PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

Well, not really, but I started a major project of scanning and downloading lots of picture on my personal Facebook page. I'm working on strictly Bastard Nation pictures this weekend, but geared up with some Bastard Nation activities outside of the organization. Much of what I have is pre-digial camera so it's a big scan job. I'll have more pictures soon, but here's the first patch

California Open 2001 party, press conference and hearing for AB 1349, January 2002

Bastard Nation at the AAC 2007

Bastard Nation at the Ethics in Adoption Conference 2007

Bastard Nation at the AAC 2009

You don't have to have a Facebook account to see this.

ABC NEWS LOOKING FOR ADOPTEES: DISCRIMINATION

From Bastardette's Mailbox:

A reporter is looking for domestic adoptees who have experienced adoption-related discrimination and bias that carried over into adulthood. If anyone fits this description and is interested in talking to the media about it, please contact the reporter directly at:

Susan Donaldson James
Reporter/Producer
ABCNews.com
7 W. 66th St., 2nd Floor
New York, N.Y. 10023
212-456-4875 (office)
609-529-0268 (cell)

This may be related to the report the Evan B. Donaldson released today. When I get around to reading it, I may have something to say. Maybe not. You can find the Executive Summary with a link to the whole report here

BEYOND CULTURE CAMP: PROMOTING HEALTHY IDENTITY FORMATION IN ADOPTION

Authors: Hollee McGinnis, Susan Livingston Smith, Dr. Scott D. Ryan, and Dr. Jeanne A. Howard
Published: 2009 November. New York NY: Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute
Document Type: Research (112 pages)
Availability: PDF Full Report | Web Page | Press Release | Executive Summary

This study, released in November, is the broadest, most extensive examination of adult adoptive identity to date, based on input from the primary experts on the subject: adults who were adopted as children.

The principal recommendations of the 112 page study include:

* Expand parental preparation and post-placement support for those adopting across race and culture. Such preparation should include educating parents about the salience of race across the developmental course, instruction about racial identity development and the tasks inherent in such development, and assistance in understanding racial discrimination and how best to arm their children to combat the prejudice and stereotypes they will face. Preparation also should include the understanding that seeking services and supports is a positive part of parenting - i.e., it is a sign of strength, not failure.

* Develop empirically based practices and resources to prepare transracially and transculturally adopted youth to cope with racial bias. This study, as well as previous research, indicates that perceived discrimination is linked with greater psychological distress, lower self-esteem, and more discomfort with one's race/ethnicity. Hence, it is essential to arm transracially adopted youth with ways to cope with discrimination in a manner that does not negatively impact their identity.

* Promote laws, policies and practices that facilitate access to information for adopted individuals. For adopted individuals, gaining information about their origins is not just a matter of curiosity, but a matter of gaining the raw materials needed to fill in the missing pieces in their lives and derive an integrated sense of self. Both adoption professionals and the larger society need to recognize this basic human need and right, and to facilitate access to needed information for adopted individuals.

* Educate parents, teacher, practitioners, the media and others about the realities of adoption to erase stigmas and stereotypes, minimize adoption-related discrimination, and provide children with more opportunities for positive development. Generations of secrecy, shame and stereotypes about adoption (and those it affects) have taken a toll, as the respondents in this research make clear. Just as discrimination based on color, gender, sexual orientation and religion - all components of people's identity - are broadly considered to be socially unacceptable, adoption-related discrimination also should be unacceptable. Professionals and parents also need to be better informed about the importance of providing diversity and appropriate role models.

* Increase research on the risk and protective factors that shape the adjustment of adoptees, especially those adopted transracially/culturally in the U.S. or abroad. More longitudinal research that combines quantitative and qualitative methods is needed to better understand the process through which children, teens and young adults progress in confronting transracial adoption identity issues. Additional research is also needed on the identity journey experienced by in-race adoptees - and, pointedly, more of the studies of every kind need to include the perspective of adopted individuals themselves.

ADOPTION IS A FEMINIST ISSUE: DAWN FRIEDMAN TAKES ON THE NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR ADOPTION

Hey, Bastardette's friend, BEA (Buckeyes for Equal Accss) stalwart, and blogger Dawn Friedman takes the National Council for Adoption to task big time in BITCH today! Adopt-ation: A feminist take on the state of the adoption industry (NOTE TO DAWN: How can Bastardette pitch to BITCH!)

Here's a couple snips (NOTE: go to the original to download her links. Some aren't working with this format)

The NCFA is so all about adoption that they commonly speak out against the rights of adopted people to make their point. Their fight against the open records movement, (which argues that adult adopted persons have a right to their original, pre-adoption birth certificates) is based on the belief that it causes people to abort otherwise adoptable children.

Obviously, some number of women with unplanned pregnancies, who would otherwise choose adoption, would choose abortion if they could not choose adoption with the assurance of privacy. What that number would be is impossible to tell, but what does it need to be? The loss of human potential from even one abortion that would have been an adoption is unknowable. And the ratio of adoptions to abortions in New Hampshire is already extremely low. In 1996, New Hampshire had only 43 domestic infant adoptions placements for every 1,000 abortions.

From Consent versus Coercion: How SB335 Harms Adoption (a position paper about a New Hampshire bill that would allow adoptees access to their original birth certificates)

and

Right now the dominant voices in our cultural discussion of adoption are those like the NCFA who perpetuate stereotypes about the women who place their children and the women who receive them. It's a conversation that tries to erase the presence of the women who give birth to those children by pushing t-shirts that equate adoption with pregnancy thereby obliterating the origins of adopted people. The way we look at adoption – especially domestic infant adoption – is a manifestation of our Madonna/whore complex where birth mothers are saintly sinners – angelic enough to give away the babies they aren't good enough to keep.

We feminists need to start looking at adoption in new ways. We need to let the first mothers among us speak about their experiences past and present because their voices have been missing from our discussion. In the blogosphere we have feminist thinkers like FauxClaud, like Suz, like Jenna. (Suz and Claud right, blogging at the 2007 Ethics in Adoption conference). They can tell us how Juno will likely feel five years from placement, ten, twenty or more.

One quibble. Dawn writes:

Adoption is a feminist issue because it is a reproductive rights issue. It is an issue about the value of women as mothers and who has "earned" the right to be one. It's about how the states supports or does not support women who fall outside of the "good mother" rhetoric. It's about privilege. It's about class.

I absolutely agree with the last three sentences, but disagree on the first. Adoption is not a reproductive rights issue. Reproductive rights involves personal autonomy and right to decide to carry to term or not. Adoption involves a born, separate live person with fundamental rights.

Unfortunately organized mainstream feminist talk about adoption hasn't moved beyond the 1970s's consumerist/choice nobody-held-a-gun-to-your-head blather that blames a specific group of de-priviledged women for their own de-priviledging--that privileged feminists have been all too happy exploit without a care to get their hooks into babies. But as Dawn pointed out, adoption IS about privilege. I would add that adoption is mainly a middle class issue as well, since today the rich and poor are seldom on the giving end of the "adoption option." (Of course, that can always change with the economy)

There is little feminist critique of adoption outside of academia, and even there it is top-heavy with adopter discourse--some of it spot-on., and I don't want to dimiss it. But, Feminist Bastard and Feminist First Mother voices are generally limited to blogs, forums, and obscure conference workshops. I don't know why.

I've addressed adoption as a feminist issue here before in Open Letter to NOW: Is Maria Elena Salinas a Friend to Women , Surprise! No Reply from NOW! and probably some other entries I've forgotten about. Other Bastard Feminists who have written extensively on adoption are Baby Love Child and Janine Baer who published the pioneering Bastard Lesbian newsletter, Chain of Life.

I wrote this in my Open Letter to NOW, and I think it's worth repeating here now:

A few years ago I received an email from a member of New Jersey NOW who opposed the restoration of identity rights to adopted adults. She smacked my fingers and accused me of lacking “feminist credentials” and respect for women, especially “courageous” birthmothers.” I should shut up and be grateful that somebody adopted me and I wasn’t tossed in a dumpster.

UK FLIM-FLAM: THE FERTILITY SHOW

The November 12. 2009 London Daily Mail offers us a a glimpse of England's first-ever "fertility show" with Claudia Connell's cleverly titled, There's one born every minute...

We know we're in for a first class tour as soon as Claudia walks through the gate:

Stepping into the huge exhibition hall at London Olympia, I haven't had time to look at my programme guide before I'm approached by a young American woman carrying a clipboard and dressed like an air hostess.

'Hi, good to see you. Are you ready to discuss your fertility options?' she asks, dazzling me with her megawatt smile.

Before I can say anything, she continues: 'We're here today all the way from Connecticut in the U.S. to help people just like you.

For the next 8 hours Claudia takes us on a Wonderland trip of high tech repro hardsell for teary women and a handful of embarrassed, sullen men, who'd seem much happier nursing a pint of Taddy Porter that walking the halls of female babydesire. It's a shame she didn't have a video camera with her.

"Everywhere I look," she writes, "I can see pictures of cherubic babies, while skilfully manipulative videos, showing pregnant women lovingly stroking their bumps or lifting smiling infants from their cribs, play in the background."

The 83 fertility show exhibits and 43 workshops, housed in the refurbished (built, 1886) National Agricultural Hall (rather fitting) makes even the sleaziest California baby facilitator look saintly

A "suspiciously smooth faced doctor" from a fertility clinic in New England:

He fixes me with his bright blue eyes and tells me I would be a perfect candidate for donor eggs.

He says his organisation just happens to have one of the largest donor pools in America - a claim that four other clinics also make to me in the next hour.

and

As I stroll around the venue, I'm leapt upon by a woman with trowelled-on make-up who reminds me of Marjorie Dawes from Little Britain. She wants to talk to me about my body clock.

She asks me how old I am and whether I've ever had my ovarian reserve tested, in the same way that a financial adviser might ask whether I have a pension plan.

About a Donnie-Osmond look-alike doctor:

His clinic is in Atlanta and, luckily for me, he already knows how many direct flights there are from London a day.

'Have you visited Atlanta?' he asks. 'It's an exciting city, and we could have your whole treatment done and dusted in less than 48 hours.'

Tempted though I am by the idea of a £7,400 frozen egg IVF cycle in America's murder capital, I decline his offer to browse a donor database.

Oh, there's also a Las Vegas junket.

Having gone through a New Age period in the 1990s, I can appreciate this high tech alternative:

We compare horror stories. I reveal all about my encounters with the smooth-talking Americans and the Marjorie Dawes character, while she tells me how she spent 20 minutes being told her infertility could be cured via astrology...

Connell, in her mid-40s with a failed adoption behind her, seems moderately curious about fertility treatments, but she's also got a cynic's eye. She comes across unimpressed by fertility shillery and the industry's commodification of women and their dreams of motherhood. "Terrified of the menopause?" "Running out of eggs?" Sounds like an outtake from Nightmare Alley. I'd not be surprised to hear that the snake oil associates at the Olympia sealed the deal for her, and others--especially those who didn't get caught up constructed emotion of the event, but read her account. At the end of her article, referring back to the Las Vegas offer, she writes, "But as every gambler knows, the house always wins - and I have a funny feeling that applies to IVF clinics as well as to casinos."

I don't know if the fertility show circuit has hit the US yet. Maybe not, since much of the flim-flammery is based here anyway. But wherever these snake oil shows are held, they're sure to pack the house. There seems to be no end to high tech consumers with no qualms about purchasing non-traceable goods.

MORE FILM--THAT HAGAN GIRL: YOU THINK YOU'VE GOT PROBLEMS. BE GLAD YOU'RE NOT MARY!

Bastardette is short on time today, but we need to plow through Adoption NaBloPoMo, so we're cobbling together another film clip. This time, That Hagan Girl, (1947) one of Bastardette's all-time favorite bastard films.

The film is hard to find. As far as I know it has never been released on video or DVD, but it shows up on TCM occasionally. Several years ago I was given a bootleg copy as a Christmas present. Due to its scarcity, and my inability to watch it, I previously wrote about the film secondhand, based on what critics had said at the time of release. I also used comments by its stars Shirley Temple and Ronald Reagan who found the movie, at best, career-humiliating.

Yet, when I finally watched That Hagan Girl, I was blown away by Shirley's first rate performance (despite the silly plot) of a teenager who endures years of vague small town gossip, learns that she is adopted despite 18 years of family denial, and her whole life has been a lie. I have never seen any film that addresses adoption lies, bastard anger, isolation, and identity dislocation as this film does--even if it doesn't mean to. In it's clumsy way, it speaks to us. The most agonizing scene comes when Mary searches through college yearbooks for her mother's picture. There's meat in this film.

Mary Hagen lives in a small Ohio town where she agonizes over her illegitimacy and is shunned by most of the townsfolk: the bastard product of a “demented heiress and a "local war hero,” Tom Bates (Ronald Reagan). When teenage Mary finally learns the gossip is true that she really IS adopted and a bastard, she agonizes, “Who am I? Please tell me the truth. ” She begs. “How can you be somebody if you’re nobody to begin with?”

It gets worse.

A boy attacks her in a school corridor and causes a brawl since, as a bastard/ adoptee, she must be fast. Instead of disciplining the boy, the principal goes to the school trustees, complains about Mary’s “kind,” and gets Mary kicked out.

Upset, Mary runs away to Chicago. When she's returned home and to school, by the police she finds herself the object of gossip, especially in the locker room. She throws herself in the local river. When a friendly teacher casts her as the lead in Romeo and Juliet, students are so hostile that she’s removed from the play. Through some plot devices she stands in for Juliet when the snippy-bitch actress gets "accidentally" waylaid. Opening night, her adoptive mother dies. The only kinda-positive in this mess is a weird courtship with a rich boy played by Rory Calhoun, whose mother leads the anti-Mary Hagan gossip. So it's not that great.

Somewhere in this mess, putative father Tom Bates, returns to town, sets up his law practice, and appears to fall in love with Mary (even though he’s reportedly her father and twice her age) after he rescues her when she throws herself in the river. He also shacks up with Mary's "friendly teacher" (Lois Maxwell, who gives a fine performance as the town's only apparent non-provincial; and went on to play the legendary Miss Moneypenny in James Bond films). Bates eventually informs Mary that he's not her father (a question he could have cleared up years ago and didn’t; and an answer we don't fully believe). In a little adoption-crazy Hollywood inside joke, Bates tells Mary that she came from an orphanage in Evansville, Illinois (home of The Cradle—adoption agency to the stars). By the end of them film, we don' know which end is up, despite the heroic efforts of the stars on screen and in real life.

Ronald Reagan detested That Hagen Girl and made repeated attempts to be released from his contract, complaining about the mock incest plot. Reaction to the film was so bad at the sneak preview, in fact, that he was able to get his last line “I love you” excised from the final release. Reagan wrote later, “Before release the line was edited out of the picture, leaving us with a kind of oddball finish in which we climbed on a train—Shirley carrying a bouquet—and left town. You are left to guess as to whether we are married, just traveling together, or did I adopt her?” (My reference to this is in storage so I can't list it here)

Shirley Temple, in her delicious and very honest autobio Child Star, discusses the film at length (p. 406-413) and documents how her exciting"lip-smacking" breakout role became an embarrassment. The only Hagan Girl clip I can find is the TCM original trailer, here.

THE GREAT LIE. THE GREAT CAT FIGHT. ONE OF MY FAVORITE ADOPTION FILMS

The Great Lie is one of Bastardette's favorite adoption films. What's not to like about a good old-fashioned Hollywood cat fight? Especially when its between inconveniently pregnant career woman of mature years with a butch haircut "Sandra," and softly coiffed Maryland horse farmer of pap entitlement, "Maggie?"

My initial viewing of the film about 25 years ago, pre-bastard consciousness, put me squarely on the side of Davis' pappery and amommery. I mean, are we really supposed to root for somebody who prefers Tschiakovsky over motherhood? When I watched the film again in the mid-1990s, I'd turned completely around. Sandra was my new hero, who even as she acquiesces, still has the moral victory over whiney wifey, who's gonna spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder. I can't wait for "Peter" and "Pete, Jr." to learn the truth 20 years later. If nobody else tells them I will!

Here is what I wrote about the film in The Happy Family (part 3 of "Scarlet Women, Bastards, and Happy Families," published in the Winter 2001 issue of the Bastard Quarterly. Re-written from the original to correct a mistake.

A not-so-tolerable and often disturbing relationship is explored in The Great Lie, a film that subtlely turns the birth mother/adoptive mother stereotype on its ear. First wife/concert pianist Sandra Kovac (Mary Astor) and second wife/horsy set Maggie (Bette Davis) form a symbiotic relationship—an odd couple, after their shared husband, Peter Van Allen (George Brent), is reported missing in a plane crash in the Amazon region. Unlike today's uneasy gal pal feminist films, (or The Old Maid) where enemies at least come to respect each other, Sandra and Maggie, operate their Mutual Aversion Society throughout the film.

Sandra, married to Peter during a night of heavy clubbing, finds herself pregnant after their quickie divorce and his subsequent even quicker marriage to true love, Maggie. Career or motherhood? It never seems to be a real question for sophisticated Sandra who looks good in beaded dresses and has a personal hairdresser. Jealous of Sandra's fertility, though she had shown no previous penchant for motherhood, Maggie grabs at the chance to take the baby off Sandra's hands. Maggie fakes her own pregnancy, and spirits Sandra off to a shack in Arizona where the two play house in some beautifully bitchy scenes written by Astor and Davis.

While Sandra is ambivalent about her own baby, Maggie attaches herself to Sandra's baby in utero, seemingly convinced that God make a mistake putting the Van Allen baby in Sandra's tummy instead of hers. Maggie, cloyingly concerned about Sandra’s health, takes control of her rival's life, setting up a prissy regimen, and demanding that Sandra pay the price for her fertility--or more likely, her fling with Peter. No drinking, no smoking, no onions. And plenty of vitamins. Sandra, who likes to refer to herself as a "healthy woman with a healthy appetite," retaliates by slouching around in a terrycloth bathrobe, smashing classical 78's, and wanting the whole unpleasant business to be over with. The greatest moment of the film comes when Maggie and Sandra get into it during a desert wind storm and Sandra, trying to burn down the house gets two slugs in the face from Maggie. (NOTE: If you are pregnant and considering moving into your pap's home, watch this film first!)

After the birth, Maggie returns home with "her" baby, whom she promptly deifies as Peter Van Allen, Jr. Sandra goes on an overseas tour. Both women are determined not only to avoid each other, but to ensure that no one, not even the baby, will ever know the truth. As fate would have it, the missing Van Allen Sr. is mysteriously recovered in the Amazon and returns to Maggie and his new son, dumb to what has transpired between his wives. So dumb, in fact, that he is eager for this odd menage to pal around together. The climax comes when Sandra visits the Van Allens for a weekend, planning to out Maggie and snag Peter for herself through the baby. In some touching scenes, Sandra emotionally connects with her son for the first time, especially when she learns that he already has an ear for music. Maggie frets, eyerolls, and whines over the impending loss of her illegitimate family. At the last minute Sandra decides to take the moral high road. Watching Maggie, Peter and the baby together in a family scene, she announces she must return to the city; thus sacrificing her own happiness and mother love for the sake of her son's future with the only family he knows.

Some kind person has put the two cat fights together on YouTube. Enjoy!

CONGRATULATIONS DON CHAON!

Cleveland adoptee Dan Chaon's latest book, Await Your Reply. "a novel of shifting identity" has been named to Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Best Books of 2009:

Await Your Reply
Dan Chaon (Ballantine)
Chaon was a National Book Award finalist for Among the Missing, and this gripping account of colliding fates, the shifty nature of identity in today's wired world and the limits of family is easily as good, if not better. It's a literary page-turner, a cunningly plotted and utterly unputdownable novel.

We've never had the pleasure of meeting Dan, though we've exchanged a small handful of emails over the last 15 years. He supports fully our rights.

Dan's book, (adoptee fav) You Remind Me of Me, was named one of the best books of the year, by the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor and Entertainment Weekly . He was the the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Here's three inverviews with Dan:

Poets and Writers, July 19, 2004

Hot Metal Bridge, Spring 2009

Bookslut, October 2009

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