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"With Contingent Kinship, Kathryn Mariner offers a deeply imaginative ethnography of the affective, moral, and economic dimensions of adoption in the United States. The book is beautifully written, accessible, and engaging. A brilliant, critically important study in which the transcendental significance of caring for a child stayed with me—and affected me—from the first to the last page."—Laurence Ralph, author of Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago
"It is rare to get such access to an adoption agency, and—lucky for us—Mariner is a talented ethnographer who brings her study to life. Her fascinating work shows the inequities of brokered kinship, and how social workers manage the economic and affective fallout when a placement falls through."—Elizabeth Raleigh, author of Selling Transracial Adoption: Families, Markets, and the Color Line
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Introduction: To Speculate Intimately
1 • Suspect and Spectral (M)others
2 • Protective Inspections
3 • Temporal Uncertainties
4 • Kinship’s Costs
5 • Closure
Conclusion: Intimacy’s Intricacies
Notes
References
Index
About the author
Kathryn A. Mariner is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester.
Summary
Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a small Chicago adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption, Contingent Kinship charts the entanglement of institutional structures and ideologies of family, race, and class to argue that adoption is powerfully implicated in the question of who can have a future in the twenty-first-century United States. With a unique focus on the role that social workers and other professionals play in mediating relationships between expectant mothers and prospective adopters, Kathryn A. Mariner develops the concept of “intimate speculation,” a complex assemblage of investment, observation, and anticipation that shapes the adoption process into an elaborate mechanism for creating, dissolving, and exchanging imagined futures. Shifting the emphasis from adoption’s outcome to its conditions of possibility, this insightful ethnography places the practice of domestic adoption within a temporal, economic, and affective framework in order to interrogate the social inequality and power dynamics that render adoption—and the families it produces—possible.
Additional text
"This book will be of use to those interested in and can be taught as part of graduate courses on kinship and race in the United States, gender and reproduction, and objects, gifts and commodities."
