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Imagining Future Kinship through Auto/Biographical Adoption Documents in the United States

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2989336
AutoresK A Mariner (0000-0002-6413-6383, University of Rochester, autor correspondente)
Ano2019
Volume34
Fascículo4
Data de publicação2019-11-08
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoCultural Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0886-7356 • E-ISSN: 1548-1360
EditoraAmerican Anthropological Association (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.14506/ca34.4.03
OpenAlexW2989971894
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas9
Referências citadas23

At First Steps, a small private adoption agency outside Chicago, social workers spent more time processing paperwork than interacting with clients. In addition to mediating the relationship between individuals and the bureaucratic adoption apparatus, these documents created anticipatory (p)re-kinned subjectivities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2009 and 2016, this article examines the completion and circulation of two different forms of auto/biographical documentation during the adoption process: the birth parent file and the adoptive family profile. These documents played a vital role in the adoption process by simultaneously enabling the creation and dissolution of kinship, through the folding of past, present, and future narratives and possibilities into adoption knowledge and decision making. Aided by the documentary termination of birth parental rights and the imagination of visual and narrative adoptive futures, domestic adoption legally split biological kinship from social kinship, rendering the former past and the latter present/future

Agency (philosophy · Bureaucracy · Business · Documentation · Ethnography · Futures contract · Kinship · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Child Welfare and Adoption · Gender Studies · Law · Reproductive Health and Technologies