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Budapest W5: Politics of Reproduction - The Kids in the Pictures


      Joshua Gamson. 2015.  “The Kids in the Picture” in Modern Families: Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship. New York, NY: New York University Press.

 The story begins with two characters - Tess and Richard, two gays who meet each other and realise they want to have children.

 Tess wanted there to be a man in the picture so that the children were used to being around men. They decided to ask a gay man and his boyfriend to be the father - providing sperm and then taking a fatherly role.

 Buddhism, something that bonded Michael, Tess and their partners, gave them spiritual support in their quest for pregnancy.

 However, getting pregnant didn't work, and going the medicalised route seemed too alien to them, so they decided to adopt. The move to adoption meant that rather than two parents out of the two couples were biologically related to the child, meaning that the two others were outside, adoption gave them all equal footing. The law meant that only Tess could be a legal guardian, and the lead adopter.

 "What brought them and the Nepali baby together, at least in part, was their relative positions within a global stratification system in which the United States remained dominant, always a receiver and never a sender of adoptive children." p.124

 What does this say about the feminist stance on adoption?

 "It was like a very warm and friendly obstacle course, and Tess had to watch herself lest her impatience turn her into a demanding, entitled, ethnocentric American" p.127
But isn't that what she is?

 "This was not a kinship world in which biology was more powerful a marker of family than choice" p.134

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