Violence of Love

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Violence of Lovechallenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents-a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Kit W. Myerscomparatively examines the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. He shows how race has been constructed relationallyto mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures-in contrast toothers thatarenot-and argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attemptto transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet they arealso linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence.The Violence of Loveconfronts this discomforting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care.