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Negotiating Motherhood: Identity and Difference in “Open” Adoptions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Barbara Yngvesson
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Abstract

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Drawing on interviews with birth and adoptive parents who have remained in contact with each other following placement of an adopted child, this article examines the dynamic of motherhood that emerges in these relationships. Moving back and forth from legal and social event to women's subjective experiences of these events, it argues that open adoption constitutes a “potential space” where two familiar “truths” about motherhood—as an experience of identity and of connection, and as an experience of contingency and separation—converge in powerful ways. Focusing on the double vision of mothers who feel both “real” and “not real” at the same time, it explores the tendency of open adoption to resolve into familiar dichotomies of nature and law and its potential to produce new subjectivities that defy legal categories. The article suggests that analysis of the sociolegal world and of the possibilities for its transformation must work along the unstable boundary of different subjective worlds, moving between them to expose the exclusions and injustices upon which each is premised.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , 1997 , pp. 31 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

Funding for the research on which this article is based has been provided by the National Science Foundation (SES-9113894 and SBR9511937) and by the Hewlett-Mellon Faculty Development funds at Hampshire College. I am especially appreciative of comments on earlier drafts from Julia Belton, John Brigham, Margaret Cerullo, David Engel, Penina Glazer, Leonard Glick, Christine Harrington, Maureen Mahoney, Lourdes Mattei, Nina Payne, Jill Roberts, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Sigfrid Yngvesson, and from anonymous reviewers for this journal. The paper has been presented to the Law and Society Summer Institute (“Work in Progress” session), the Hampshire College Feminist Studies Seminar, and to the Smith College Program on Women and Social Change. Comments and discussion by participants in these seminars have been helpful to my reconceptualization of a number of issues. Finally, I want to thank the birth and adoptive parents whose stories I present, as well as the staff of Friends in Adoption and my own extended family, for agreeing to participate in this work and for their thoughtful responses to the manuscript.

References

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