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    Blood ties : the labyrinth of family membership in long term adoption reunion : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Social Anthropology at Massey University
    (Massey University, 2005) Browning, Julee A
    This thesis reports original research conducted with twenty adoptees, adopted under closed-stranger protocols, who have been experiencing regular post-reunion contact with their birth families for more than ten years. It examines the themes of the mothering role, family obligation and family membership to uncover how adoptees navigate their family membership within and between two families (adoptive and birth family). This study presents the thoughts, feelings and observations of the participants in their own words to convey a deeper understanding of their experiences. Drawing upon in-depth interviews, this study has sought to expand on earlier research focusing on the search and reunion and immediate post-reunion stages to examine the long-term experiences of adoptees in post-reunion. The principal finding is that reunited relationships have no predictable pathways and are approached with varying levels of ambivalence and emotional strain, and that there is no fixed pattern of family arrangements and relational boundaries. While closed-stranger adoptions and the subsequent reunions may eventually cease, this research may assist in understanding the issues surrounding the reunion between gamete (egg) and sperm donor's and their offspring in the future. KEYWORDS: Adoption Post-reunion, Adoptee, Birth Family, Family Membership, Family Relationships, Closed Adoption Reunion.
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    Wade in the water : storying adoptees' experiences through the Adoption Act 1955 : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at Massey University, Manawatu, Aotearoa/New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2013) Blake, Denise
    In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Adoption Act 1955 legislated and governed adoption practices until 1985 when it was supplemented, but not amended or repealed. More than 80,000 children have lived with the effects of that Act. Underlying the legislation were assumptions about illegitimacy derived from notions of nullius filius, the child of no-man. Dominant culture sought to right the wrongs of illegitimacy through the practices of adoption producing a child as if born to legally married adoptive parents. Through these practices, adoptees became legitimate beings in the social world. The first two chapters of this thesis trace the legal and psychological narrative constitution of adoptees and make it possible for me to ask the question: how are adoptees enabled and constrained through specific subject positions within a particular moral order and how are social power relations implicated in the narrative constitution of adoptees? To address this question, I draw on a Foucaultian poststructuralist position using narrative theory to form a hybrid representation of the stories of 12 adoptees. The first analysis chapter considers how a legal narrative positions adoptees so as to exclude the possibility of articulating their experiences within 'normal' kinship and social narratives. To be positioned as if born to did not remove the history of being born to for the adoptee, or the 'real' lived effects of that lack. The second analysis chapter discusses the ways in which adoptees' psychological experiences are affected by their legal positioning, how they cope while living the legal fiction and include accounts of, and resistance to, psychopathological narratives that constitute their experience. The next analysis chapter explores the complexity of reunion experiences in relation to ongoing identity construction for adoptees. A chapter of hybridity then draws the analysis chapters together to represent some of the complex and contradictory social elements of adoption. This thesis argues that it is possible that the legal exclusion from normalising kinship narratives constitutes the psychosocial responses of adoptees that are observed as abnormalities and result in their over-representation in clinical populations. From the participants' perspectives, it is possible that their experiences are normal responses to abnormal circumstances.