central to adoption work is the view that parenting is a class free activity and that how we parent is not informed by class. Yet the privileging of an attachment model of parenting promotes a particular classed notion of what it is to be a parent, a silent measure against which working class parenting must struggle or fail.

This paper is an initial exploration of an under researched area in the field of contemporary adoption—the impact of class on adoptive family life. It is part of a wider research study that is exploring the impact of class on contemporary open adoption, a project that develops previous research in this area. The objective is to find out more about the lived experience of class in adoption and how class attitudes and experiences operate within substitute parenting. Whilst class is enjoying a new visibility within sociology (for example: Devine et al. 2005; Atkinson et al. 2012; Biressi and Nunn 2013) and there is substantial research on mothering and class (for example: Lawler 2000; Walkerdine et al. 2001; Lareau 2003; Gillies 2007), it has been a neglected area within adoption social work. The classed nature of adoption is often commented upon, but there has been no research undertaken on how class is a significant structuring in terms of how both adoptive parenting and attachment is understood and practiced.

The paper will be in two parts. Part one will be a brief overview of how we can understand the neglect of class in adoption work. Part two will draw upon a small scale qualitative pilot study with one local authority where adopters and birth parents were interviewed to explore class and parenting in contemporary adoption.

#### **1. The Neglect of Class in Adoption**

Given that since the 1970s adoption has largely been about the transfer of working class children to middleclass families (Parker 1999; Bridge and Swindells 2003), one would expect the effects of class difference to be informing placement practice. However, whilst parenting and child welfare are central to adoption, their classed constitution is given little attention1. In the contemporary era of open adoption, class differences are starkly evoked, as usually middleclass educated and materially comfortable adopters sustain some kind of tie for their children with working class, impoverished and under educated birth parents. Yet there has been little research on the effects of these profound class differences. One quite obvious explanation is the nature of adoption as an intervention. Since its inception, adoption has operated to sever and remove a child's first history and to replace it with a new family culture. Whilst there have been all sorts of other changes to its practices, adoption is still understood as an intervention that can remove an original social background. This understanding was

<sup>1</sup> Whilst class isn't mentioned, a recent paper (Selwyn and Meakings 2015, Vol. 39, pp. 294–302) exploring the issue of smell within the context of adoption disruption, is clearly about class. A number of adoptive parents interviewed had said that from the beginning their children 'didn't smell right' and this clearly inhibited the process of attachment. The paper did not explore the relationship between the 'wrong smell' and class differences, arguing for more essentialised biologisticbiological explanations. Yet there is a long history of the working classes being understood as the stinking poor, the great unwashed (Barret-Ducrocq 1991), which surely is contributing to these adoptersadopters' revulsion.

endorsed in the interviews with adopters where there was a strongly held view that their children's original class background would be eradicated by adoption. However, the neglect of class in adoption is not reducible to the replacement family culture that it operates. I want to now go on to explore a number of significant changes in the contemporary social field that makes the acknowledgment of class and class differences extremely challenging.

The 'disappearance of class' in western cultures has been a much explored and debated issue within political and social sciences (Bauman 2000; Žižek 2000; Butler 2004; Skeggs 2004; Tyler 2013). Of course, it isn't that class stratification has materially or economically disappeared but that the inequalities it installs are concealed through a new privileging of individualism. We live in an era where social problems are individualized, understood as caused by the actions or choices of individual subjects. There is now the view that class as a social structuring is irrelevant to how a person progresses—or not—in their life. Everyone, if they work hard and use opportunity, can get on and achieve and we all now bear an enormous responsibility for the lives we lead. It is not poverty or disadvantage that is holding people back, it is their poor self-management. By situating failure as personal not social, it has become much more difficult to both recognize and so resist the forms of inequality and injustice that contemporary class stratification produces. Bauman (2000, p. 135) captures very well this atomizing of the social:

'The matter of improvement is no longer a collective, but an individual enterprise. It is individual men and women on their own who are expected to use, individually, their own wits, resources and industry to lift themselves to a more satisfactory condition'.

There has been a related transformation in the field of parenting. Today parenting is defined as so determining a practice that social issues are no longer considered factors in how children are raised. This new centrality of parenting means we now commonly speak of failures of mothering, not failures in the wider socioeconomic field. In her book, *Marginalised Mothers*, Gillies explores the impact that this contemporary 'disappearance' of class has had on working class mothers.

'Without the language of class to explain their lives, such mothers are set apart, misinterpreted and ultimately blamed for the socio-economic marginalisation that characterise their lives'. (Gillies 2007, p. 19)

Without a framework of social and economic inequality, these mothers blame themselves for their struggles with parenting. Furthermore, whilst parenting is understood as outside of social class (Lawler 2000; Gillies 2007; Faircloth et al. 2014), the silent measure for all parents is a middleclass model:

'For the sake of their children's future, and for the stability and security of society as a whole, working class parents must be taught how to raise children who are capable of becoming middleclass'. (Gillies 2007, p. 7)

Clearly this contemporary culture is significantly oppressive for working class mothers, but as my interviews revealed, for the unfit working class mother the consequences are far graver.

Finally, what accompanies this new centrality of parenting is an intensified and risk averse parenting culture. There is a growing literature (Hays 1996; Nelson 2010; Faircloth et al. 2014) on what has been described as this new 'intensive motherhood' (Hays 1996) with the child's attachment a central concern and the avoidance of risk a key structuring practice. Burman (2008, p. 98) describes how 'the greater segregation, protectionism and surveillance of children' has led to not only an increase in childhood conduct disorders, but in children's protracted dependence. Many commentators (Walkerdine and Lucey 1989; Skeggs 1997; Lareau 2003; Gillies 2007; Nelson 2010; Faircloth et al. 2013) have argued that this new parenting culture where children's dependence is both fostered and extended requires the kind of time and money only available to middleclass parents.

Since the 1970s attachment theory has incrementally established itself as the central organizing paradigm for this intensive parenting culture. At a time when the child at risk was becoming a cultural concern, attachment theory's emphasis on the maternal 'secure base' would offer the ideal framework to protect and nurture that child (Sales 2012; Faircloth et al. 2014) Attachment theory has now become such a normalized part of cultural understandings of parenting that its classed basis goes unnoticed. As Burman (2008, p. 140) elaborates, 'The apparatus of attachment theory naturalizes class and cultural privilege'. Furthermore, it reduces the social to the interpersonal, making a particular kind of mothering the primary and determining focus for the production of 'good' citizens (Burman 2008, p. 132).

Attachment theory is, also of course, a dominant paradigm within adoption and the primary way of understanding both the dysfunctional parenting of birth parents and the re parenting tasks of adopters (Quinton and Michael 1988; Howe et al. 1999; Schofield and Beek 2006).

In my interviews it was clearly a way that most of the adoptive and birth parents understood their parenting, its challenges, its successes and its failures. Any sense of the differences that class might inflect on parenting had been colonized by the dominance of attachment thinking. Within this framework the child's working class family of origin can never be a resource and the child's working class birth heritage is always positioned as a deficit.

I have argued here that the culture of adoption and the culture of the wider social field work together to elide the place of class as a both an experience and an explanatory framework for parents and children involved in adoption. My research aims to return class to the field of adoption and to expose its currently silenced operations.

#### **2. The Pilot Research Project**

The aim of this pilot study was to explore the impact of adopted children's class background on their new adoptive family. There were two areas of enquiry:

The degree to which adopted children's class differences are interpreted as attachment difficulties

The degree to which middle-classness operates as a silent measure for successful parenting in substitute care

This research was undertaken with a rural local authority adoption team in the UK. The study received approval from University of West of England ethics committee and from the participating local authority research governance department. There were a number of meetings with the local authority to discuss both the nature of the research and recruiting for the study. A mailing was then undertaken by the local authority to all domestic adoptions from care in the last five years, where there was either direct or indirect contact. The mailing went to both adopters and birth parents involved in each adoption and included a letter explaining the project, an information sheet for participants and a consent form with a stamped addressed envelope to the researcher. The following is a list of the respondents: See Table 1.


**Table 1.** Research participants.

All the participants who responded were from working class backgrounds, except for one adoptive father. I was interested that apart from this one adopter, no middleclass adopters self-selected for this particular research. This raises questions about why this study did not interest middleclass adopters and what might need to be changed in terms of the project design in order to engage them in the future? This meant that working classness has assumed a structuring importance in terms of this study and has certainly indicated some findings for a bigger piece of research.

#### **3. Defining Class**

This study placed an importance on the self-reporting of class by the respondents. However, as the interviews show, only the adopters were able to define their class identity, with birth parents struggling with this question. The researcher, then, drew on a number of indicators to define the class of the four birth parents: Educational background; employment; family background and family history; language use; aspirations.

Recent work on widening the scope of class analysis (Skeggs 2004; Reay 2005; Atkinson et al. 2012) has also contributed to how class has been thought about in this study. The work of Bourdieu, particularly his work on class taste in Distinction (Bourdieu 2010) moved class analysis away from economic inequalities to cultural and symbolic forms of domination (Atkinson et al. 2012, p. 1). The cultural and social capital of working class subjects are not accorded the same level of recognition as middleclass capital; indeed forms of working class capital are often shamed and denigrated (as the interviews below reveal). This tension is clearly evident in the working class adopters, who all have taken on a middleclass life style but still insist on their working class identities, setting up a complex and paradoxical position for them in relation to their children's working class background.

#### **4. Interviews**

The interviews were conducted by a sole researcher, who has a background in adoption and is also a psychoanalyst. They took place in participant's homes except for the interview with participant 6, who was interviewed at a family center. The interviews lasted between 2 and 3 h and were semi structured around the following questions:


The two questions around how children came into or went out of families were deliberately open in order to find out more about how parents understood their parenting.

All participants were assured about the confidentiality of the research and that any use of the material would be anonymized and their identities concealed. Whilst these protocols are foundational to any research interviews, they have an even greater importance within the culture of adoption where secrecy and confidentiality are foundational to its operation. The interviews were digitally recorded (with all participants granting permission for this) and subsequently transcribed and anonymized for analysis.

#### **5. Methodology**

Both the interviews and the analysis of the interview material are understood within a psycho social framework. This means that the psychological and the social are understood as imbricated (Butler 2005, p. 5), when so often in adoption research there is a privileging of the psychological. The interviewer, as a practicing psychoanalyst, is very accustomed to conducting intimate conversations within a relational field of conscious and unconscious communications. Whilst the interviews are not regarded as psycho-analytic sessions, there was an awareness of the transferences that the position of researcher produces, as well as an acute sense that talking about class stirs up a very intense affective field where shame is commonly provoked. There is not the space in this paper to address this dimension of the interviews.

Walkerdine et al. (2001, p. 83) discuss how their own working class backgrounds enabled them to create a 'different discourse' for reading the operations of class in their research interviews. They emphasize two aspects of their position: working class experience is not read as either lacking or pathologized against a middleclass standard and questions not normally posed were able to be asked. The interviewer's own working class background was hoped to be a similar resource in interviewing a largely working class sample.

#### **6. Class and Parenting in Adoption**

#### *Adoptive Parents on Class*

All the adoptive parents identified as working class, except for one adoptive father who described himself as middleclass. They were all keen to communicate about their class, and expressed pride in their working classness. Some of the adopters had been through higher education, but still felt tied to their working class roots. All the adopters saw their working classness as a resource in their lives.

'I am working class, grew up in a council house, first one in my family to go to university. Mum and dad didn't know about university, an alien world, but I still feel very working class myself, proud of it'. (Adopters 3)

'I would say I am definitely working class, my dad was a painter and decorator, mum stayed at home, a very local life; I moved back to the same village when I adopted; I want my son to have the same kind of upbringing I had, freedom, go to the beach'. (Adopter 5)

All the adopters lived in secure housing that they owned, all worked and could be described as part of the professional/managerial class. They all drew attention to how well they had done for themselves, how far they had exceeded their own parents' lives. In spite of this so called social progression, they all remained very clear about their working class identity. Clearly these participants are not using an economic model for understanding their class position, as by their own description they have moved into what could be designated a middleclass professional place. This sense of their working classness seems more tied to an affective sense of belonging. This is what Bourdieu would describe as a class aesthetic, a form of taste that has been unconsciously installed, creating a deep sense of class belonging (Bourdieu 2010, p. 169). Furthermore, this enduring sense of working classness is consistent with recent research on working class culture. In a recent collection on class Devine et al. (2005, p. 99), cited numerous research studies that showed how little difference there is between the affluent and the unskilled working class in terms of their culture.

'It proved difficult to sustain the view that there were fundamental differences between the affluent working class and the unskilled working class. Other studies argue that it is difficult to find any clear differences between skilled and unskilled workers, and show that the working class is still demographically coherent'.

However, the interviews revealed a less homogeneous picture of working class culture than that suggested above. For some of the adopters, it was important to differentiate their working class identities from those more disadvantaged working class birth parents.

All the adopters emphasized close and supportive ties with their extended working class families, most of whom lived very local to them. Indeed during two of the interviews, grandparents turned up

to either bring back or collect grandchildren. The traditional extended working class family was well represented amongst the adoptive parents in my sample, with all parents emphasizing the importance of these kinship connections. However, whilst all of the adopters had this inclusiveness around family, there were marked differences in how far they wanted to include their children's birth families. I will return to this point in more detail later.

Given that all the adopted children were from working class backgrounds, this could be then seen as a helpful match. Sharing a class background might help the adopters understand or empathize with the birth parents, might help them understand aspects of their children's heritage. However, a much more complicated picture emerged during the interviews. For three of the five adopters, the children's working class background was something that they dismissed, denigrated or marginalized. I will give some examples from these three families.

I asked Adopters 1 to describe the class background of their two adopted children; the adoptive father (the one middleclass adopter in the sample) said:

'Same as ours, adoption completely lifts the girls out of that cycle, the only thing that can do that, fostering you still have the links'.

I asked again about the background:

'We know the area they grew up, it wasn't that they weren't loved, but history of people not knowing how to parent, not a lot of opportunity to get out, nobody really working, that sort of life style'.

It was striking how much the parents did not want to talk about the class origins of their children; I had to persist with my question to get it answered. In answering, the adoptive father identifies some key elements in the children's class background—a lack of work, a lack of social mobility and an ignorance around parenting. Their working class origins are seen as a source of limitation and waste, making no positive contribution, so there is no loss for the children in replacing this background with a new adoptive family. This impression was confirmed when I asked the adopters about how the children's social background came into their home life with them. Again the adoptive father answered:

'Hasn't been hammered out of them, but they have nice middleclass table manners now. We did have to tell them that all the McDonald's were closed'.

This interesting communication suggests that the children's class background has been rigorously removed and replaced by a different middle class mode of being. This may reflect the father's own middleclass position, but it was also apparent with some of the working class adoptive mother's communications. She said:

'They are both so clever and that would have been wasted if they had stayed where they were'.

To illustrate this, she tells me what the children's birth mother wanted for the girls in terms of their new adoptive family. The birth mother said she wanted them to be able to go to the park and the beach. The adoptive mother saw this response as having 'narrow ambitions for the girls' it could be argued that the birth mother has different ambitions for her children, ambitions formed through a rather different class experience2.

Indeed there was a strong sense that these adopters conducted some surveillance of their children's behavior for signs of their original class background in order to correct and replace these behaviors.

<sup>2</sup> There is now a growing literature on the differences of working class subjectivity (Walkerdine et al. 2001; Skeggs 1997, 2004; Gillies 2007) differences shaped and formed through structural inequality and lack of recognition. Gillies (2007, p. 77) makes the point that working class ambitions are shaped by fitting in, not standing out, whereas middleclass ambitions are tied to visible achievement. If you lack middleclass legitimacy, then standing out is very challenging.

These adopters had different class positions, but in terms of their adopted children, it is the middleclass position that is the more desirable.

They were not the only adopters who saw McDonald's as a signifier of low grade working class taste. Adopters 2 complained to me about the presents their two adopted children had been given by their birth parents:

'Lots of stuff arrived with the children, plastic tat, nothing had any meaning, lots of plastic free gifts, kind of thing that you get with McDonalds, nothing of value'.

Here there is again a denigration of the children's working class culture, which the adopters dismiss as cheap and valueless. Yet these were the adopters that had been surprised that they were allowed to adopt because of their working class background.

In my final example, adopters 3 were very uninterested in their children's class background, telling me it was unimportant. When pressed I was told that their children's birth mother was a working class drug addict, still living in the same town as themselves, alongside her wider family. This proximity was very troubling for the adopters and they had changed their children's names to protect their privacy. Again, they very much wanted to totally replace their children's background and showed little interest in having knowledge about the children's early life. The adoptive mother said 'Anything the children want to know we have' There was a strong sense of closing the family lines, and shutting out the children's earlier history. The birth mother was presented to me as nothing more than an addict

'We keep track of the birth mother via the local paper; she is 36, petty crime to support her habit'.

When it came to discussing contact arrangements, the same conflicted and denigratory relationship to the birth parents circulated. Adopters K did an annual letter but seemed dismissive and disinterested in this form of contact and unsure about who it was for

'I do a letter, but no-one picks it up and I don't know who it is sent out to; I didn't do last year's but just about to do this year's'.

They are similarly disregarding of the children's life story books, where there is a lot of uncertainty about whether they even have them. There is a strong sense that this earlier history and heritage is less important than the children's new life with their new family.

I want to now think about what we can make of these (largely) working class adoptive parents in a relation of denigration and marginalization to other working class parents?

In spite of a shared cultural heritage, these adopters were expending a great deal of energy and commitment to pointing up huge differences between themselves and these other more failing working class parents. I would argue that in a culture that still denigrates working classness, working class people find it imperative to separate themselves from those others who are lower down on the working class ladder. Bourdieu, writing in Distinction (Bourdieu 2010, p. 33), says

'It must never be forgotten that the working class 'aesthetic' is a dominated aesthetic which is constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics'.

It was clear that all the working class adopters in my sample identified with the dominant middleclass aesthetic, whilst still endorsing their working class origins. Their homes and their life styles were clearly modelled on middleclass taste, an aspirational standard against which their working classness was a source of failure. So whilst working classness was a resource for these adopters, it was also a cause of concern, as it created a proximity to a more troubled form of working classness in their children. This troubled working classness touched something in them about their own class position. This meant that rather than operating as a source of empathy, it operated as a source of revulsion. This can be seen in the ways that the children's class behaviors, or class attachments have to be remade or removed from adoptive family life. We could say that the injurious class identity of working class adopters is mobilized by the adoption of working class children, which leads to a denigration/rejection of the children's working class background.

For two of the adopters there was a very different relationship to their children's class background. These were two single adopters (participants 4 and 5), who very much embraced their children's class background and wanted to include the family of origin as a positive for their adopted children. Both these adopters found the exclusive culture of adoption difficult and challenging. Both came from large close knit working class families, where family gatherings and family relations are important and this is very much their relationship to their children's birth family. These adopters were critical of what they experienced as the 'rigidity' of the local authority letterbox system, complaining that they were not 'allowed' to write extra letters and include photographs. Adopter 4 was upset and frustrated that her daughter did not have visiting contact with her birth parents: 'My daughter would say to me, 'I am still getting used to it here and I want to see my mummy and daddy'. This adopter linked the lack of visiting contact with her daughter's very slow capacity to settle. With these two adopters there is not the same mobilization of class injury in relationship to their children's class background; indeed they embraced their working class children's heritage. A follow-up study, with a larger sample would allow a greater and more in-depth exploration of how these differences within working class adopters can be understood.

#### **7. Birth Parents on Class**

'It was a fact, I was never going to get my kids back, even if I had won a million pounds on the lottery, it was a fix, right from the moment they were taken off me, to it ended. It is one rule for them and one rule for me'.

The above mother captures very well the position of an unfit working class mother today. She understands the enormous gulf that separates her world from the world of acceptable mothering. This mother has been defeated by the rules of a culture that she has been powerless to challenge. All of the parents interviewed knew that there was an enormous difference between their lives and so-called 'normal families' but this difference was never described in class terms. The four birth parents struggled to answer the question about their class background. Here are their answers:

Birth mother 7: (Laughing) 'I haven't thought about it' (looking at her mother also in the room).

Birth mother 8: 'Don't know what you mean. I see myself as a down to earth person, help people when they need it'.

Birth father 6: 'I am working class. All my family were my world and I just worked for them, farming'.

Birth mother 9: (laughing) 'I am not middleclass, I work, my husband works, now I don't have the children I look for work, so working class I guess'.

It was clear that these four parents were working class, a definition based on the following information communicated in the interviews: economic position, employment, family background and history, aspirations, education, language. However, unlike the adopters, they do not understand their lives in class terms. Indeed, they didn't really understand the question and even the two parents who said they were working class, were taking the term very concretely, and understanding the question to be one about their status as workers. In talking to the parents, there was a profound sense that their histories were characterized by the precarity of deprivation, abuse and poverty, but the language of class inequality and injustice was never used to describe themselves or their background. This means that, unlike the working class adopters, their class backgrounds were not a resource or an explanation for their lives. This raises some important questions about how working classness can be a resource for some parents, but not for others. Unlike the adopters, the birth parents in this study were not resourced by either family, education or work. Two of the parents mentioned their family—indeed one of the mothers was interviewed with her mother present—but these family ties did not operate as a source of support, meaning or stability. Most importantly, the social condemnation that failed parents receive, powerfully prevents their class background being anything except a source of shame and denigration.

Commonly the parents framed their experiences in individual family terms—their families had failed them and they had then failed as parents. Here are two examples:

An exchange with birth mother 9 who had five children adopted:

Why do you think the children were adopted?

'My own stupid screw ups, didn't have the best start in life, abused when I was a child, didn't have the right upbringing, the right tools to cope with children'.

What was missing?

'A family really, it's like you can only trust so much and I couldn't trust my family, in a normal upbringing you would have the keys, you would learn from mum and dad, had none of that, I made a lot of mistakes'.

Birth mother 8, who had three children adopted, was very forthcoming about her family background, and like birth mother 9 related this to her own difficulties with her children. Her mother was violent and neglectful, but no-one removed her until she was 14. She lived with her gran, then in foster care, then a children's home. At some point in social care she was sexually abused.

'We didn't have a stable environment like normal families, we were just wild because we had no chance of a home'.

Both these birth mothers have a notion of a 'normal' family where they would have had the 'right' upbringing. This would have supplied them with the tools and the keys to have been better mothers themselves. We could say that they are using the language and the references of middleclass mothering as a measure, against which they have failed. There is a clear correlation in these communications between abnormal/working class and normal/middleclass. Within such an opposition their mothering can never be understood as any kind of contribution for their children. Furthermore, as there is no wider social framework for them to understand their experiences, they blame their own families, and then themselves for what has happened to their children.

#### **8. Adoptive Parents on Parenting**

The interviewer was interested in exploring whether these working class adopters had taken on the dominant attachment model of parenting. The local authority manager had already made it clear that, in line with most adoption teams in the UK, they use an attachment framework. This issue emerged in the interviews when parents discussed how family life has been since the arrival of their adopted children. Adopters 3 used the language of attachment most directly. The adoptive mother had been to attachment training and some workshops 'to put her mind at rest' and she then used the language of attachment to describe the two adopted children. Here is how she describes the older daughter, who was 8 months old when placed:

'L has attachment difficulties; she was in a busy foster placement, busy household, lots of children. The foster mum said L had attachment difficulties. L's attachment took a long time. She has an insecure attachment, she goes nowhere by herself; she cries when I leave her at a school; it has taken her a long time to attach to me'.

In contrast, her younger sister who was placed at 4 weeks from hospital, has no attachment difficulties and is described as more robust and more secure than her sister.

Adopters 1 also used attachment to capture a difference between their two children. Their oldest daughter had 'experienced abuse' but the youngest was removed so early 'she had less attachment difficulties'

Adopters 2 also made a difference between their two children, who were 2 and 5 months when placed.

'My oldest A, was a real struggle at first, she had been neglected, but he was removed at birth. A hadn't been looked after, wasn't fed properly, passed around the family'.

With these three families the notion of forming a singular attachment to two parents means the favoring of the youngest child, the one who has the least attachment to his/her former life. The oldest child in each case is seem as struggling because she has taken longer to form an attachment. In each of these cases the older child's relationship with the birth family was an issue, with questions that couldn't be answered. Are these children's kinship ties to their first families being pathologized as attachment disordered behaviors?

Adopters 1 reported to me that the oldest daughter was incredibly curious about her history:

'L wants to know where she was before Sue [the foster carer]. She is devastated because we don't know her first spoken word, whereas for her sister, A, we were there for the first everything—first word, first step. Because A never lived at home, removed from birth, she is so different. She cannot remember a time before us, but we have gaps for L'.

The adopters tell me that L is very persistent about wanting information

'She wants to know why we can't phone up her birth mother and ask what her first word is. When we say we don't where she is, L wants to know why? Can we find out where she is and can we visit her?'

For these adopters there is clearly a conflict between the kind of family attachments they want to achieve, and the demands of their oldest daughter, with her continuing curiosity and attachments to her first family. Whilst these adopters are very angry at the lack of information they have for their daughter, they will not entertain any possibility of finding out this information from the birth family itself.

Adopters 2 have a similar conflict about the place their children's former attachments occupy. The adoptive mother became very emotional telling me about her family tradition of giving all new babies a teddy bear. She turns to her adopted son and asks him about his teddy bear, but the little boy starts telling me about Rabbit, a stuffed toy that his birth father had given him. He becomes extremely animated and starts asking for Rabbit in a loud voice, which brings his sister into the conversation. She has Fluffy, she tells me, Fluffy is so important that he never goes out of the house. The adoptive mother, now looking very distressed, tells me her daughter has had Fluffy since her birth, a stuffed animal given to her by her birth mother.

Clearly these two stuffed toys, Rabbit and Fluffy, have enormous importance for the children as important ties to their birth history, but for the adoptive mother they are complex signifiers of her children's attachment to their first family. Within the attachment framework, there is no room for attachments elsewhere, setting up profound conflictual difficulties for adopted children. Furthermore, the contested position of the birth family in adoption work installs a complex paradox for adopted children; they sustain links with simultaneously endorsed and refused parental figures. For working class adopters these former attachments touch all sorts of issues including their own class identities.

My argument here is with the kind of model of family life that contemporary attachment work promotes and whether that model is the best one for adopted children. The current attachment literature has an insistence on the building of new bonds and on parents developing empathy with their children in order to enforce a singular, familial relationality. This raises a number of questions for working class adopters: Are they comfortable with this attachment model of family life and how different is it to their own working class experience of family? What has to happen to the differences of their own working class backgrounds in order to become such an adopter?

There was a marked contrast with the two other working class adopters. They didn't use the language of attachment to describe their relations with their adopted children and they had a more spacious and open attitude to their children's history. It has been argued that an attachment framework and open adoption practices are irreconcilable (Sales 2012, pp. 120–125) and it is not therefore surprising that adopters are more open when they are not drawing upon attachment thinking in their parenting. Adopter 4 reported that her adopted daughter told her early on 'I am from a different country' and she knew that respecting this difference would be foundational to her daughter settling down.

#### **9. Birth Parents on Parenting**

All three of the birth mothers used the language of attachment to describe their parental deficits. As all of the women had had periods of time in a mother and baby unit as a support to their parenting, they had clearly acquired some of this language. However, there was often considerable confusions about how they understood the purpose of the placement, the expectations of them and why they had failed. Running through all of the extracts is class differences, and how difficult it is for these mothers to understand and participate in the middleclass culture of parenting.

This is an exchange with birth mother 6:

'The mother and baby unit, was this to help you hold onto your girls?'

'Yeah, it was to show my parenting skills, which was going fine, but I got postal natal depression and then wasn't bonding with them or something and they used that against me'.

'Did you know they would be placed for adoption after the mother and baby unit?'

'No they didn't tell me that'.

And the following exchange about her son:

'C tooken off me at 6 months, domestic violence related, I was in a holding placement, which is like before court proceedings, before they put him up for adoption, but I wasn't allowed to do nothing for him, it was weird, like, I could feed him and all, they would have him in their room'.

'Was the idea that they would help your parenting?'

'I didn't get a chance to bond with him, every time, like in the first placement, I got to bond with him at the hospital, but the second I left, after that social were just in control, I got to feed him, but I was told about my baby all the time'.

This birth mother is using the language of the professionals—bonding, parenting skills, post-natal depression—to try and communicate to me about how she failed the numerous placements with her children. Of course, separated from the wider social context of this woman's life, these expressions communicate very little, but what she has understood is that her mothering has fallen far short of these professional standards. Here we see very clearly how parenting is divorced from the wider social field and distilled into a series of detachable universal skills that all mothers need to acquire if they want to keep their children.

Birth mother 8 spoke at length about her failures in various mother and baby placements. Here is her description of a foster placement with her son:

'Not allowed to do much, she wouldn't let me cook, and I had to eat lot of weird stuff, one day vegetarian, I wanted to be my own parent, I had always lived independently, and sometimes I didn't want to out with I if it was cold but I had to, do you remember that snow back in 2009, we had to go down to T . . . that day, frightened of an accident'.

This birth mother captures how difficult she found the culture of the placements, the food, the emphasis on exercise and fresh air, the surveillance of her as a mother, this is a culture that is so other to her life. Like birth mother 6 there is an increasing sense of imprisonment, detention, judgement, with very little understanding of how she should be mothering and how she is failing in these placements.

In contrast, the interviews were full of practices of parenting where the parents communicated about the numerous ways they continued to care about their absent children. All the parents I interviewed expressed worries about their children. Birth mother 8 tied her worry to her maternal position: 'I wouldn't be a mum if I didn't worry' whilst birth mother 9's concerns were to do to with her knowledge of her daughter: 'I am worried about J who doesn't like change, worried how she copes with living with two women, L is young enough he can adapt to anything, but J more confused being that bit older'.

As none of the four birth parents had face to face contact with their children, the letterbox communications were an important way of sustaining their tie to their children. The three birth mothers all had special places for the letters they received, as well as photographs of the children in albums and displayed on walls and surfaces in their homes. The practice of writing letters was reported as challenging for all the parents involved. Birth mother 8 expressed her difficulties: 'It is hard for us mums to write to our own flesh and you have to write it in a stranger's way, it is awkward, know what I mean'. Birth mother 9 explains how she tries to keep up her maternal place: 'They are not allowed to call us mum, but I try and keep the letters as family orientated as I can really'. All the parents complained that they had been forbidden by the local authority to fully communicate their love for their children. Birth mother 9 was upset that the local authority wouldn't let her give her daughter a ring from her and the father with the engraving 'daughter we will always love you'. Birth mother 6 had written an 'unacceptable' letter where she says 'you are always in my heart and I am missing you so much'.

All the parents expressed a wish to see their children and a desire to be ready when they reach 18 and can legally search for them.

The above practices get little or no recognition within the wider culture of adoption. Adoption has disqualified these parents from a parenting role, so the ways they continue to show love and concern for their children receive very little acknowledgment or are given very little importance. However, it was very clear that there were many ways in which these failed parents still practiced parenting with their absent children.

#### **10. Conclusions**

This paper set out to explore the under-researched area of class in the field of adoption through a small scale study interviewing birth parents and adopters. Working classness assumed a structuring importance in this study as the majority of the self-selected participants were from this class background. This produced two particular findings that would reward further exploration. Firstly, with three of the adoptive families, their injurious working class identity was mobilized by the adoption of working class children. This had a negative impact on their relationship with the children's birth family and contact arrangements, resulting in a wish to replace or minimize the children's birth heritage. Secondly, three of the adoptive families embraced the attachment model of parenting, interpreting their children's difficulties with belonging through this particular framework. This had a number of effects: a privileging of the younger adopted child who had less history with previous parents; an emphasis on the building of bonds within the adoptive family; a refusal to address the older child's birth attachments through contact arrangements. Two of the adopters, in marked contrast, were more embracing and open towards their children's birth heritage and didn't draw upon attachment thinking in terms of their parenting.

The interviews with working class adopters clearly then showed differences in both class and parenting attitudes, but the sample is small and a larger sample would provide more information about these differences. What has to happen to the differences of working class parenting in order to take on attachment thinking? How can we understand the differential operation of class where some adopters are clearly more comfortable with the working class background of their children? Unfortunately, my sample didn't represent middleclass adopters and in any future study this would be an important inclusion. Do middleclass adopters parent more easily within the attachment model? Finally, there was ample material that showed marginalization and pathologization of failed birth

parents. What are the effects of this pathologization of their backgrounds on adopted children? How far are attachment difficulties in adopted children a response to being kinship and class conflicted?

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflicts of interest.

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