Thursday, May 13, 2010
Annette Ruth Appell (Washington University School of Law in St. Louis) has posted Controlling
for Kin: Ghosts in the Postmodern Family, 25 Wisconsin Women's Law Journal__(2010) on SSRN.
Here is the abstract:
This Article illustrates a paradox
in the regulation of families. On the one hand, jurisprudence sanctions
biological connection to promote liberty and the private production of value
and culture, including the protection of the freedom of non-normative parents
to parent. At the same time, however, this regulation serves as a restrictive
paradigm for family composition, rigidly adhering to a biologically-evocative
two parent maximum that fails to reflect the intricacies of private ordering or
political constructions of biological connection. The legal and social
disruption of these connections exposes their structural and subjective
materiality to individual and group identity and challenges conventional
notions of the two-parent family that continue to dominate postmodern family
doctrine and theory.
The Article deploys the gendered
and racial history and development of adoption law and the lived experience of
adoption’s constituents to illustrate the perils and promise of the new
postmodern families. Although this critique commends the new regulatory schemes
for legitimating lesbian and gay family formation, assisted reproduction, and
stepparent-child relationships, it problematizes the exclusive bionormativity
of this regulation and suggests that the law should recognize and even
legitimate the porousness of these new families. The article proposes a unique
and perhaps controversial approach to kinship that pushes against current
regulatory trends that privilege social relations at the expense of biological
connections.
MR
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/family_law/2010/05/appell-controlling-for-kin-ghosts-in-the-postmodern-family.html
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