The Stratified Reproduction of Adoptive Kinship: Narrating the Double Origins of Mothers and Children.

Colen's (1995) concept of stratified reproduction has drawn attention to the making of kinship within political economies of race, gender, nation, and class. But how do people who owe their family ties to such inequitable conditions narrate the origins of their kinship? Adoptive parents, for example, must try to find ways to tell the story of how and why their children came to them, which is simultaneously a narration of their own origins as parents; but narrating these together suggests a set of material and social ruptures, especially in relation to birth family. This is a thoroughly gendered affair--much of adoption discourse is about the specularized absence and/or presence of a mother's love, and the contradictions of journeying between differently located mothers. In this paper, I use the case of China/US adoption to examine how stratified reproduction marks the origin stories American adoptive mothers (the vast majority of whom are white) tell to and about their Chinese children (the vast majority of whom are girls). I demonstrate how the uneven relations between adoptive mothers and birth mothers are especially salient in these stories, and how origin narratives resolve these tensions in a variety of ways, including the invocation of universal motherhood, gendered readings of Chinese culture and politics, and most saliently, the hand of fate. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]