The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States

by Kit Williams Myers

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 regard to 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. Showing 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—he 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 discomfiting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care.  
 

Genres: Adoption

286 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 28, 2025

Reviews

[MeiLing]

It's fascinating reading about adoptees from so many different countries and within the United States. The scholars and activists within these spaces are so inspiring. It's very telling how empty and dispassionate my conversations have been in the past with political strivers, social workers, doctors, nurses, therapists and teachers/professors who aren't adopted but take over in adoption spaces.

[丰春苹༄]

thank you kit myers for making this open access 🙏