The US House of Representatives! Now that’s a big chunk of Adoption, Inc to chew on.  While we were pulling for our own nominee (Adam Pertman) we couldn’t  be more pleased with this august body of hacks, crooks, sycophants, boodlers, and hypocrites has taken the grand prize this year. I mean, is there anybody who likes these people?  The House-Session 112 was Demonized ostensibly for its overwhelming support and promotion of HR   1464 popularly known as tne North Korean Refugee Adoption Act of 2011.    I admit I’ve not followed this bill as closely as I should, so  I’m going to nick some information from Pound Pup Legacy: (from link above). In a devastating analysis of this bill, Catherine Hong makes the following observation: Modeled on a failed series of North Korean human rights bills that stretch back to 2003, the North Korean Refugee Adoption Act of 2011 proceeds from an outdated portrait of on-the-ground conditions and distorted premises. Empirically speaking, the bill misrepresents the reality of the children whom it purports to help. As a placeholder for children who are, by and large, not North Korean, not refugees, and not orphans, the “North Korean refugee orphan” is a Continue Reading →

As some of you  know I’ve been forced  in old age to take a job as an  :”inventory associate.”–that is, I count inventory at  mostly chain  stores– Penney’s ,Victoria’s Secret, Party City,,  Tractor Supply, Hollisters.  For the last two days  I’ve worked at the Lowe’s in Mount Vernon, Ohio. . Today I counted over 16,000 pieces of merchandise, everything from screws and  light bulbs to planks of lumber. It’s tiring.  Afterwards, I trudged  back home, and after nursing my decrepitude with a bag of White Castle double cheese sliders I promptly fell asleep There. in Dreamland, I dreamed  the most interesting message:  Martin Scorsese hired me to write a screenplay on  the history of adoption reform..  I envisioned it as a bourgeois Gangs of New York with Bill Pierce as Bill  the Butcher, and me as Amsterdam Vallon. –but  probably less compelling.  Thankfully this screenplay will never make it to Marty’s mailbox. This dream however, reminded  me of other adoption- related dreams I’ve had  through years. Theyonly stopped when I  (for you pop psych fans) I integrated my adoptive and non-adoptive  self. ***** I come home from school and find my amother has been “sent away.” Nobody , including my Continue Reading →

 Call for Papers Mothering from the Margins: New Philosophical DirectionsEditors: Amrita Banerjee and Bonnie MannSubmission deadline: July 15th, 2013. The last two decades have witnessed growing philosophical scholarship on pregnancy, birth, and mothering – areas in which the discipline of philosophy has hitherto remained largely silent. Scholarship in these areas is philosophically important since it takes women’s embodied experience and maternal practice (a practice that has been historically placed in the realm of ‘feminine’ work) as serious domains of philosophical reflection and, more importantly, recognizes the potential of these domains for generating new knowledge in ethics, epistemology, ontology, etc. While this work constitutes an important new development in feminist and philosophical inquiry, there are a number of critical gaps in the new literature. While reviewing some recent work on the topic for the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Shelley M. Park notes the absence of the voices of “non-normative maternal subjects” (Park, 2012), that is, maternal subjects that are not “straight, biological, middle-class, able-bodied, white, western mothers of infants and very young children.” (Park, 2012) Social, cultural, economic, and political arrangements (such as race, nationality, sexual orientation, etc.) that anchor ‘non-normative’ maternal subjectivity, as well as ‘non-hegemonic’ contexts of mothering (such Continue Reading →