Overview

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents—a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Kit W. Myers comparatively examines the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. He shows how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures—in contrast to others that are not—and argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempt to transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet they are also linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence. The Violence of Love confronts this discomforting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care.

Full Product Details

9780520402485

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Citing sources from Michel Foucault to Dorothy Roberts, Myers writes in a way that makes the theoretical frameworks and concepts he references accessible to interested readers. This vital addition to the expanding literature of adoptee-authored critical adoption studies is a unique resource for understanding the past and present ramifications of TRNA, one that points the way to a better future for children and families."" * The Washington Independent Review of Books * ""The book is compelling and compassionate; even if abolition seems unrealistic or too radical to you, it is well worth the read."" * Pact, An Adoption Alliance *

""Citing sources from Michel Foucault to Dorothy Roberts, Myers writes in a way that makes the theoretical frameworks and concepts he references accessible to interested readers. This vital addition to the expanding literature of adoptee-authored critical adoption studies is a unique resource for understanding the past and present ramifications of TRNA, one that points the way to a better future for children and families."" * The Washington Independent Review of Books * ""The book is compelling and compassionate; even if abolition seems unrealistic or too radical to you, it is well worth the read."" * Pact, An Adoption Alliance * “Myers’ eye-opening book explores race, family, and various types of violence by examining the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children into white families. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read about adoption: thoroughly researched, deeply moving, revelatory.” * Zocalo Public Square *

Author Information

Kit W. Myers is Assistant Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced.

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