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 Love challenges 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 regard to transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Kit W. Myers comparatively examines the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. Showing how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures—in contrast to others that are not—he argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempt to transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet they are also linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence.
The Violence of Love confronts this discomfiting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care.
"This well-researched book is for anyone who wonders if the identity issues that many transracial adoptees face are outweighed by the positives of simply having a loving family."—Angela Tucker, author of
"You Should Be Grateful": Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption "
The Violence of Love is sure to become an essential resource in critical adoption studies. Kit Myers meticulously employs a variety of methods to ask and answer a provocative, paradoxical question: How can transracial or transnational adoption be a simultaneous act of both love and violence, and how can we envision a different future?"—JaeRan Kim, Associate Professor of Social Work, University of Washington Tacoma
"Myers cuts through the objection that can often drown out studies of the power relations of adoption: that adoptive parents love their children. This powerful book responds,
Yes, but on a broad scale, that is exactly how transracial and transnational adoption accomplishes its structural violence. (White) 'Love' blots out the stories and situatedness of birth families and communities."—Laura Briggs, author of
Taking Children: A History of American Terror 
