Browsing by Author "Blake, Denise"

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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Adoption Act 1955 legislated and governed adoption practices until 1985 when it was supplemented, but not amended or repealed.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.
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    ‘Wade in the Water …': Rethinking adoptees' stories of reunion
    (Massey University, 2011) Blake, Denise; Coombes, Leigh; Morgan, Mandy
    In 1955, the Aotearoa/New Zealand government legislated the closed stranger adoption period. Approximately 80,000 children were constructed as a legal fiction when deemed as if born to a legally married couple. Birth family information was permanently sealed. Yet being raised in a fictional subject position and being denied access to any family of origin has consequences for all involved. After ten years of lobbying, the Adult Adoption Information Act (1985) came into effect. The power of that legislation was to overturn the strategies that suppressed adoptees’ rights to know details of their birth. Adult adoptees over the age of 20 years could access their original birth certificates, which provided a birth mother’s name. With this identifying information, reunions became possible. Birth family reunions involve a diverse range of experiences, reflecting the ways in which adoptees are contextually and historically produced. This paper reconsiders the identity implications of reunion stories using the theoretical concept of hybrid identity. The complexities of reunions are multiple, and adoptees negotiate their identities through being both born to and born as if and yet neither identity is safe. In the production of this hybrid story, it was possible to see the political and moral trajectories that enable and constrain a sense of self through the complexities of a legal context that produces binary subject positions.
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    Wade in the Water: Awash in the Sense of Adoption
    (School of Psychology, Massey University, 2012) Blake, Denise; Morgan, Mandy; Coombes, Leigh
    A discursive approach to knowledge contends that language is the constitutive force of experience and lived reality. Meaning is created through language use within relationships, while discourses function as the statements that produce knowledge, power and truth claims. We cannot step outside of the discourses through which our knowledge of experience is produced, though their complexity always allows us to resist particular identities that are discursively available to us. Based on interviews with 12 adoptees constituted within the ‘closed’ adoption period between 1955 and 1985, this narrative analysis represents the way in which the adoptive body matters to participants’ experiences of adoption and their resistances to the discourses that produce knowledge of adoption: Embodiment needed to be incorporated into this discursive work. Knowing, accessing and beingin- the-world are achieved through our senses in everyday life. We engage and shape cultural norms that enable and constrain corporeality. The adoptive experience is lived and felt through bodies that struggle to articulate their corporeality through discourse. Without discourses fit for purpose, speaking embodiment in and through adoption is precarious and adoptees attempt to articulate subjectivities beyond those allowed. This paper discusses the strategies used to materialise body matters in researching adoption.