Print

Garland, Brit Maike

College of Education and Social Services

2005

Ed. D.

This dissertation seeks to illuminate the lived experience of lesbian transracial adoptive families through in-depth interviews with fifteen European American lesbian adoptive parents of African-American and African children in Vermont as well as through an exploration of my own narrative as a queer parent in a transracial adoptive family. The purpose of this research is to inform and inspire antiracist activist, queer families and allies, adoption agencies, and potential parents. I sought to understand the experience and meaning of the many interchanges between this very specific group, white lesbian parents of Black children, and society at large. In addition, I explored how lesbians articulate, perform and make sense of their identity as lesbian parents, and how they develop strategies to deal with issues of social stratification such as racism and heterosexism. Central to the public and scholarly debates on transracial adoption and queer parenthood are a number of intersecting identities: racial, adoptive, sexual and antiracist identity. Both liberal and radical perspectives use identity/identity development as a central premise for the debate, whereas the postmodern perspective challenges the idea of a stable, established, identity thereby changing the basis for the debate. The fluid, locational and performative quality of identity challenges some of the central tenets of the anti transracial adoption advocates, and I was curious about how lesbian mothers made sense of the debate and whether this debate could be found reflected in lesbian mothers' reflections on self and parenting. Snowball sampling was used to identify find fifteen European American lesbian parents of African-American adopted children living in Vermont. Open-ended interviews were conducted with each participant in the study. The multiplicity of voices and perspectives of the participants is illustrated through presentation, discussion and analysis of the data as well as through poetic transcriptions. I have also included my personal narrative, as researcher and adoptive lesbian mother of an African American daughter, through interludes. Through analysis and coding of the qualitative interviews, multiple pathways, previously undocumented, to lesbian adoptive motherhood emerged. Maternal identity seemed to take precedence over sexual identity, and the women's understanding and interpretation of racial, sexual and maternal identity clearly was fluid and shifted with social location. The locational, fluid and evolving understandings and interpretations of sexual, 'racial', ethnic, and maternal identity and the experience of queer transracial adoptive motherhood led the women to develop awareness and strategies to negotiate racism, heteronormativity and other structural imbalances. Previous research has not fully addressed the impact of queer transracial parenting on the parents or society at large. This is an exploratory study that underscores the need for further research.