The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in United States
University of California Press (January 2025)
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. You can purchase the book or download the free version at the UC Press website.
Reviews
"This thoughtful and exhaustively researched exploration of transracial adoption is both an invitation and a challenge: to learn more about the practice and its history; to ask hard yet necessary questions about family, care, and kinship; and to 'find adoptee voices and listen with love,' as Myers writes, understanding that there can be no love without truth."—Nicole Chung, author of A Living Remedy and All You Can Ever Know
"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. 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
