Politics of Birthmotherhood

Politics of Birthmotherhood By Kate Livingston Drawing from literatures relevant to the interdisciplinary field of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, this bibliography provides an introduction to the politics of birthmotherhood in the United States. Contemporary feminist scholarship on motherhood reproductive rights have insufficiently accounted for the experiences of women who lose children through adoption. Nevertheless, these bodies of literature provide important insights into the narratives, representations, institutions, and economies that shape birth motherhood in the US. The first section of this bibliography combines interdisciplinary scholarship in adoption studies and general feminist scholarship on motherhood to examine how motherhood is defined and culturally produced. With topics ranging from law to pop culture, these entries explore motherhood as a social institution and cultural construct informed by intersecting and often paradoxical ideologies of race, class, sexuality, and gender. This list focuses on American publications from the 1970s to the present, and is intended to help the reader consider how racial, class, sexual, and gender inequalities produce diverse and multiple experiences of birth parenthood in the US. Drawing primarily from feminist reproductive rights scholarship and adoption literature in law and the social sciences, the second section of this bibliography explores the relationship of birth motherhood to feminist considerations of reproductive rights and justice in the US. Readings on reproductive rights are introductory in nature and are intended to illustrate how feminist scholars have variably theorized the role of law and social policy in the regulation of women’s sexual, reproductive and maternal lives. These readings explore how the struggles over reproductive rights influence the politics of adoption in the US and how adoption is implicated in larger feminist debates over sex equality, privacy, “choice,” and the constitutional foundations of reproductive rights. Entries by and about women of color are especially important in helping readers consider the social, political, and economic conditions necessary for the exercise of rights. These critiques provide a basis for Adoption & Culture Vol. 4 (2014) 160 considering the ways in which adoption law and policy function as the racialized regulation of birthmothers’ sexuality and reproduction. The Ohio State University Birth Mothers and the Feminist Politics of Motherhood Ashe, Marie. “Postmodernism, Legal Ethics and Representation of ‘Bad Mothers’.” Mother in Law: Feminist Theory and the Legal Regulation of Motherhood. Ed. Martha Fineman. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 142–66. Print Berebitsky, Julie. Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851–1950. Wichita, KS: U of Kansas P, 2000. Print. Bordo, Susan. “All of Us Are Real: Old Images in a New World of Adoption.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 21.2 (2002): 319–31. Print. ---. “Will the ‘Real’ Parents Please Step Forward? Beyond Our Fears and Fantasies about Open Adoption.” Adoption & Culture 2 (2009): 7–34. Print. Brettschneider, Marla. The Family Flamboyant: Race Politics, Queer Families, Jewish Lives. Albany: State U of New York P, 2006. Print. Cahn, Naomi. “Birthing Relationships.” 17 Wisconsin Women’s Law Journal 17 (2002): 163–81. Print. Carp, E. Wayne. Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. Print. Chodorow, Nancy, and Susan Cotratto. Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989. Print. Collins, Patricia Hill. “Black Women and Motherhood.” Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000. 45–68. Print. ---. “Mammies Matriarchs and Other Controlling Images.” Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000. 69–96. Print. ---. “Shifting the Center: Race, Class and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood.” Glenn 45–67. Cooey, Paula. “Ordinary Mother as Oxymoron: The Collusion of Theology, Theory and Politics in the Undermining of Mothers.” Hanigsberg and Ruddick 229–49. Print. Livingston, “Politics” 161 Conway,Margaret,DavidAhern,andGertrudeSteuernagel.“Historical Background of Child Care and Family Leave Issues.” Women and Public Policy. Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ, 2004. 180–88. Print. Commachio, Cynthia. “Motherhood in Crisis: Women, Medicine and State in Canada, 1900–1940.” Materialist Feminism. Ed. Rosemary Hennessey and Chrys Ingraham. London: Routledge, 1997. 306– 27. Print. Cornell, Drucilla. “Re-Imagining Adoption and Family Law.” Hanigsberg and Ruddick 208–28. Print. Crittenden, Ann. “The Mommy Tax.” Okazawa-Rey and Kirk 350–59. Davis, Angela. “Outcast Mothers and Surrogates: Racism and Reproductive Politics in the Nineties.” Feminist Theory: A Reader. Ed. Kolmar, 2005, 509...

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