Some academics are as superstitious as baseball players: One was wearing a certain blazer when he received notification of a million dollar grant, so now he always wears that blazer when he's waiting to hear the reults of a grant proposal; One always brings a certain fountain pen to class, believing it helps her deliver particularly insightful lectures; One always stays on an even numbered hotel floor when presenting at conferences because past successful presentations were given in years bunking on an even numbered floor, while returning to a bed on an odd-numbered floor followed unsuccessful ones...
I am in this camp.
I was listening to Miles Davis, "Birth of the Cool," when my Wittengenstein Trick exercise began to bear fruit. Thus, I predict I will be listening to a lot of Miles over the next week or so as I further flesh this out.
So, anyway, Bill Evans is on piano, Coltrane's on tenor, Stella's in the Starlight and I'm thinking 'bout the stories adoptive parents tell...
From my earlier entry:
"There might be a kind of trans-positioning with this, then. The idea is not new with me; others have noted this: Adoptive connections are legally and socially given what we might think of as a biological translation. At least currently in American adoption history, the legal standing of an adoptive parent is the same if that person were the biological (genetic) parent. An adoptive parent is positioned the same way she would be had she birthed the child herself."
Modell (1994) speaks to this. She actually takes it further by suggesting that there is a causal link between adoptive and biological parenting, in that we (society members) come to define what biological relationships are, or could be, by looking at what adoptive relationships are. From her intro:
"Adoption not only mirrors biology but upholds a cultural interpretation of biological, or genealogical, kinship. Every time a child is given up and taken in, the script of 'real' relationship is, as it were, written again. And so when adoption changes, interpretations of genealogical kinship will not remain unaltered" (p. 3).
Modell is describing something that she thinks exists on a societal level. She has experience as an adoptive parent. And this book is based on data from adoptive families. But I have a sense that her statements about what "adoption" is doing, are statements about an institution-society interaction. The question is, then, whether or not individual adoptive parents recognize this process, and maybe even are active in constructing this re-writing of biological (via adoptive) parenthood themselves.
Remember that what I am interested in is what adoptive parents say about this relatedness between them and their children. Keller (2000) speaks of something similar in her analysis of advances in the fields of genetics and molecular biology. She coins a term, "gene-talk," that is instructive for my present purposes. She documents how the word gene came into the scientific lexicon, summarizing that "the gene has become a great many things--no longer a single entity but a word with great plasticity, defined only by the specific experimental context in which it is used" (p. 69).
Note that she is speaking of uses of the word gene in professional narratives, talk employed by scientists doing their scientific work. She notes several uses of gene-talk in scientific circles (even though the concept on which the word is based is not very scientifically precise):
(1) Gene-talk does a kind of conceptual heavy lifting for bench scientists in the course of their conducting and talking/writing about their experiments; as Keller puts it, gene-talk does "yeoman work" (p. 137).
(2) Gene-talk is used as "operational shorthand" that effectively functions "within the context of a given and clearly understood set of experimental conventions" (p. 140); So scientists know what each other means when they use gene-talk, even as they know that gene-talk does not represent comprehensive scientific language.
(3) Gene-talk is employed by scientists as a "tool for persuasion" (p. 143), for example in securing funding and in marketing potential biotech applications of their work in the marketplace. Since "everyone" has a since of what a gene is, then gene-talk is a powerful common language to speak with politicians, the business world, and the public at large.
So, my question becomes, in lay (non-scientific) settings, does something analogous to "gene-talk" exist? We might shorten "the connectedness/relatedness-related stories that people tell" to "genetic narratives." (This has all sorts of problems or issues that could be problems, like me using a word "genetics" to describe narratives about relatedness, only some of which may be actually considered to be about genetics specifically: See my earlier discussion regarding the term "marital status.") SO, in the case of adoptive parents, do they have genetic narratives? (If so:) What are "gene," "genetics" and their gene-based metaphorical stand-ins (e.g., "in her blood," "inner make-up," "blueprint," "biological program") "operational shorthand" for in the adoptive context? What are the "clearly uinderstood" social contexts in which this language is invoked by adoptive parents? What are the outcomes--both beneficial and not--for explaining one's adoptive family processes using genetic narratives? Are they trying to convince someone about something regarding adoptive parent-child relationships with their genetic narratives? If so, who and what? (And why?)
From my previous entry: "What's left has something to do with how adoptive parents may or may not talk about perceived differences, as well as possibly the way they talk about others' perceptions." For further schooling on this point I went back to an oldie but goodie in the adoption field, Kirk's "Shared Fate: A Theory and Method of Adoptive Relationships" (1964/1984).
LOTS of rich material in Kirk, but one of his most enduring contributions are the two ways that adoptive parents are said to cope with their "role handicap," that is, the "discrepancy between the expected and the actually encountered forces" (p. 13) that inteferes with the clarity, autonomy, obligations, and rewards and sanctions associated with being a parent. These two coping mechanisms are
(1) one stance characterized by an adoptive parent denying the difference between adoptive and biological parenting, and
(2) another characterized by an adoptive parent acknowledging the differences between the two.
A later researcher added a third point along this continuum:
(3) insisting on the differences between adoptive and biological parenting.
Now, it's important to be familiar with the method Kirk used to arrive at these labels: He had a pot of verbatim responses from adoptive parents on a whole host of topics in response to "mop-up" or "closure" survey items--the kind of items that allow people to say "anything else" they might want to say, perhaps that the researcher failed to ask in the course of the questionnaire. From these statements, Kirk and his team culled these two themes, which were interpretations of the spontaneous statements. It's also important to note that the elegant terms, "acknowledgement-of-difference" (AOD) and "rejection-of-difference" (ROD) are once removed from the interpretation closer to the data. For example, in Kirk's words (quoting some of the participants' responses):
"To be 'privileged,' 'lucky,' or unbelieving of one's good luck to the point of 'pinching' oneself suggests that one is different from those around him who are inclined to take the enjoyment of a particular experience as a right, for granted," while using the other coping strategy "suggests a withdrawal from, perhaps a denial of what is known to be true" (p. 58).
This, along with the verbatim parental responses Kirk provides in his book, are key to me. What counts as "different" or "true" in the context of familial relationships seems to be time-bound, partly an artifact of the year and place in which family relationships are occurring. In Kirk's time, the two coping strategies represented one pole identifying with and laying claim to the "norm" in parenting (biological parenting), while the other pole was staked in the unfamiliar ground of adoptive parenting, and claiming that as a normative identity to be explored--and created. I think one thing that was happening with the reconceptualization that added the third pole was a recognition that changing times had added a new way to cope with difference.
BUT, I think what is more meaningful now is that many parents recognize that the "norm" in parenting is based in part on an ideal, a fiction. Thus most parents, biological or not, can see that they likely do not conform to that culturally normalized parenting script. So the interesting thing now is that some adoptive parents may see a similarity between themselves and biological parents not based on a denial, but based on how they both differ from this idealized norm. This seems important enough to me to set it apart from the surrounding text:
So the interesting thing now is that some adoptive parents may see a similarity between themselves and biological parents not based on a denial, but based on how they both differ from this idealized norm.
This idea is worth thinking about more. Combined with my previous thoughts inspired by Modell and by Keller, I think my instincts about Kirk may point me in a helpful direction in terms of how to characterize the concept I'm trying to develop.
Posted by perry032 at December 18, 2004 08:21 AM | TrackBack