num_pages: 216
description: Since the early 1990s close to 250000 children born abroad have been adopted into the United States. Nearly half of these children have come from China or Russia. Culture White Mothers International Adoption and the Negotiation of Family Difference offers the first comparative analysis of these two popular adoption programs. Heather Jacobson examines these adoptions by focusing on a relatively new social phenomenon the practice by international adoptive parents mothers in particular of incorporating aspects of their children's cultures of origin into their families' lives. Culture keeping is now standard in the adoption world though few adoptive parents the majority of whom are white and native-born have experience with the ethnic practices of their children's homelands prior to adopting. Jacobson follows white adoptive mothers as they navigate culture from their motivations to the pressures and constraints they face to the content of their actual practices concerning names food toys travel cultural events and communities of belonging. Through her interviews she explores how women think about their children their families and themselves as mothers as they labor to construct or resist ethnic identities for their children who may be perceived as birth children (because they are white) or who may be perceived as adopted (because of racial difference). The choices these women make about culture Jacobson argues offer a window into dominant ideas of race and the American Family and into how social differences are conceived and negotiated in the United States.
language: English
title: Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference
publisher: Vanderbilt University Press