ABSTRACT
During the twentieth century, policies and practices related to child adoption changed enormously in the United States. This chapter considers an issue that has preoccupied students of therapeutic culture and is also central to adoption’s modern history: authenticity. In adoption, the therapeutic revolution aimed to confer authenticity on a type of kinship widely understood as artificial and second-rate. Adoption’s rules for realness have shifted dramatically, moving from a dominant emphasis on the authenticity of similarity—prevalent before the 1960s—toward a new interest in the authenticity of difference. Demands to open sealed adoption records, moves toward open adoption, searches and reunions, and the increasing visibility of transracial and transnational placements have contested, if not dislodged, the codes of matching and secrecy that previously governed adoption. “Telling” has been among the most persistent features of the literature on therapeutic adoption, in part because it highlights the chronic problem of making adoptive kinship real while also acknowledging its distinctiveness.
