Imagined and Occasional Co-Presence in Open Adoption

Abstract

Notions of blood ties predominate in Western understandings of kinship, and parenthood is understood to be founded on biogenetic connection. Adoptive kinship is at odds with and indeed challenges these claims. After adoption, the positions of both birth (or original) and adoptive parents are somewhat ambiguous. These workings are even more complicated when adoption is contested, involuntary, or within the context of institutional care, and questions of parental status and entitlement are accentuated. This chapter explores the respective positions of adoptive and birth parents relative to the child as well as to one another in open adoption; it identifies how adopters achieve, delimit, and mediate imagined and physical co-presence between their child and their child’s birth parent, and considers the emergence of virtual co-presence via online social media. Qualitative research with adoptive parents to chart the family practices through which they configure birth parents as kin are also presented.