The 4th International Conference on Adoption and Culture
Mapping Adoption: Histories, Geographies, Literatures, Politics
March 22 – 25, 2012
The Claremont Colleges, Claremont, California
Call for Proposals
For our 2012 conference, we are expanding our concerns to include not only adoption in its many historical and cultural variations but also parallel institutions such as foster care, orphanages, and technologically-assisted reproduction, as well as various forms of forced relinquishment or family separation.. We seek proposals that explore the cultural meanings and/or political locations of any of these practices, and we encourage analyses of relationships among them. We will include academic work from a wide range of scholarly disciplines and areas—literature, film and popular culture and performance studies, cultural studies, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, law, women’s and gender studies, etc.— as well as artistic presentations of film, creative writing, graphic art, music, or productions in other media. We also encourage interdisciplinary panels, presentations, and productions.
Proposals may address adoption or related practices or their representation in any way, but we especially encourage work addressing race, class, gender, nationality, and/or sexuality and sexual orientation, and/or investigations of topics such as state and institutional power, (in)fertility, markets and market practices, and incarceration.
Confirmed keynote speaker: Catherine Ceniza Choy, Associate Professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, University of California, Berkeley, whose forthcoming book, Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America, examines how Asian international adoption has contributed to the transformation of the U.S. into an international adoption nation and how its history is also a history of race, labor, immigration and intimacy.
Please send 200-word proposals for papers or samples of creative work (of less than 10 pages) to asac2012 AT scrippscollege.edu.
Proposal deadline: July 1, 2011.
Feminist Philosophers 
I hope you will address the class inequality in infant adoption. When a woman in unplanned pregnancy she is often being encouraged to consider what she has to offer vs what the adoptive parents have to offer. No self aware poor single woman who is in emotional turmoil with an unplanned pregnancy could really feel like she could compare. Instead of helping women gain self esteem, find the resources they need, and grow in empowerment over their parenting identity, they are encouraged to “do the selfless thing” and give up their child even when they know it will destroy them emotionally. It’s a horrifically imbalanced system especially when you add to that that adoptive parents pay huge fees and none of that would go to the pregnant mother if she wanted to parent. The adoption workers are not there to empower the pregnant woman, they are there to take her baby from her when she emotionally collapses and feel like she can never be good enough for her own child.
That is not just unethical, that is CRUEL.